Here’s how we solved a huge problem that led to players feeling dumb, frustrated, and mad at themselves… When they should have been mad at us.

Faeria is a unique strategy cardgame where players build the board they play on each match. Most of your focus is on the cards you’re playing, but you also can use the “power wheel” once each turn to build a new land or gain a resource (like drawing an extra card).

This god power is free, so you should always use it. It’s easy to remember to use it in the early game, because you need to make lands for your creatures to walk on. You couldn’t do anything else yet.

However once players had the initial lands they needed and more units to consider on each turn, they started forgetting to use their free power.

When they realzied they’d lost out on a free land, card, or resource for no reason – they felt dumb, and mad at themselves for it. It was easy for them to start saying, “I’m not cut out for this game” and quit.

This was NOT the skill we wanted to test. This was a game about how you used your resources, not whether you *remembered* to use them.

We tried everything to help players remember. We tried flashing the wheel, we tried audio callouts, we tried heavily emphasizing the wheel during the tutorials, we added text reminders and more.

Nothing worked.

Until I remembered an idea from Industrial Manufacturing.

To prevent mistakes around a dangerous machine, you don’t JUST train workers to not make mistakes: You design the machine so the mistakes become impossible.

One technique for this is called Machine Guarding. If you need to hold down two buttons on the side of a machine to get it to run, your hands CANNOT also be inside the machine while it’s running.

We applied this idea to the Power Wheel. Instead of reminding you to use it before clicking the “End Turn” button, we had the Power Wheel transform into the End Turn button when you used it.

We made it impossible for players to forget to use their God Power. Those feel-dumb moments completely dissappeared… And we even saved UI space in the process.

If you want more content like this, follow me on linkedin, here, or check out my summer game design bootcamp “Mastering Game Systems“. This is an excerpt from day 13 of that.