I was honored to participate in the Board Game Summit for the all virtual GDC this year. My talk was pre-recorded and aired for participants on Monday, July 19th. This is Part 4 of the script for my GDC 2021 talk: Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. (Part 1 is available here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.) The script has been lightly edited for ease of reading and annotated with links to other posts for additional thoughts on certain topics.
Now I’d like to look at two games as case studies for how they implement the traits I’ve outlined. The first is Tokaido. Let’s start with the rules lore, to see what the game says about itself:
“The players are travelers in Japan in the days of old. They will follow the prestigious Tokaido [road] and try to make this journey as rich an experience as possible. To do this, they will pass through magnificent countrysides, taste delicious culinary specialties, purchase souvenirs, benefit from the virtues of hot springs, and have unforgettable encounters.” [Tokaido rulebook, p.2]
Or as most gamers have described the game: you’re competing to have the best vacation. I like the brevity here. There’s additional historical information at the end of the rulebook, but this introduction only tells you what you need to know to get into the game. It’s not amazing writing, but it gets the job done.
The board itself is fairly abstract, but we still clearly see a road stretching across it, with wayside points to stop at. In this case, the suggestion of a road is just as effective as a more realistic illustration. After all, the character movement reinforces the idea of a road, as does the elongated board shape. Without these signifiers, however, the abstract representation would not have been very effective.
Tokaido is a masterclass in evocative actions. Let’s look at the action names in the game: first, a player moves a traveller and lands on a space. I’d prefer if the player ‘travelled to a location’ and ‘visited’ or ‘stopped’ there, but we can’t have everything. However, each of the spaces is evocative in a way that aids rules comprehension. Shops sell souvenirs, temples accept donations, encounters reveal people, and inns provide meals. Ending a round or ‘day’ with essentially dinner is particularly evocative. The remaining locations require a small amount of imagination but we can assume that farms produce money because you spend time there as a day laborer, panoramic views appear to produce panoramic artwork (the location and the cards are just called panoramas, which is a touch confusing), and hot springs presumably produce relaxation.
Nowhere on the board is there a generic board game symbol to draw a card. The thematic graphic design is effective at reinforcing the rules while also helping reduce the abstraction of the board, particularly the road. Tokaido deftly uses time and location elements to create the feel of gameplay without needing full-bleed art on the game board. This is good news for designers— you can create rich experiences in prototypes even if you are not an artist.
The cards do have generic game graphics in the form of scoring tables and transformation arrows. However, the larger art of the cards (as opposed to the locations) offsets the necessity of [displaying] this information. There is a balance struck between thematic expression and usability.
We find plenty of familiarity in shopping, sightseeing, and stopping at an inn for the night. The unexpectedness of Tokaido came from the clean visual design of the board coupled with the thematic gameplay. That same clean design keeps the game feeling uncluttered, a rare feat in a point salad style game. It’s also still unexpected, almost a decade later.
For the next case study, I’ll be looking at a much more detail-filled game: Everdell. Once again, let’s start with the lore in the rulebook:
“A new year begins. Within the charming valley of Everdell, beneath the boughs of towering trees, among meandering streams and mossy hollows, a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. Ever since famed adventurer Corrin Evertail discovered the hidden realm long ago, the citizens have prospered under the shelter of the Ever Tree. From Everfrost to Bellsong, many a year have come and gone, but the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host- it will be a busy year! Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?” [Everdell rulebook, p. 1]
It’s not great. There are too many details in general, but also too many details that exist only here and don’t appear in the game. This is a game with a lot of flavor text, both on the cards and in the rulebook, including a short story and a poem, but most of that text is very clearly “opt-in” lore. The beginning of a rulebook is a place most players don’t want to dwell on. Lengthy fluff like this with lots of adjectives and place names feel like a loss of momentum before the game has even begun.
I would prefer something more like this:
“A new year begins. Within the charming valley of Everdell a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. But the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host- it will be a busy year! Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?” [an edit of the above paragraph]
The focus changes to what the players will be doing in the game and not the geography and history of the world. But don’t get me wrong, this is perhaps my biggest criticism of Everdell’s expression of theme and it’s one that is shared by many games. One lesson here is to read your lore fluff out loud to easily see if you’re giving the reader too much detail.
The art of Everdell is highly evocative. Reminiscent of other works such as The Wind in the Willows or the Redwall series, the art immediately establishes the tone of the game— cozy but not completely free from conflict.
The resources in Everdell are delightfully tactile. The berries, which are made of a squishy plastic, are a standout example of how materials used in components can create resonance. The rest of the resources are nearly as good. The resin is translucent plastic; the pebbles are opaque hard plastic; the twigs are made of wood. Tactility that matches our expectations provides a strong emotional response. Tactility can also be an avenue of unexpectedness. I’m not sure that I can name another game that uses the same kind of squishy plastic as the berries in Everdell.
The building cards produce resources or effects that are highly thematic. Mines produce pebbles, farms produce berries, storehouses store resources. Buildings also attract critters whose profession matches that building. Postal pigeons move into post offices. Kings move into castles. Placing a closed door token on a building that has already attracted a critter is a simple and thematic reminder that that building is occupied. We get a sense of location from the materials used to build the buildings, from how the buildings are used, and from the critters that inhabit the buildings. Coupled with the game board, Everdell has a strong sense of place. One small element of dissonance is that positioning in your tableau has no game effect. I’m far from wanting Everdell to be more complicated, but I wish that neighboring buildings or critters had some slight mechanical relationship, rather than just being a random assortment in front of the player.
While discussing location, we have to talk about the tree. The tree adds a sense of scale to the world relative to the wooden critter workers. It also adds unexpectedness through sheer verticality. It makes an attempt to be incorporated into the game board as a place to store components, which ultimately isn’t that useful, but I would rather it have some use rather than for it to be just a cardboard sculpture. The tree impairs usability somewhat by blocking lines of sight during gameplay and when storing it afterwards, however. I suppose the lesson here is that if you are going to include an element that is even slightly difficult to use, it had better be gorgeous and highly thematic to offset its potential downsides.
Everdell is not the only game to divide rounds or phases into seasons, but it uses this structure pretty well to create a sense of time passing. Players can imagine harvests, births, and rests after long journeys during the prepare for season phase. My only complaint here is that the theming is so strong that it conflicts with the rules. One player can move into a new season while other players are still in the previous season, which is so counterintuitive that I got this rule wrong the first time I played Everdell.
Everdell uses illustration, tactility, verticality, and timing to create a rich world while mostly not over cluttering this world with distracting details.
These were just two examples of games that use a variety of tools to create resonance, particularly with regards to location and time. I hope to see more games in the future that leverage character motivation and relationships for resonance, especially in shorter games. Campaign and legacy games are already exploring more complex characterizations. And I hope that you leave today with a better sense of what it means for a game to be resonant. To recap, resonance is the combination of emotions and story elements with some attention-grabbing twists that focuses on the core experience and nothing else. Familiarity plus unexpectedness minus chaff. If you want to dig more into thematic design concepts, I have a blog at shippboardgames.blogspot.com which I update most Mondays. Thank you.
This concludes my GDC talk.
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