My ideas about design theory are evolving. I've based this series off of what appears to be the academic consensus of the principles of design and structured my thoughts around the framework and terms used in Lauer and Pentak's Design Basics. That's been useful for me because I own a copy and I find it very accessible. However, I would like to propose a sixth principle, mood.
Mood is the emotional content of your design. All art, all music, all narrative has emotional content. It doesn't take much research into color theory and marketing to realize that all design does too. Color temperature, how 'warm' or 'cool' a color is, has a huge effect on mood. Scale can be deployed to create a feeling of vastness, but may need to be paired with other elements to really develop a sense of loneliness in the cosmos. Rhythm can help make a game more exciting or relaxing or whimsical or joyful.
Mood is all about eliciting a desired emotion or response in your players. A game design should not be 'finished' until not only do the mechanisms work well, but the players respond to the emotional content of the game in a way congruous with your design vision. This type response will be more obvious in themed games, but most games have an arc of play that can include emotions such as optimism, overconfidence, or agony of defeat.
Art assets hugely reinforce mood. Mood informs player experience. A game's art should match the intended experience. I cringe every time I hear someone say that art shouldn't matter. (Yet there is no outcry when someone buys a game only for the minis.) A typical board game, sans players, is visual components, tactile components, mental components, and time. When at least a quarter of the stuff that makes up your game is visual, it must be integrated into your design. It must reflect the quality of the mechanic design. Bad art is bad marketing; it affects usability by being distracting; it dis-unifies a design. What is good art in a board game? Good art is well executed (i.e. looks professional), reinforces the design vision, and follows the principles of design. I am so tired of looking at boards where the major color is 'washed-out dirt'. Boring boards or cards are just as lazy design as cluttered, poorly organized ones. Designers don't always have a say in the art that goes into a game, but from an end user's perspective it's all the same design.
Conclusion
This series has been a very high level discussion of design. Each of the design principles could turn into their own series, by applying the principles to different themes and mechanics and so on. But the purpose of this series was to introduce new terms to how we talk about design as a topic.
Here are some things I hope become standard good practices in board game design:
1. All elements of a design should be fully integrated. Every element should add to the experience and reinforce the design vision.
2. Games are fundamentally experiences. All games should be designed with player experience in mind.
3. How games convey information is as important as the information conveyed. Sometimes the information is emotional or experiential.
I'd also really like it if we retired washed-out dirt as a main color choice.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
Today we cover the last principle of design: rhythm. Rhythm is the visual, auditory, or chronological patterns present in a design. Two types of patterns can affect rhythm. Alternating rhythm is a consistent sequence of elements, the continuation of which can be anticipated by the viewer. Progressive rhythm is a sequence that changes or ramps up as it goes along.
In addition to design terms, we can look to music for ways to use rhythm. The visuals of our boards can have a tempo. Elements that flow gently to one another are more legato, whereas elements that abruptly break up the pattern are more staccato. Rounds of play can be described as having beats and meters. Here I think it is helpful to switch for a moment to theatre terms. In theatre, beats are small units of action that are broken up by moments of reflection. A beat may be more than a single action, but they have a single goal in the scene, or perhaps the phase or round. Much like in music, how you structure the beats of gameplay can build excitement (or relaxation, contemplation, etc).
All of a game's elements should have rhythms that make sense for what they are trying to bring to the game. Much like the actor's beats, each element should have a motivation. The goal of a card draft is for player's to add new cards to their hands. The motivation of drafting cards might be to slow down gameplay and allow for a moment of reflection and strategizing. Every board game mechanism (even the one you invented ex nihilo) has an inherent rhythm. The combination of mechanisms into turns and rounds and phases creates the cadence or meter of gameplay. The rhythms of the visual design should reinforce the rhythms of gameplay. A visually cluttered and chaotic play space (especially at set-up) will convey a stressful, frenetic rhythm, regardless of how the game actually plays or is intended to play. Visually and tactically, rhythm can be conveyed thru texture. Sharp edges and points can reinforce fast, exciting gameplay; gentle curves and soft edges convey a slower rhythm.
Rhythms that work together to achieve the design vision help create unity of design. Emphasis should be incorporated into the rhythm of your design. It should be clear by now that each design element supports the others.
In the next post we'll look at a bonus principle and draw some conclusions.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
An abundance of attention is given in board game spaces as to whether a game is balanced. 110% of that attention is paid to how mechanisms work in relation to each other and the win condition(s). But balance can apply to all elements in a design.
Balance is the distribution of 'weight' or importance within a composition. In order to be balanced, all sides must maintain equilibrium. In terms of mechanisms, a game is considered balanced when all players have an equal chance of winning based on starting position. In design terms, balance is one of the key ways to create unity. Balance helps reign in emphasis by keeping the focal point from taking over the design.
Balance can be achieved thru symmetry or asymmetry. Symmetry is when all design elements have equal weight. Symmetry creates a sense of stability in a design. One way symmetry creates stability is by repeating patterns and motifs across a design. Symmetry in most elements can help to emphasize a focal point. Bilateral symmetry is when one half mirrors the other. The easiest way to describe bilateral symmetry in game terms is to look at two player games. If both players have access to identical resources and abilities and set-up positions at the start of the game, then that game has a high level of bilateral symmetry. Boards with bilateral symmetry are often easier for new players to contextualize. Radial balance or radial symmetry is when elements extend out from a central point in many directions. All games played around a table should have visual radial balance in the components. Especially in competitive games, all public information should be readily perceivable by all players. Crystallographic balance or mosaic balance, aka 'allover pattern' is a constant repetition of a quality. A grid of tiles (or an Andy Warhol print) exhibits this type of balance. Each tile, or board in a campaign game, or expansion, or episode should feel like it fits as part of the whole.
Asymmetry exists when elements are noticeably different but have equal weight. Asymmetry feels less formal than symmetry. Asymmetry can be deployed by increasing variety. Asymmetry in board games can be found in player powers, one vs. all gameplay, player elimination, round length, and board layout. Wingspan has asymmetrical round length, with players taking more actions each new round. Point salad games have high asymmetry in scoring.
Imbalance creates tension. Too much imbalance creates chaos. A perfectly balanced game has little excitement. Most gameplay exists in the space between perfect balance and total imbalance. Encouraging players to take risks (that are real risks, not merely perceived as such) generates greater imbalance but also greater engagement. Card art with intentional imbalance can add to the spooky feeling of a horror game. Well-executed, imbalance can simply feel like forward momentum, that the game is hurtling toward its eventual, but not inevitable, conclusion. In scoring terms, the goal of most games is to be the player to achieve the best/most imbalance.
The various types of balance (and imbalance) should be considered in every aspect of designing a game. Does this element bring stability or tension? Does this element reinforce other elements? Does this element draw too much attention away from the overall design vision? In other words, is my game balanced?
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
Today's topic is the most engineering forward of the principles of design. In many ways two aspects in one principle, scale and proportion is all about looking at how size affects design.
Scale is the actual sizing of an element. Scale is most obvious in games with minis, where the scales are usually listed (especially if the minis are bought separately). Scale is hugely important in board games, a hobby enjoyed by the very young to the very old with vastly different levels of vision and dexterity. Board games are physical objects that are manipulated by human players and present changing information sets to players throughout game based on that manipulation. Human scale is when elements are designed to be used by the average human (as opposed to mice or elephants, I suppose). Some games have employed an unusual scale (or exaggerated scale) to drive excitement about a game. Giant Jenga is arguably outside of human scale, especially for humans whose height trends below average. Giant Jenga is also clearly cooler, because everyone knows that the possibility of a concussion is what Jenga had always been missing.
Scale can also be deployed to create a sense of space. Do you want players to feel small in a vast universe or tightly constrained with little room to maneuver? The scales you deploy can reinforce the theme or desired player experience.
Proportion is the relative size of one component compared to another. Proportion can be used to create emphasis by using the size of an element/part of an element to drawer the viewers' attention. Notably, proportion can vary within a given scale. Mess with proportion too much and you enter into surrealism, which is a confusion of scale. Surrealism must be intentional and well executed or your players will simply feel confused. Confusion is only good if it adds to immersion and doesn't detract from gameplay. Similarly, fantasy in scaling moves completely beyond reality. Fantasy in this sense is not the same as fantasy commonly seen in movies and literature, which often still broadly relies on human scale to create the world.
Hierarchic Scaling is the use of more than one scale to convey which elements are the most important. This is another way to clearly deploy emphasis, with the clear intention to convey that the larger element is the more valuable/important/essential. Ancient Egyptians were famous for deploying hierarchic scaling in their art. To our eyes, hierarchic scaling in art looks odd, but makes complete sense in graphic design.
Returning for a moment to human scale, we need to talk about context. Context is the surrounding condition(s) were we find (or can expect to find) a design. Context includes location, which for our purposes is where a game is played. Tabletop games have the expectation of being able to be played on an average sized dining table. Unlike board game storage, where kallax reigns supreme, there is no general expectation that the majority of hobbyists will have the same sizes of gaming table. However, there are some general guidelines designers can follow. The most important issue is that every player should always be able to understand the game state regardless of where they are sitting relative to board orientation. A tiny, unreadable board that is four feet away from a player is bad design. I would say that the individual player space should be no more than two square feet, to allow all of the players and the general use space to fit at the table. The number of players is going to be limited by the number of people the table can accommodate. A typical card table is 3'x3', which is fine for parlor games where players hold most of their cards and there is no large central board. We no longer have an expectation that people will play cards at a card table, which opens design up to be more expansive. Lastly, components should be neither too tiny nor too large to be easily manipulated or deciphered by the average player.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
From here on out, the remaining principles should require fewer posts to cover. As the overarching principle, Unity had a lot of ground to cover. On the other hand, today's topic is arguably optional depending on the style of design. I'm not saying it is optional, but you could argue that if you want.
Emphasis is giving particular stress or importance to an element. You give a design emphasis by using focal points. A focal point is a central, singular component or idea. It may be an innovative element or experience. In order to have effective focal points you need to choose only one or two within a design. The rest of the elements should support your focal point and not distract from it. In other words, unity still needs to apply. In essence, a focal point is a type of variety employed to convey the big idea of the game. In board game design, the focal point could be an innovative mechanism, unique theme, engrossing narrative, engaging experience, or impressive central component. Remember however, that a focal point is not just something that stands out; it still needs to be an integral part of the design.
Emphasis in a design can be created thru a number of methods. Deploy one or more of these methods to help draw attention to the element you want to showcase in your design.
Contrast allows focal points to stand out by virtue of their differences. A great way to use contrast is to set expectations then change the script just once in a noticeable way. The biggest mini is almost always the boss. Flipping over the only card in the deck outlined in red means you're probably in trouble. It's ok if the contrasting element follows certain meta-tropes. We want the audience/players to know something is happening just before it happens. The noticeable contrast draws attention to your pivot in the game. The dramatic moment is set up, pulling the players deeper into the experience. Poorly timed drama falls as flat as poorly timed comedy. Putting emphasis in the right places adds drama to your game.
Isolation declutters what you are trying to emphasize. Similar to contrast, you are trying focus the attention of your players. Too many focal points or just too many elements will compete for attention, resulting in a feeling of chaos. Everyone always knows who to attack on a given turn in King of Tokyo. The spatial isolation of one player avatar from the rest is always abundantly clear. Players, regardless of what side of the board they are facing, should always know where to look in a given phase of a game and what they are looking at should easily convey the intended information.
Placement uses the arrangement of elements to draw attention to a focal point. Our eyes are drawn around a track or to the center of a rondel, so we may as well use those spaces accordingly. Pillars of the Earth is a good example of clean flow of information around a board and also isolation of the visual thematic center piece. There is simply no reason for a board to be more visually confusing than a card laying game. After all, on a board, the designer/developer team has full control over how the information is presented. Each area of the board can have its own minor focal point and still flow one to the other smoothly.
Of course, every gamer today knows the (overly relied on) Great Big Element. A design with one striking centerpiece is an easy way to achieve visual impact. It adds to table presence and is usually cool in its own right. Please just remember to integrate your great big focal point into your design. If you can't, perhaps consider the other methods of creating emphasis.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
Truly elegant designs all have strong unity of composition. But 'elegant' is not always interesting or exciting. To address that, we turn to the last method to create unity, variety.
Variety adds interest thru contrast and comparison. In board game terms, variety adds complexity and (often) depth. Variety applies to rules, pieces, mechanisms, shapes, colors, and so on. Chess doesn't have much variety compared to most hobby games, but it has more variety than checkers. Variety lends itself to theme-focused games. Unity without variety is easier to achieve in abstract games. In fact, themed games that only have one or two simple mechanisms are often decried as abstracts with a pasted-on theme due largely to the simplicity of the gameplay. Variety allows for space to tie in your theme in multiple ways.
Unity across your design is often simpler to achieve without variety. Every element added that is unique and different has to be weighed against the entire design and integrated seamlessly. Compare the base games of Santorini and Gloomhaven. Both designs are well-executed, but Santorini exudes elegance whereas Gloomhaven leans into showcasing its variety.
Variety can lead to increased engagement. Players become invested in legacy and campaign style games because they want to know what new things will happen next. Of course, these games don't change drastically on each play-through. Instead, they balance unity and variety by deploying varied repetition. Each game is just different enough to maintain engagement without overwhelming players with too much new information.
Variety still needs to abide by the guidelines of proximity, repetition, continuation, and continuity. Variety without organization or obvious purpose creates disunity in a design. Every element of a design should add to the experience and reinforce the vision of the design. A well-developed element that nevertheless doesn't fit the overall design is usually an attempt to shortcut the design process while maximizing engagement. In other words, a gimmick. Gimmicks can work well for marketing, but let us not pretend that they are good design.
That's it for Unity. Next post, I'll introduce the second principle, Emphasis.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
In the last post we defined unity as when all elements work together as one harmonious composition. Now we will discuss methods that can be used to create unity. Board games contain a lot of information: rules, mechanics, strategies, scores, etc. in addition to the visual input from graphics, art, and components. Fortunately for us, these methods are all about bringing that information together to make one usable design.
The purpose of these methods is to add clarity, reduce visual/information chaos, strengthen relationships between elements, and add consistency. The result of which is greater unity in your design.
Proximity refers to the idea that elements near each other (in space or time or visual look) will be associated as a group. Groupings add clarity to a design. A good rulebook will go over all the rules about scoring in the same section, for instance. Cards of different 'types' will be readily identifiable from the front-side (and often the back, depending on if decks are separated). Placing certain icons near each other graphically gives them an implied relationship. Rounds of play can be designed so that related things happen subsequently, which can help players remember to perform all the actions in a round.
Repetition, as any student could tell you, is a memory aid. Repetition is the repeating of motifs across a design. Repeated motifs add clarity (unity is largely about clarity of message), reinforce symbolism, and can add to theme and immersion when done well.
Continuation is the flow of one element to the next. Every element should occur in a way/place that feels logical and 'natural'. The graphic style of the box should feel like a logical extension of the board/experience. The cards should be in the same world as the tiles. The icons should match the components. (I've seen a published game where this was not the case and it was enraging to me.) Game phases should feel connected (at least thematically) to each other.
Continuity is the flow of one design to the next. The industry is leaning into expansions, modules, game systems, and legacy versions. Good designs will retain the feel of the original while allowing room for improvement.
Next post, we'll cover the last method of unity, variety.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
Since this is a series about the principles of design, we should probably start talking about them. The first principle of design is arguably the most important. And the oldest. And my favorite.
Unity is when all elements work together as one harmonious composition. In other words, all the elements feel like they belong in the same world.
Aristotle, in writing about tragedy, wrote "the components ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible difference is not really a part of the whole." (The 'classical unities' of theatre would be described two thousand years later based on what Aristotle wrote in the Poetics.)
I firmly believe Aristotle's view of unity applies to board game design. The debate about toy factor and table presence needs a good dose of unity-focused design. Especially from designers. Publishers are going to sell games however they want to, but designers should be slow to embrace gimmick. This does not mean ignoring product-focused design! Designers should be designing for the overall gameplay experience including making a game desirable to not just to play but also to purchase. But there is a difference between games with table presence and games people only buy for the bits and never play.
Now that there are so many games on the market, the standards for a 'good' game have gotten higher. Game designers (supposedly) used to be able to design a set of mechanics and let the publisher take it from there. Designers now are responsible for designing (although perhaps not executing) the full play experience, which requires a different set of skills than what is required for developing mechanics alone.
How unity can help your designs:
-Better integration of theme
-Fewer unnecessary mechanisms
-More immersive world-building
-Art that supports gameplay
-Components that add to the overall experience
Next post, we'll delve into ways to create unity.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
The biggest divide in board game design is theme versus mechanics. Which is more important? Which comes first? I reject the premise that it is 'either/or' and contend that both are elements of a whole design, the success of which relies on all elements being well designed and integrated.
First off let's review the definition of design: Design is an aesthetic organization of elements; creative problem solving; the relationship between content and aesthetics (or form and function); and a way of communicating intended use or expected response.
Which brings us to how elements are divided in the Principles of Design. All of design consists of form and content. Content is the subject, the information, the thing you want to convey. Form is the shape the content takes, the way the content is conveyed.
In board game terms, content is the pieces, rules, mechanics. Form is the box, rulebook, components, theme, art, lore, and overall experience. It is possible for the roughest prototype and the glossiest published game to have the exact same content (by virtue of being the same game); the difference between the two is the form they take.
Both form and content are a part of design. A good designer should consider all elements of the game play experience. A well-designed game doesn't have to be fully immersive, but it should be fully designed.
Now I am going to disagree with myself and say that if the theme is the heart of what you want your game to convey and why you are designing your game, that is your content and the mechanics are your form. It isn't about theme vs. mechanics. It's about what you are trying to accomplish and how you get there. If you feel you could cut an element from your game or change it, it's not your content. Content is your design vision. You should be able to write a one to two sentence design vision statement for your game. The elements mentioned in a design vision statement are your content. Everything else is how you get there, your form. Each individual element is also made up of form and content, in that each element should have a specific purpose and also aesthetics that help it mesh with the overall design.
The rest of this series will detail the principles of design, so now seems like a good idea to introduce them: unity, emphasis, scale, balance, and rhythm. By using these principles, we can make better, more cohesive designs.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
I'm passionate about design. So are most board game designers (or designers of any type). Isaac Shalev called me a formalist. [Well, he said he was a 'formalist, too' if we're going to be pedantic.] Board games have made a push into formalism with encyclopedias and design courses where terms are codified and a lexicon is built. And I could not be happier about that.
When I see higher level board game design discussion online, I see a lot of 1) math, 2) the prisoner's dilemma, and 3) what I think of as 'engineering' discussion. What's the probability? How do we quantify our player's strategies? At what point will a mechanism break a game? I don't have an issue with these discussions. I believe that they are important aspects of design, in the same way engineering is important to architecture. My contention is that engineering isn't architecture.
Most often, though, what I see in online discussions is people reaching for the right words to describe why a design works/resonates or doesn't. This is the void I want to see filled.
Hi, my name is Sarah and I spent seven years in higher ed. studying theatre. I have taken six college level design courses. And I work in theatre, which is fundamentally about collaboratively designed experiences. Board games are also designed experiences and usually collaborative in some way. The advantage that theatre has is a 2500 year head start on building a lexicon (and an industry).
The principles of design are taught in more than just theatre classes, however. Visual design (or communication design) impacts any industry that has ever used the word 'presentation'. It's just that many of those industries are content with bad design.
You could learn to draw horses really well by buying one of those "Learn to Draw: Horses" books or you could learn the basics of drawing, and in the process also learn how to draw horses or anything else you like. The same is true for design. Knowing the basics of design will make you a better (board game) designer.
So, what is design?
1. Design is an aesthetic organization of elements.
2. Design is creative problem solving.
3. Design is the relationship between content and aesthetics (or form and function).
4. Design is a way of communicating intended use or expected response.
There are amazing board game designers out there who probably don't need to learn the vocabulary of design in order to be good designers, but they may struggle to explain what good design is. A sign of a mature industry is a common shared technical language. The language of design already exists and is only waiting to be adopted into board games.
In this series, I'm outlining the principles of design from a perspective of how they relate to board game design. If you want to read more on your own, the main reference I use is Design Basics by David A. Lauer and Stephen Pentak. Available here.
