On Not Playing Ugly Games

If I printed out a pamphlet of board game design advice in comic sans, it would be unsurprising if many people threw it away without reading it. To many people, it is an ugly font, not to mention a lazy choice in how to display my information. Yet when some players state that they will not play ugly games, surprise abounds. I am a 'visuals-first' consumer of games and I would like to make my case.

I will not play games that make my eyes bleed. This applies to board and video games. This applies to art, graphics, and layout. If I do not find a game visually appealing, I won't play it; I don't care how good it is. I am not stating this as a virtue, merely as a fact. 

Good art reinforces theme and adds to the sense that actions have a purpose beyond getting points to win. Good art reinforces the atmosphere/mood of the game, deepening the experience of gameplay. Good art is a form of (visual) sensory pleasure (one of the 8 types of fun), which adds to the overall fun of playing the game. 

Good graphics are also pleasurable to look at. They reduce the mental load of game rules, allowing players to enjoy the dynamics of gameplay more fully. Good graphics and layout can also reinforce theme and prevent a game from feeling like filling in a spreadsheet. 

Good visuals are appealing; they draw people in while conveying what the game is about. Bad visuals are off-putting. Bad layout and graphics confuse and obfuscate game rules. Bad art misrepresents otherwise good games. Bad visuals feel cheap and lazy and amateurish. 

I experience a game first with my eyes. Ideally, the color palette and art style accurately represent the mood and theme of the game. Ideally, the cover art and the board/card art are in the same universe of tone and theme. I am tired of beautiful box covers hiding hideous-looking games. 

I find bad art to be visually distressing. As an artist, I am perhaps excessively sensitive to color combinations and line quality and the emotion that any art, good or bad, can convey. I get overwhelmed by games with lots of tiny boxes of information laid out in grids, the way many heavy euros are laid out. Not only does that visual trigger information overload, but the theme gets lost in the grid. The phrase 'secondary board' makes me shudder. Again, this is not a virtue; this is how I process information. 

Good visuals have clear advantages in making games appealing to players. I have never heard someone wish that a game was uglier. Gamers who are not artistically sensitive are not adversely impacted by playing games with good art any more than they are by games with bad art. But just because some players do not need good visuals in order to have fun with a game does not mean that players who are more visually-oriented are wrong. People are how they are and should be allowed to pass on games they won't find fun (for any reason). 

Since publishers are embracing games as polished-looking products, this is becoming less of an issue, especially as old games get nicer reprints. But the question still comes up online a lot, presumably from bewildered gamers and designers who don't understand why art is all that important. Hopefully, this is an adequate primer. 

My Design Aesthetic

I'm getting to the point in my design journey that I have a few elements that I will generally put in my designs and recommend to others when I play their designs. I would not call these my rules for design, just strong preferences in design execution.

1. I have an aversion to rectangles. I'm not talking about standard component shapes here. I'm talking compounding the rectangularity of standard components with graphics and arrangement of components to make rectangles upon rectangles upon rectangles. I adore the player boards in Quacks of Quedlinburg. But if you're stuck with rectangles, they need to be visually mitigated by art/color/graphics. Seriously, this is my number one thing to critique in prototypes. That may sound mean, but I am at my best as a playtester when critiquing game-feel over gameplay: theme, layout, experience, etc. 

2. "Theme is fun."/ "Art is fun." I like fun mechanisms. But that's no reason to deny your game the fun potential that comes from good theme or art. If you are shopping for a publisher you can still have designed space for the possible future art and convey what sort of style would add to the fun-ness of the game. It is not asking too much for the $60 box of rules and components that I bought to both look and sound fun when I am trying to convince my friends to play it with me. I use color liberally in my prototypes for a similar reason: I want to attract playtesters and publishers by using all the tools available to me, and color is fairly easy to add even if all you have is a ten dollar maker set and some sticker paper. 

3. Story should be motivated by mechanism. If a character is described as 'greedy' the mechanisms should back up that description. I hate hate hate the lore paragraph at the beginning of a rulebook that has no narrative relation to what is actually occurring during gameplay. However, I do want to know why your factions are at war with each other, even if the reason is outside the scope of gameplay. 

4. Verticality is good, but it's better if it's motivated. A game that has an example of both is Santorini. The dimensionality of the pieces is motivated by theme and gameplay. The dimensionality of the board is not motivated. Whether or not unmotivated verticality is worth the added cost of a game is a debate still playing out between publishers and consumers. However, verticality that feels required by gameplay adds so much more to the experience than simply adding extra plastic or cardboard. 

5. Obfuscated scoring mitigates a number of 'player problems.' I really like not being sure who is going to win until the end of the game. I like pulling out a few hidden objectives and trouncing my strategic-gamer husband. I like it so much that most of my designs obfuscate scoring in some way. 

6. Card or tile flipping appeals to my sense of kinesthetics. I like the motion of flipping things over. I like revealing a new game state with a motion. I'm on my third design where this is a primary mechanic and I'm not bored with it yet.

I may have a few more, but these are ones I return to over and over. Again, this is just how my brain works and I, by no means, see this as a complete set of aesthetic rules. Rather, this is my design bias that I have chosen to lean into. Knowing your biases as a designer doesn't always mean avoiding them; sometimes it means leaning into your strengths to develop your artistic voice. 

Breaking the Rules

Probably the number one rule of writing or art is that you have to know the rules before you can break them. Part of knowing the rules is understanding the purpose of each rule. When you know the reason a rule exists, it becomes easier to know when to break it. 

One of the most cited Rules of Board Game Design is "rush to prototype." Producing a 'minimally viable  prototype' ensures that your game idea is worth pursuing before sinking hundreds of hours into iterations and playtests.  Of course, the minimum amount of what you need to test an idea varies widely from design to design. Another rule is to not spend time on art, but instead focus on core gameplay. (The immediate corollary is that publishers are only human and will be influenced by prototypes that are visually appealing.)

In reality, 'rush to prototype' and 'don't worry about art' are different codifications of the same concept: make a game that people want to play before worrying about anything else. Most of the 'basic' board game design rules boil down to this. The 'rules' are attempts to explain how to do this in a way that will work for most designs. However, much of the standard advice requires accompanying paragraphs to explain why a certain rule exists. We need to rework the 'rules' for clarity, much the way we would a game manual. Here's my proposed list:

Proposed New Basic Rules Of Board Game Design:

1. Make a game that people want to play before worrying about anything else.
2. Physically make a game, not in your head. Reality and theory often don't match.
3. Do not spend more than a month making a game before attempting to play it, although less time is better.
4. Play the game you make before adding or changing anything. 
5. Prioritize clarity of gameplay over theme/art. 
6. Play your game with other people. Often, if possible. Take notes.
7. Iterate your game with the goal of making other people want to play it. 
8. At some point, making your game look nicer is what will make other people want to play it. Your game still needs to be good regardless of how it looks. 
9. You need to love your game and still be willing to let it grow into something beyond what you first imagined. This may include publisher re-themes. 
10. Don't expect to recoup any money you spend on prototypes, etc. 
11. Consider the manufacturing cost of publishing your game before pitching with regards to components. 

That being said, I think that designing games primarily for yourself, as a hobby, means you can do whatever you like. Not every hobby needs to be monetized. 

I break a number of these rules with my designs that have garnered publisher attention. I spent far too long working on a prototype for my game that has 128 double-sided tiles. However, that was after a solo proof-of-concept with colored glass tiles that I knocked out the same day I had the design idea. I spend longer than I need to on finding free art and graphics for all my early prototypes. I am a theatrical artist, so some aspects of design are just fun for me and I make no apologies. My style lends itself to making visually appealing games that I then work toward making play well (which I don't recommend to others, although I know Ryan Laukat has admitted to this "flaw" too). Lately, I've been working a lot on flavor text for a design, but that is mostly due to the fact that my regular playtest group is suspended right now. 

This leads me to my point about breaking the rules. That double-sided tile game I mentioned above? I made it to be my "art game" (think art house cinema) to show off what I can do without regards for publish-ability. It has too many components for the weight of game it is. The set up takes too long for the length of gameplay. And yet I have had two publishers contact me about pitching it after they heard about it on Facebook. The takeaway here is that really good ideas are worth more than flawless gameplay. But I know that if I'm breaking Rule 11 (128 tiles, after all), I need to be better about the rest of the rules, especially when it comes to quick iteration. Breaking one rule can make you a visionary; breaking all of them makes you obnoxious. 

Learn the why of the rules. Then break the rules.