Want to know why so many games offer just 3 choices at a time? Slay the Spire with card picks, Hades with its boons, and many more default to just 3 options to pick from. Why?

Here’s why: It’s baked into our brain chemistry. There’s also specific reasons to use 2, 4, 5, or 8. Let’s talk about sets of 3 first.

Our brains don’t usually judge the value of each option independently the way economists would prefer, we tend to judge by comparison.

Extensive studies show that we irrationally like an option better if you offer us an extra option that is obviously worse.

Likewise, we feel worse about a good option if we know we’re giving up another good option to take it. Offer me a free trip to hawaii and I’m thrilled. Offer me a choice between a free trip to hawaii OR a free trip to japan and I’ll still have a great time, but now I’m also imagining the trip I’m missing out on. It stings a little.

We want players to feel good when making decisions, but we also tend to want those decisions to be a little difficult – espescially in strategy games. How do we make them feel better?

Simple: Add a bad option!

Bizarely, by comparing our top 2 choices to an obviouly inferior option we feel a lot better about our final decision. Even if we randomly distribute the options without intending to match this pattern, it often happens by accident. You can engineer things so it happens more frequently too.

Marketers use this to their advantage and call it the Decoy effect. Brains are weird.

So if we want an interesting decision that feels meaningful, we usually want at least 2 good options. If we want to make it feel satisfying, we often want at least one option that we feel good about NOT choosing. Otherwise it can feel like the decision doesn’t matter too much, because all the options are pretty good.

3 is the minimum number of options that can support this pattern.

3 also works for situations where you have two extreme options and want to give people a neutral one to opt out of taking a firm stance.

There’s also reasons to use other numbers, but this is a long post already. We’ll talk about those another time.