A while ago, I talked about why so many games offer 3 options to players making a decision. I also wrote about when to use 4. Today I’m going to quickly cover 2, 5, and 8.

2 options is best used for thematic contrasts like good/evil or war/peace binaries – but in the context of strategic choices it works best when it’s difficult to tell exactly what the outcomes of each option will be – making it difficult to compare them directly. This can be used with bundles (pick this pile of stuff or that pile of stuff) but also works with games like REIGNS where each choice can have unclear narrative outcomes in addition to incrementing and decrementing multiple resources at once.

5 options is the maximum the typical person can comfortably hold in our head without messing with other tasks, and is comfortable for shops or lists of possible missions/tasks where each has significant opportunity cost and you’re supposed to consider all of them at once. This works particularly well for shops where you have multiple cheap options and 1 or 2 expensive options.

8 options is the smallest amount that is above the number that most people can hold in their short term memory. 5-7 is a commonly quoted limit that works well as a rule of thumb.. Therefore, 8 is the smallest number of options that will still feel “huge” to players. By the time they’re reading the 8th they’ve lost track of the first 1 or 2, meaning their options feel boundless, bigger than they can fit in their head. This is very useful for creating a list of open world quests to make the world feel filled with boundless opportunity, or a list of classes that feel like the game is fileld with a huge number of options.

Context matters immensely of course. In some games you can mentally throw out many options at a glance because they aren’t relevant to you. This is the only way MTG draft works with 15-card packs, because once you’re committed to 2 colors you can usually ignore about half of every pack‘s contents. The first picks are harder, and so players learn lists of top commons and bombs to look out for.

New drafters also learn general guidelines like “B.R.E.A.D” (bombs, removal, evasion, aggro, defense) to reduce what to consider at any given moment, because 15-card packs are just too many. Players need to develop their own coping mechanisms to simplify the choice to something mentally parsable + enjoyable. if we don’t provide a comfortable number of options for the system, players will take steps to do it themselves. They quickly narrow down to just 2-4 cards worth considering in each pack.

Either way, it’s worth thinking about this application of the Decoy effect and the limits of Short Term Memory when viewing a static list of options under no time pressure. Adding time pressure, or multitasking, generally cuts the 5-7 memory budget in half.