Back in the early days of the video arcade, you paid to play a game for as long as you wanted, until you lost. For whatever reason, it was pretty common for you to have 3 attempts before the game decided you had truly lost the game and the coin you'd inserted into the arcade cabinet. When home consoles became available, that tradition was continued as a common lose condition. You could play for as long as you wanted, but once you'd lost 3 lives you had to start the game from the beginning as if you'd never played it before. Modern gaming (aside from those that implement it as a gimmick) has fortunately abandoned that tradition, recognising it as a financially-driven timing function that's no longer necessary or useful. Some tabletop games, oddly, forget that a gamer doesn't have to lose the game to feel challenged. Sometimes that's true, but in many cases all a lose condition does is encourage a player to stop playing the game due to lack of meaningful progress or victory. I think it's often more fun for the player, and healthier for many games, to design around lose conditions, and instead allow players to fail forward. Here are 5 ways tabletop games can help players keep playing by eliminating failure.
Of course, a lose condition in many situations is important. In a competitive game, somebody is expected to win, which means somebody else must lose. Historically though, a loser often ended up having to sit around being bored while everybody else continued playing to the end of the game, and that's not very fun.
When somebody wins, the game ought to be over. Don't force the losers to pile up on one side of the table as they watch the winner go through the motions of sealing the victory. Design your game so that the win condition is a terminal function. This might mean that one person wins and everybody else loses, or it might mean that everybody either wins or loses together based on a countdown timer, or that the game simply ends after a set number of rounds so scoring can happen.
For co-op and solo and legacy games though, hard loss often just doesn't make sense.
If a game removes player resources, then you have to give the player a chance to go back to headquarters and heal or recruit or repair. Too many games grind down the tools available to the players as a threat mechanic, but expect players to continue playing nevertheless. Continuing a game with half of what you started with feels haphazard and exciting at first, but mathematically it can only last for so long. Eventually, the player is left with nothing, and it's only after a chronic battle that the lose condition mercifully occurs. The lasting effect is that the player remembers mostly playing a game without any hope of actually winning, but the inability to end it.
At the very least, make a safety valve to detect an oncoming lose condition. For example in wargaming, it's common to have a morale system. After a player's troops has been reduced to half or a quarter of its original size, the army must succeed on regular morale checks or else disband and retreat. In good wargames like Warhammer 40,000 or Necromunda or Blackstone Fortress, that army can return to central command between games and gather new recruits and requisition new wargear so it can continue into its next battle at full strength. In less good wargames (which I won't mention by name), there's no allowance for that, and players are expected to just keep playing with a fraction of available forces.
Sometimes a lose condition is necessary, but you can disguise it by rewarding it. It might seem like it trivializes winning to reward losing, but actually losing is often part of the winning process. In real life, making mistakes is an unavoidable and necessary component of finding a solution, and in gaming you have to lose some times to achieve victory. It's part of the cycle.
Some games accept that, but punish players for losing because that's often what happens in real life. When you slip and fall, you get to keep walking, but with a limp. Why not emulate that in a game? Well, you don't emulate that in a game because a game is far more limited in scope than real life. In real life, you can keep going forward after a mistake or you can stop and recover, or you can go get help, or you can choose another path, and so on. In a game, you have only the resources granted by the game system. When something's taken away, you are at a disadvantage.
When a player loses, it's not the time to punish the player but to provide assistance. Encountering a lose condition isn't a sign that the player just needs to try harder, it's a sign that the player is presumably trying but failing. You can help the player get further in the game by granting a bonus after a lose condition is met.
The bonus you hand out doesn't have to be labeled as a reward for losing. You can disguise or theme it according to the game.
Did the player just get torn apart by several zombies? New military technology has been discovered that resurrects a fallen survivor with a helpful mutation.
Was the player unable to defeat the daemonic minion? Well, the gods have taken notice and they've sent a helpful familiar along to absorb some of the damage during the fight.
A failure can result in an unexpected and unlikely advantage to help the player get to the next stage of the game.
Losing is sometimes its own reward. For some gamers, the dishonour of having to accept assistance is the real lose condition, and you can weaponise that for Good. By telling players that losing is reserved for hardcore players, you allow players to continue through what would otherwise be a loss unless the player wants to play on Hard Mode. A player who won't permit flipping over to Easy Mode due to pride can accept the lose condition and start over. A player who just wants to complete the game can happily accept the step down in difficulty.
A good example of this trick is Forbidden Island or Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, both of which have starting levels keyed to either desired difficulty or number of players. If you play through a game and realise it's too hard to be fun, you can dial the setting down. If you play and realise it's too hard but that you enjoy the challenge, then you can just keep playing as is.
The trick is to elevate hardcore mode while not diminishing Easy Mode. Players ought to feel good about winning on Easy Mode, understanding that Hard Mode is mostly just a theory.
Sometimes, winning is just a question of degrees. A player enjoying your game is the ultimate win condition for you and the player, so even when a player encounters a lose condition there's been a victory. You may be able to leverage this by qualifying the conditions of the endgame.
Maybe the player lost the outpost, but still managed to kill 8 zombies. That's admittedly a loss for the survivors, but 8 destroyed zombies is a major win in the battle against the horde!
Maybe the player lost the dual. Good thing the dual was just a delay tactic anyway, and has resulted in a major victory for the rebellion!
When a player loses, you can change the win condition.
It's not whether you win or lose, it's how much you lose that matters. You can make winning inevitable after a series of small losses and setbacks, based on a scoreboard of degrees of success. A player may have played to the end, but having only obtained 50% of the objectives there's a lot of room for improvement. Why not play again, only better?
Completing the game is winning the game. If you want to win more, then play the game again, but lose less.
In modern gaming, the real victory is taking the time to relax and play a game. That more than anything is a win for the player and for the game developer. It doesn't cost anything to grant imaginary rewards to a player for trying, or to grant an even bigger imaginary reward to a player for trying harder than before. The real losers are the people who don't play, and there's no point in designing a game around them.