Book Announcement

Do you remember that super secret project that caused me to go on hiatus this summer? I'm sure my regular readers will not be surprised to learn that that project was a book on game design theory. Thematic Integration in Board Game Design will be out in January. I'll post again when orders are open. 

In the meantime, what is this book and why would you want it? TIBGD takes my past blog posts on theme and puts them in order, provides additional examples, and fixes my slapdash approach to grammar. (Apparently using 'out' phrases is my thing: suss out, find out, clean out, call out, etc. These have been removed from the text.) The end result is a coherent treatise on what theme is and how it should be approached in board game design. 

If you have received any benefit from this blog at all and were looking for a way to show appreciation, buy this book. Seriously, I have never and will never monetize, advertise, or otherwise try to cash in on what I write here. There may one day be another book, but you should consider this book the only way I may ever see a dime as a theorist. 

That said, I don't believe in paywalls. Don't buy the book if you're happy reading the rough versions of my ideas here for free. There isn't very much there that isn't already on here. (The little that isn't found on the blog comes from other places where I have written or spoken, and those may be harder to find in the future.) 

Now, two more things. 

First: it has come up several times recently that people are mildly shocked when I state that I want to hear more from people who disagree with me. This is even part of my motivation for writing a book: I want my ideas to have enough legitimacy to be disputed. So, once the book comes out if you have opinions about where I went wrong, write about it then drop a comment on the blog so I can find it. I think theme is an important topic and the only way to prove that is if I'm not the only voice talking about it. 

Second thing: I had intentions once the book manuscript was done to devote time to regular blogging. Life recently threw me a curve ball and this post has been almost a month in the making. I have lots of things to write about, but getting the writing done has been absurdly difficult. I imagine that the person most upset about this is me. I can't make any promises about content going forward. However, I will be attempting to maintain a once-a-month schedule over on Ludology if you need a fix.  

This book was one of the most challenging projects I've ever undertaken and I'm absurdly proud of it. At the same time, I've already got ideas for new chapters in a potential future edition. Which will all preview here for free. Thanks for going on this journey with me. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates on infrequent Mondays. 

Communication is a Design Skill

Maybe I'm projecting, but when I sit down to playtest with people who know me from my online presence, I feel like they are invariably disappointed. You could probably read this blog and come away with the impression that I am good at game design, or that having me as a playtester will yield helpful insights. 

The truth is, if I am smart at all, I am only smart about a very narrow band of topics. I have a hard time with rules complexity and strategy as a player, and that comes out in my designs. Fortunately, there are a few things I've gotten better at which make me a more effective designer and playtester.

One thing writing this blog has done is make me a better communicator. I've found this skill helpful when playtesting games by other designers, because I am able to articulate what parts of the game didn't work and why I think they didn't work. As a designer, I'm still working on how I teach my games to playtesters and communicate affordances in the components and rules. Sometimes I succeed better than others. 

The good news is that this is a skill every designer can improve on. We all have our weak areas, but strong communication skills can help us show off our design strengths. A good way to do this is to playtest your rules teach. Learning to give the players the correct amount of information in a useful order will make you a better designer and help you when you go to write your rulebook. 

Playtesting your teach means you have to be comfortable enough with your game rules that you can not only convey them to players, but you really need to be able to simultaneously pay attention to the players to ensure that you are aware of any confusion that occurs. You may want to practice on people you know before practicing your teach on strangers. I'd also recommend being a playtester for designers who have a number of published designs. Pay attention to how they run the playtest. Heck, take notes. 

Another way that communication is important is within the design itself. We talk about player confusion a lot, but another way of describing player confusion is to say that the design is doing a poor job of communicating with the players. You may have found that your design will go through a phase where all you are fixing is graphical issues until you hit a point where players begin having issues with mechanics again. Most players won't be able to give feedback on mechanics when there are glaring usability problems. Eliminating those problems allows the game to communicate better with the players and thus the players are more able to give structural feedback about systems. 

Becoming a better communicator will make you a better designer. All it takes is some practice. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

More About Rules Complexity

In a previous post, I talked about ways rules complexity can eat away at your complexity budget. I want to delve a little further into my point about memory. 

When I play games with my parents, my father has an especially hard time learning the rules. He doesn't have a lot of experience with board games and only plays them when I am around. There are several lessons about rules complexity that I can glean from trying to teach my dad any number of supposedly gateway games. 

The biggest one is that number of steps matters. Quick turns with fewer distinct action options is by far the best method for lighter weight games. Where I think designers can get tripped up is that we are unconsciously chunking a number of steps into a single unit. Chunking allows experienced gamers to learn games faster when familiar elements are present. However, designers cannot rely on chunking when teaching new players, particularly at the beginning of the game, because every player will have a different set of game experiences to draw from. Instead we must view every mechanism as its component parts. Deck building, for example, is a mechanism that includes card drawing, playing, acquisition, and shuffling. That's a minimum of four steps before you include any other rules. Worse, card shuffling may not occur every turn. Any step that does not occur every turn should be considered higher in memory load than the steps that occur every turn. 

Games where base rules are quite simple and the complexity is revealed via board state or conditions on cards are generally easier on new learners, with some caveats. Number of icons should be considered a part of rules complexity. Each icon is a piece of meaning that has a relationship to the rules that must be memorized (or listed on the player aid). Intuitive icons can decrease rules complexity—like a hammer to represent a building action—but very rarely will this be true of all icons in a game. The worst offenders are space-themed games that have no intuitive icons whatsoever. 

One way to know that you have exceeded your complexity budget is if your intended audience cannot pay attention to their progress toward the endgame because their attention is wholly focused on the procedure of taking each turn as it occurs. Not every game needs to be mastered on a first play, but turn procedure should be sufficiently clear after the first few turns. 

If you are designing for more casual audiences (or looking to reduce memory load), don't hide endgame scoring conditions in the rulebook. Make sure all scoring is represented in some way on the table, even if some conditions are represented by face down cards. Having to check the rulebook to find out who won at the end of a game is a bummer for new and casual players. 

I'm a fan of games that you can learn as you play, especially with casual players who aren't used to a long teach. However, even some casual players would prefer a full rules explanation to just getting started. Either way, reducing memory load is an important design step to making a game easier to learn. And remember that you cannot rely on chunking when writing rules. 

Generally speaking, games have more rules than designers think they do. This affects how easy they are to learn and the overall perceived complexity. Awareness of this issue can help you to tailor your design to your intended audience. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Nov 12-19 I will be at Tabletop Network and BGGcon in Dallas. Stop by the Unpub room if you're there. 

Next Game Blues

Most creatives know that at some point in the process they will suffer thru feeling like their work is terrible and they should just give up. Knowing that this is a part of the process can help you push past this feeling and get your project to a place where you can be proud of it. However, one thing I think we don't acknowledge enough is that moving from a finished project to a new project magnifies the bad feelings. 

When I have a game in the late design stages, my tendency is to believe that I have grown enough throughout the process that all subsequent games will be easier. I will be a better designer and each design will be better than the last. This is, unfortunately, not how it works. I have plenty of bad ideas and abandoned designs. I may never have a better game idea than Deadly Dowagers. I may never sign another game. However, any future success I do have will be because I pushed through the suck. Showing up, making bad games, and accepting feedback is the only way to eventually produce a good game. 

I get particularly down when I am starting a new design after having spent a lot of time polishing a nearly finished game. The "next" game will always be the hardest one. There will always be new challenges. And for those of us with modest to low design output, it may be many, many years before the "next" game gets easier. 

This is where I see a lot of designers give up. If your first game turned out to be a pretty good concept, you may not be prepared for the struggle to find the fun of your second game. And successful designers don't spend a lot of time talking about the designs they've trashed along the way. 

Learning to tolerate being bad at something is how you stick with a skill long enough to become good at it. Producing bad designs gets you to the good designs. But importantly, most designs start out "bad". As designers, whether to others' games or to our own, we need to tailor our feedback to helping get a game to where it will be fun rather than focusing on the ways it is bad. Because of course it's bad. That's how the process works. Let's be more charitable to ourselves and others. (But also, let us not be so nice that a design doesn't make the necessary changes it needs to become good.) 

Designing bad games doesn't make you a bad designer. It's a part of the process of becoming a better designer. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Oct 21-22 I will be at ATX Protospiel in Austin, TX. Nov 12-19 I will be at Tabletop Network and BGGcon in Dallas, TX. Come say hi if you are around. 

Boring Themes

Usually when we talk about boring themes, we are talking either about personal preference or about overdone themes. Certainly, themes just looking to cash in on the latest fad but with nothing new to say can be said to be boring. But today I want to look at what makes a theme boring within the context of playing a game.

Many themes seem like they should be boring, but players end up loving them. Many people point to Wingspan as the surprisingly enjoyable theme, but there are many other games with themes that are a great deal more surprising. Eurogames tend to have very boring sounding themes, although you can argue that their fans don't care about theme. However, some euros, like Pipeline or Barrage, are very theme forward in spite of the theme centering on a topic few people would claim casual interest in. These themes are not a draw in themselves, but they catch the imagination when learning to play. The water physics of Barrage especially keep the players engaged with the thematic level of gameplay. 

The point is that boring topics aren't necessarily boring game themes. This being the case, boring themes must have a different cause. A player might say, "The theme didn't add much for me," or "I didn't care about the theme." But player feedback like this does little to illuminate why the theme didn't positively add to the experience of play. In general, players are good at knowing how they feel during play, but not why they feel that way. It is up to the designer to diagnose the cause of a boring theme. 

What causes boring themes? I argue that themes that don't engage the player's imagination or impact the mechanics are boring because they are easily ignored during gameplay. However, let's get a bit more specific. 

Your theme might be boring because it doesn't provide purpose to the player's actions. If all of the actions are stated in a purely mechanical way and feel purely mechanical, your theme isn't adding much to the experience of play. (Where are the "letters" in Love Letter? I am going to die on this hill.) Themes should provide a sense of purpose to the actions that are taken in the game. And because I apparently can't go a month without saying it: the win condition of the game should align with the thematic objective. 

Your theme might be boring because it doesn't give an identity to the players. This one usually goes with purposeful actions, but a major way to add interest and decrease confusion is to make it clear to the players who they are and what they want. Lack of player identity isn't likely to be the sole reason a theme is boring, but it can be a contributory factor. 

Your theme might be boring because it is not dynamic within the game. This is the reverse of actions that are impacted by the presence of theme. In this case, the theme responds to the actions taken. What does this mean? It means that when actions are taken, there are thematic results not just mechanical results. Water flows downhill, unless a dam is put in place. Birds lay eggs that hatch into more birds. Letters get delivered to the intended recipient. 

Boring themes are themes that don't relate to what occurs during gameplay. These themes are boring largely because they are irrelevant. As designers, we can do better. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

The Abstraction of Space

I talk a lot about how human scale phenomena are more resonant and thematic-feeling because those events/things are more easily accessible to our imaginations. We can be transported by them because we have a clearer sense memory of them, or a clearer idea of what it could be like if it is something we have not experienced. Representations of gravity, temperature, speed, weather, smells, and more all evoke our own lived experiences. Themes that rely on human scale experiences tend to be more evocative. 

Even themes that are unrealistic, such as high fantasy, tend to be grounded in familiar settings, such as medieval Europe. Forests, farms, and walled cities are all very human scale and familiar. The same goes for eldritch horror: gas lit streets are not very far removed from the historic sections of those same cities that can be visited today. Magic is not as easy to make evocative, because the concept of magic is meant as a shortcut or alternative to natural processes. But as long as some part of the setting remains human scale, the theme can feel anchored in some sort of logic. 

It is the themes that eschew a familiar human experience that have a more difficult time, regardless of whether those themes represent real phenomena or not. The best example of this is games that are set in space. Space is, of course, real. And a small handful of humans have experienced what it is like to leave our home atmosphere. But the scale of space and the change in physics (gravity, air, speed, etc) give the setting of space a baseline that is beyond what the vast majority of us can imagine. Added to this, most space-themed games include "magic" in the form of fantastical technology: wormholes, faster than light travel, etc. There is nothing to anchor the theme's physics to a familiar experience. 

The result is that space games are more likely to suffer from feeling abstract. The most thematic space games likely feel thematic because they rely on thematic elements other than just vessels in space. Mars at least has gravity. The abstraction of space is exacerbated by game boards with black backgrounds only decorated by round objects in the form of stars and planets. Many true abstracts are also presented on a plain background with round tokens, which is a much more familiar sight to many of us than large scale stars and planets, and certainly more human scale. Thus we associate the form factor with abstraction more strongly that with real celestial bodies. 

Of course, space-themed games sell well. Many people enjoy techno-magic. Thanks to decades of science fiction, space is also associated with diplomacy and negotiation, which translates to game mechanics that feel appropriate to a space theme. Many people like certain aspects of the more abstract qualities of space as a theme, such as point-to-point travel. And the concept of space has always been aspirational, so there is an emotional component. While I don't care for space as a theme for the most part, I have no problem with the people who enjoy it. 

Rather, the point of this post is to illustrate that just because a theme is "realistic" does not mean it will feel thematic. Likewise, fantastical themes can feel grounded in reality. Understanding the relative abstraction of a setting can help designers calibrate how thematic the game is likely to feel. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Thematic-feeling Mechanisms

There is a difference between the logic of the theme informing the design of the mechanics and those mechanics actually feeling thematic. Sushi Go!, for instance, does not feel particularly thematic despite the drafting loosely representing a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. The metaphor of the conveyor belt is entirely escapable; it does not add to the experience of play. 

When we attempt to design highly thematic games, we must implement one or more "inescapable metaphors" (or simulative actions). In general, the more representational the action the more the players can access the theme. In this regard, simulative and literal actions work better than mere metaphors for driving home the theme. Most players will not have degrees in media criticism that they put to use by teasing out how the setting impacts the available actions. They will know when a game feels like the theme and if it doesn't they will call it abstract. 

There are three primary ways to make a game feel more thematic. 

• Mechanisms that evoke sense memory. When I talk about theming the physics of your world that is because human scale physics are not just familiar but will produce a visceral response in players. The game will feel more "real" if even one element reminds players of how the real world works. Heat, gravity, etc. are powerful tools that when modeled in games will make the world of the game seem grounded in reality. Importantly, the mechanisms must remind players of the sense of feeling hot, cold, vertigo, thirsty, and so on. The goal is to evoke sympathetic sensations as opposed to scientific accuracy in the theme. This method gets used a moderate amount. I see it most often in smaller games modeling simpler ideas. 
• Gameplay decisions that evoke the theme. Most detective themed games involve players solving mysteries in some way or other mechanically. The closer aligned the decision space is to the theme, the more thematic the game will feel, even after multiple plays. There is a lot of rich territory to explore here around player agency, loss aversion, other player psychology topics, and how those topics can be integrated into various themes. This method is very underutilized (except in the detective genre), and I want to see much more attention paid to the theming of the decision space of a game. 
• Themes that evoke emotional reactions. This method is the most used in games. However, the emotions typically evoked tend to lean toward "I find this art/subject matter to be appealing." I think we can do better. Instead of asking players if they are interested in playing a generic nature game, find an aspect of that thematic genre that has a strong pull for your intended audience. For example, a game about baby giraffes trying to complete an obstacle course, which is difficult because they're still learning coordination. The goal of compelling themes is to take the reaction from "Yeah, ok, sure" to "Heck yes, I want to play that right now!" The major caveat here is that that response tends to only get you to the point of a first play. In order to maintain a sense of theme throughout play, you really need the other methods and/or simulative actions that fall outside of those methods. 

Sense memory, decisions, emotions. Thematically integrated games will feel thematic if they get inside the players heads. To feel thematic, theme need to exist not only on the table but also in the players minds. This is the power of a thematic-feeling game: to get under the player's skin and make them feel. To me, this is the pinnacle of design. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.