Narrative Framing

I've started to refer to crafting a game's story as theme-building. Worldbuilding (Which I guess is one word? I only just now looked it up.) often refers to the background story elements that inform what happens in your story. Theme-building is crafting the story itself in relation to the mechanics of a game. Within theme-building we encounter narrative framing. Narrative framing is the boundaries of the story and how the story is expressed. 

Let me unpack that a bit. Think of narrative framing as similar to cinematography. In film, you can have a good script, good acting, and good directing, but if the cinematographer does a bad job, your movie might be incomprehensible. Similarly, in board games you can have a good story in the rulebook about your world and you can have good mechanics, but if the theme is not knitted to the mechanics the game won't make narrative sense. 

Narrative framing is a tool we can use to help us knit together our theme and mechanics. Narrative framing focuses on who gets the spotlight and which parts of the story get told. Board games by their nature have to present an abstraction of a story. Narrative framing is the process of deciding what details get airbrushed out and what details get emphasized. There are a few basic questions to ask to determine your narrative framing.

Who are the players? You may have a story in mind, but the type of game you are trying to make will partially determine who the main characters are. In cooperative games, characters have a single purpose and work together to achieve it. In competitive games, characters have conflicting desires even if they have the same goal. In a competitive game, you would not want to depict characters who are all on the same team unless you include an element of betrayal. Players may control separate teams of characters, however. Your choice of PCs has a strong effect on how players will relate to the game world. Characters are the way that players access the world of the game. Sometimes changing who the main characters are in the story will focus the story on the type of experience you want players to have. Read these posts for more about shaping playable characters. 

What are the characters doing? What are their goals? A character's goals should line up with the win condition (or their win condition) of the game. Even if the mechanics don't change, changing goals thematically can raise the emotional stakes which in turn increases player investment in the game narrative. Did players seem to care about the main task of the game? That goal should feel important enough to the PCs that the players also become invested in achieving it. 

How are they doing it? What actions are they taking? The actions of a game should be the method by which a character achieves their goal. Actions should feel 'in character' for PCs. If a character acts in a way that doesn't flow from the logic of the narrative, players will disconnect from the story. Actions are how the story is told, so retheme as necessary to produce the best experience. 

Why are they trying to achieve a certain goal? Why are they going about it that way? Goals and the methods used to achieve them should make narrative sense. It should be clear why the characters want what they want and why they employ the methods that they use. Either through the types of actions available to a character, their special power, or flavor text, let players know what the character values. A character's values give insight into why the character is trying to achieve a certain goal. I talk more about character motivation in this post. 

When & where is this happening? Setting is very important for providing context clues to players about the game world. Players can use their existing knowledge of a genre or time period or location to fill in some of the gaps in worldbuilding. This means that your chosen setting can also provide an experience you don't want players to have. For example, Puerto Rico's setting combined with the brown colored discs suggests that the players are slave owners, even if the game makes an effort to deny that fact. Changing the setting to occur after slavery was abolished is much more effective than simply trying to name the discs. 

Playtesters, especially those who have been in the hobby awhile, are quick to give feedback about mechanics but not narrative. You may have to ask what they thought of the story of the game. I would give a two sentence explanation of the game world prior to playing the game, then see if their experiences mesh with your vision of what the story is. As a designer, you likely see all the background worldbuilding that may not be apparent to the average player. 

When I design, I want to feel invested in my PC's goal. I want to care about the main task and actions of the game. "Why should I care?" is the question I ask most often in the early design process, before things like balance come into play. If I can nail down the emotional core of the game, the rest will follow eventually. I'm amazed by designers who think that any theme can fit any game. I believe that going forward, we will see a rise of themes strongly knitted to mechanics. And if you don't learn how to design theme, you will get left behind. 

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

Defining Conflict

There is a trend in the hobby of people calling for more development of conflict-free games. This leaves me a little baffled. In some cases, I think what is happening is a mismatch of terms—my definition of conflict is not the one they are using. In other cases, I believe there is a desire for games that deliver experiences that I am not sure analog games are capable of providing. So, what is conflict? What kinds of conflict are found in board games? What would a conflict-free game look like? 

Conflict exists when something or someone stands between you and your goal. Any obstacle is a form of conflict. Conflict creates tension and urgency. Overcoming conflict creates feelings of achievement and satisfaction. If we look at the eight types of fun, conflict relates directly to challenge and indirectly to narrative and expression (and you could argue fantasy, fellowship, and discovery also benefit from the existence of conflict). Challenge is the enjoyment we get by striving with/overcoming obstacles. To be conflict-free, a game would need to lack challenge. Expression is the enjoyment we get from creating or expressing ourselves. The primary conflict found in expression is inner conflict. My inhibitions, skill level, and imagination provide limits and obstacles to my ability to express myself. My argument for fantasy, fellowship, and discovery is that conflict adds a sense of purpose (and drama) to our make believe, our social interactions, and our exploration. And then there is narrative. 

Narrative conflict (in literature) has long been divided into around a half-dozen types. Narrative conflict is stated as person or character vs. the source of conflict. The types are as follows: character vs. self, character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. supernatural/fate/god, character vs. technology, and character vs. society. The existence of narrative conflict provides characters with the impetus for action and gives meaning to the action. A story without a conflict is a story without a plot.* In board games, conflict-free themes can seem at odds with the win condition, can seem pasted-on, or can seem half-baked where the players don't fully know why they are taking the actions of the game. (Assuming that the game contains challenges but the theme attempts to be conflict-free.)

In video games we find another way to designate conflict: player vs. player (PvP), player vs. the environment (PvE), and various combinations of the two (PvPvE, PvEvP). These terms let players know who is the antagonist, aka who is trying to kill you—the game or other players or both. These terms are relegated to only a few specific types of video games. 

By comparing how conflict is described in literature and video games to how conflict exists in board games, we can create terms for the main modes of conflict. There are three main types of player conflict in board games:

Player vs. Self—This could be expressed by players trying to beat their high score/best time or by players accessing their creativity/self-expression. This conflict is most prominent in party games and some solo games, but exists in games where there are avenues for creative expression within the components and rules, such as engine builders. There is often tension between players' creativity and optimal scoring, which may or may not be a desirable trait in a game. 

Player vs. Game—This is the challenge the game poses to the player. Almost all games have this conflict to an extent (and to the extent that what we consider a game is something with rules that restrict our freedom of choice). But we see this conflict most prominently in solo games, cooperative games, and multi-player solitaire games. A subset of this conflict is player vs. time, where is game imposes time constraints on the players. 

Player vs. Player—This exists whenever a subset of players can defeat other players. This conflict is magnified by direct player interaction, especially negative player interaction. 

So far, we have seen that several types of fun generate or benefit from conflict and that types or styles of gameplay can provide different types of conflict. Now let's look at the intersection of theme and game structure: the win condition. Specifically in this case, what or why are we trying to win? Some games, even thematic games, don't provide a reason for why you want to win. However, most games have at least one of the following three goals.

Beat your opponent(s) in a competition—If there are victory points in a game, it is likely a competition. Races are also competitions. Earning the most money is a competition. Does the game measure your performance against other players? It's a competition. To double down on the theme, many games explicitly state that player characters are thematically challenged to a competition with their peers. Competitions can be team-based or against a game AI. 

Destroy or eliminate your opponent(s)—Most games with player elimination (or that end when one player is reduced to 0) have this type of victory condition. However, you could be destroying NPCs controlled by a game AI (and vice versa). In team-based games, one team may win when all (or a majority of) members of the opposing team are eliminated, such as in Werewolf. 

Outlast your opponent(s)—This is much more rare. Here, you are not actively fighting other players. Instead the focus is surviving what the game throws at you. The goal is to continue to be able to play after other players have failed. I can't think of a tabletop game that does this, although I'm sure there are some (maybe in the dexterity genre?). Dance marathons from the first half of the 20th century fall into this category, as does that car contest where you have to keep your hand on the car for the longest. 

Now let's return to the question of what a conflict-free game would look like. I posit that a conflict-free game would have no win condition. The prospect of winning (and especially losing) generates conflict. Likewise, challenge generates conflict; so conflict-free games cannot be challenging, to the extent that it cannot present difficult or meaningful decisions. Self-expression can generate internal conflict, so that's a no go. Narrative is largely defined by the conflict of obstacles that get between a character and their goals. Yes, I am saying that a conflict-free game can't have story-telling or much in the way of creativity. What kind of game are we left with?

RPGs provide some interesting options if all you want is a game without competition or a win condition. However, due to their narrative nature, all RPGs contain some form of conflict. For conflict-free games, I think we have to look at video games. The types of fun least associated with conflict are sensation and submission. A game that delights the senses (honestly, that's optional) and functions as a rote pastime with goals and rules but no obstacles other than the time commitment to playing is a game that is truly conflict-free. Video games that focus primarily on 'grinding' or 'farming' stand out as exemplars of submission-focused games. Other games that fit this category are Candyland and bingo, because they lack challenge, expression, and narrative, even though they have win conditions. Indeed, bingo is an example of a submission focused game that also has a high degree of fellowship. 

It is possible to want a conflict-free game, but also to think that my description of what that looks like sounds boring. I think here is where we find the mismatch of definitions. When people talk about conflict they may be referring to violence, domination, artificial scarcity promoting needless competition, an us vs. them mentality, antagonism, or just an unhealthy obsession with winning. Games can be free of all of these things but still have conflict. The conflict found in an educational game may be around the obstacles of learning the concepts rather than winning. Overcoming obstacles is often a learning process and learning usually involves overcoming obstacles. Also, as we have seen, the conflict in a game does not have to come from pitting players against each other. By understanding what conflict is, we are better able to carefully craft the sorts of conflict found in our games. 

I believe that board (and card) games are best suited to challenge-related conflict. Games create space for us to model overcoming obstacles and failing safely. Games let us practice how to respond to conflict. Conflict is just another tool we use when designing games. Instead of blaming the tool, let's learn how we can be more proficient in its use. 

*I'm coming from a western point of view. There are other ways to think about literature. However, I think that my broader point about how the types of fun intersect with conflict still stands. 

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

Mechanics Roundup: Roll & Write

It has been over six months since I've written a post purely about mechanics. (We're not counting the recent theming actions/structures/strategies series, because in my mind those posts are about theme.) This is a mechanics roundup post, my second, that takes a deep look at the mechanisms that that can crop up in certain areas of game design. This post is all about roll & writes. 

I'm not an expert in the roll & write genre; I simply haven't played that many. But I find their ever-branching development to be fascinating. So, while this post will be far from comprehensive, I want to break down some of the mechanisms that crop up in the roll & write genre. 

Sometimes called random & write, the umbrella genre breaks into two halves: dice (true roll & writes) and cards (flip & writes or draw & writes or draw & draws). The genre is largely defined by the random or semi-random accrual of resources and logging those resources on a personal player sheet (or more rarely a communal board). I'm using the word resources in the broadest possible sense to include roads and buildings and geographical features (or merely numbers that must be logged in a certain order) as well as items we more traditionally think of as resources. In theory, any sort of randomizer could be substituted for dice or cards. Sonora is a flick & write, using dexterity as a semi-randomizer. Acquiring resources in a way that is not at all random, however, would likely fall beyond the boundaries of this genre. For instance, I have a game that involves flipping cards to obtain resources, but the cards are laid out in a grid and the players always know what is on the reverse side of each card. I joke that the game is a flip & write, but the main mechanisms are action drafting and blocking. On the other side of the coin, games that don't involve marking on a board or sheet also tend to not be included in the genre, even if they have all the other hallmarks of a roll & write. Era: Medieval Age claims to be a roll & build, because the game takes elements previously seen in roll & writes but eschews drawing in favor of placing plastic buildings on a board. 

Now that we know the minimum requirements for a game to be a random & write, let's take a closer look at common mechanisms found in the genre. There is a great variance of mechanisms within random acquisition beyond whether the game uses dice or cards. Here are some of the more prominent ones— 

Bingo: Every player must allocate 100% of the resources revealed. The only choice presented is how players choose to allocate the resources. This mechanism is used with both dice and cards, sometimes with both at once. Players are almost always allocating resources simultaneously to their personal boards. (Let's Make a Bus Route subverts this by having the revealed resource card translate into different actions for each player which are then carried out on a common board.) 

Simultaneous pooled resource selection: This is a variant of bingo. Every player must choose a subset of the resources revealed. There may be restrictions on how resources are chosen. Play is still simultaneous and resources do not diminish. This adds increased variance between player boards. Again, this mechanism uses dice, cards, or both. I haven't seen this done with a shared board, but it seems more possible than simple bingo. Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw showcases how using this mechanism with cards can add strategic tension by having two different decks that get added to the pool each round.

Drafting: Players select a subset of resources from a pool and those resources are no longer available to other players. Acquisition is therefore turn based. Allocation may also be turn based, especially if there is a shared board. First player may rotate from round to round to make drafting more fair. This mechanism could use cards or dice but is unlikely to have both. Cards are more likely to be drafted from a pool rather than pick-and-pass, largely because simple, fast acquisition is a hallmark of the genre. (Combos in R&Ws usually come from how resources are allocated, not how they are acquired.) Let's Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game sits somewhere between drafting and pooled resource selection; the first player chooses three dice and the second player chooses one. 

Yahtzee: On their turn, the active player rolls a pool of dice up to three times, selecting some dice to save after each roll. Play is turn based; resources are not shared. This mechanism offers the most choice per turn but also the most instances of randomness. As far as I know, there is not a game that attempts a Yahtzee mechanism with cards or on a shared board. If you're looking on BGG for this mechanism, it is listed as 're-rolling & locking.' 

Resource allocation mechanisms fall broadly into two categories: set collection and spatial placement— 

Set collection almost always requires a personal board to mark off resources that have been collected. Completed sets usually offer bonus points and/or single special abilities that allow players to trigger combos. Set collection mechanisms encourage players to push their luck by penalizing collecting too much of a resource. Players are more likely to mark off resources by ticking a box than draw them as icons. The trait that won me over for R&Ws is that you are not limited to the number of resource chits that can fit in a box. You can put thirty different resources on a single sheet and still have a small, affordable game. Generally, large numbers of resources are going to fall into set collection and not have a spatial element. 

Spatial placement typically uses a grid that may have preprinted features and/or coordinates that restrict placement. Spatial placement mechanisms focus on adjacency and connection. They create tension by allowing players to paint themselves into a corner. Players are more likely to draw resources than mark them off, although grids of preprinted resources combine elements of set collection and spatial placement. Spatial placement mechanisms really took off with the advent of map-building games that combine route-building or city-building with terrain-building. These games produce visual artifacts as the result of play that can be quite aesthetic, especially compared to the spreadsheet look of most R&Ws. 

Many spatial placement games have set collection aspects to them such as Harvest Dice, which has players drawing vegetables in a garden plot. In Harvest Dice, adjacency restricts where you can plant but scoring is determined by sets of vegetables and their market value. Games can also combine both set collection and spatial placement as separate ideas in the same game. In Let's Make a Bus Route, players use spatial placement to build routes on a shared board. The routes collect secondary resources (riders) that are marked off on a personal player board. Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade combines set collection and spatial placement by making the sets only reachable thru various spatial rules (mostly involving implied gravity). Layering resource allocation mechanisms can provide additional tension and depth of play at the cost of making the game more complex. 

Both simultaneous resource selection/acquisition and simultaneous allocation are hallmarks of R&Ws. This keeps the games feeling fast and breezy even when players are making tense decisions because there is virtually no downtime between turns. Personal player boards facilitate simultaneous actions but prevent most player interaction. R&Ws are efficiency puzzles; most have a set number of rounds or end when a player has filled a certain portion of their board. Player interaction may not be particularly desirable, as players are likely to be focused on their own puzzle. 

None of this is prescriptive, however. As the genre continues to iterate and expand, some games (like Era: Medieval Age) will fall outside the bounds of what is considered a R&W. Other games, like Sonora, are considered within the genre, even as they push the limits of what it means to be a random & write. Genres work best as ways of descriptively grouping things, and pushing boundaries is often how new genres are created. Since this genre has such a simple format, it provides a lot of opportunity for creative mechanisms, because almost anything goes. Is there luck? Do you draw or write? If yes, you're good to go. 

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

Dealing with Doldrums

The last few weeks on this blog have seen a lot of high effort (for me) posts that required a decent amount of research. In addition, I was working on a deadline to submit a game to a publisher. Now that I'm past the deadline and between series, so to speak, it seems like a good time to write about something I've had lurking in my idea book for six months. In this post, I want to talk about design doldrums. 

There is a lot of information to be found online about imposter syndrome. And Dunning-Kruger. Threaded around these topics you'll discover discussions about how long it takes to become competent in a new skill or how you develop good taste before you develop good execution. And that comes close to what I think the doldrums are. 

For me, being in the doldrums is existing in a gap between your experience and your achievement combined with what I'll call a leveling up problem. When you first learn a new skill, the early concepts come faster and easier than when you hit the doldrums. In the doldrums, your early excitement is replaced by a certain amount of tedium. Skills become harder to build. The shine of novelty wears off. This is the leveling problem. You feel as though you aren't progressing as quickly as in your early days as a designer. On top of that, you may have achieved something you're proud of but can't announce due to the delay of publishing cycles. That's the achievement gap. As far as you're concerned, you have moved from hobbyist to professional, but no one will likely see the fruits of your labor for the next three years. Meanwhile, you have to keep designing and pitching like you deserve to be in this space. (See the connection with imposter syndrome?) 

So many designers exist are in the gap between knowing how to design a good game and getting recognition as being good designers. This seems to be when many designers give up and quit. Which is completely understandable, given that for some designers the doldrums last years stretching into decades. So what can be done about it? 

Step one: figure out why you design. If your why has to do with accolades, your energy could be spent elsewhere. If you want recognition, become a community organizer, which the hobby always needs more of. If your why is making something that can bring joy to others or is stretching design concepts in experimental ways, you're on the right track. Your why should drive your activity. 

Step two: push yourself like an athlete. You've got the basic skills. You have to practice, but also seek out more advanced training. That can look like playing games by respected designers who design in a style different from yours, playtesting with more experienced designers in the industry, or creating design teams with your peers to help push each other onward. It also looks like designing with a regular schedule, rather than only when inspiration hits. 

Step three: move the goal posts. Film actors have to learn to define success as getting an audition instead of getting cast in a role, because otherwise the rejection rate would be too much. Publisher interest is a more reasonable goal than a signed contract. When you research publishers, shoot for submissions that are so targeted that if even one publisher responds you have a good response rate. I like my response rate to be between 1-in-3 to 1-in-6. If you can't get a constructive response after six submissions, find someone who can give you honest feedback with an industry perspective. Maybe the game isn't viable as a product or maybe your submission package just needs work. 

Step four: celebrate your victories. Maybe you were selected for speed pitching, but no contracts resulted from the event. You still had face time with a bunch of publishers. Maybe you had one game signed but struggle to get a second. Don't move the goal posts to published games just because it happened once. Every handshake, every elevator pitch is a victory. If you can't accept this perspective, go back to step one. 

I have very mixed feelings about fora that ask you to post weekly progress. Sometimes progress is small or even intangible. Sometimes talking about it could kill the fragile momentum you've built. And looking at others' responses can make you feel like you're falling behind. You'll know if those types of posts help you or not. But keep a private list, one that tracks your victories and lays out your goals. Remember, awards don't belong on the goals list. Find joy in the process. 

The doldrums are hard. I am definitely in the experience/achievement gap, and I am definitely not taking all of my own advice. But I am working on it. Moving step by step to a place where I can design steadily for years to come. Every day can be a victory against the doldrums. 

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

Playable Character Roles

This post spun out of ideas I had while working on my recent post about game structures. In this post I want to look at different roles players take on when playing a game. 

When developing themes alongside mechanics, an important question to ask is "Who is the player playing as?" Most, but not all, games benefit from an explicit answer to that question. 

The Hero is probably the first role most people think of. Hero characters may be solo acts (especially in competitive or solo games), team members (such as in cooperative games), or faction leaders (skirmish and civ games). This role requires that you know who you are playing and that that role is in some way unique from the other players. Characters may have different stats or powers, but different portraits can be enough of a distinction. Unique jobs can also be enough. If the job is carpenter and every player is playing the same nameless, faceless carpenter, that job will not make players feel like they are the hero of their story. However, being the only stone mason in the village is enough detail to become invested in the inner life of a character. And in fact, most games where players play only one character will provide some detail about the characters. Furthermore, a character is not always a person, sometimes your 'character' is a corporation. As long as a corporation has a unique logo and/or player power, it still qualifies as a hero role. (Although you should design with the implications of making a corporation the hero in mind.)

The Baddie could be a villain character or a traitor character. Villains are bad from the outset while traitor characters often switch sides at some point during the game. Villains, as a role distinct from heroes, are opposed to the majority of players, such as in one-vs-all games. To be a villain, the character must be competing against the other characters in a way those characters are not competing against each other. Villain roles usually give their players more information or exclusive information that is hidden from the other characters, such as in hidden movement games. Narratively, this gives the role a 'plotting' air. Often villain roles require a player to curate the experience for the other players, rather than playing as competitively as possible. Villains need the same level of detail that heroes do in order for players to invest in them as characters. A villainous character could still fill the role of hero, if they are not uniquely opposed to the other characters. I wrote an entire post about villainous characters in games, so I won't spend much time on them here. 

The Squad could be a team or a population. In this situation, the player is playing as multiple characters. In many cases, these games have an implied boss character (a Boss) or an explicit leader (a Hero). However, in games like Flame Rouge or Quest for Eldorado you can definitely make the case that while the player has god-level control and knowledge in the game, the characters in the story are presumed to have free will. This is easier to do if the characters have separate goals or trajectories that can narratively imply independent decision making. 

The Boss could be a business manager, a general, or even a deity, depending on what makes sense in the fiction. This role is what happens when you don't specify a hero character, but the minion characters clearly don't have free will.  This is common in worker placement games and asymmetrical games, among others. If a manager, general, or deity has a named role and card art, that technically makes them a hero (or villain) character and not a boss. The boss is a meta explanation for why the player has total control over a number of characters. 

Blind Forces falls somewhere between the hero and the boss. Players may be told who they are, but who they are is a force of nature, law of physics, or a philosophical idea. Players may be mechanically distinct from one another, but won't have much in the way of character background. (Personified forces with character portraits would be heroes.) Storytelling can get tricky around blind forces, as players won't have discernible in-world motivation to defeat other players. An example is Petrichor, where players play clouds who have a preference in what plants their water grows. 

Unspecified Roles are sometimes the best options. Sometimes, the implications of the role take your world building in a direction you don't want it to go. For example, if you try to figure out who you are playing as in A Fistful of Meeples, you may come to the conclusion that you are an Old West mobster extorting a town. Instead, the game wisely doesn't try to explain why you benefit from both arrests and robberies. Other times, the most logical explanation is either boring or doesn't add much to the game. I think of these as 'filing clerk' roles. An example is Space Base, where your role is specified in the rules fluff and never again—because you are a garage attendant for a space station. Obviously, the boss is a type of unspecified role, but one that most players could intuitively explain after playing your game. Lastly, one type of unspecified role is when players are playing above the narrative. Players will sometimes take on the role of 'player doing a mechanical action' that is not tied into the theme. Because the action is not tied into the theme, the role is not either. 

Roles are a huge aspect of world building. Mechanically, roles provide logic for player actions. Thematically, roles allow players to invest in their characters. Roles should be consistent with the logic of your world building. 

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

Theming Player Strategies

In the past couple of posts, I have discussed actions and structures in games and how to think about designing them thematically. You may want to read those posts first. In this post, I'm going to talk about incorporating player strategies into your theme. Shoutout to my omni-gamer husband (and several friends) who helped me come up with this list of strategies. 

Player strategies are emergent styles of gameplay that ideally lead to having a shot at winning the game. Games consist of goals and obstacles, and strategies are how players attempt to overcome obstacles to reach a goal. Stories are also made up of goals and obstacles and characters who strive with them. Notably, in acting the term tactics is used to describe the ways an actor relates to goals and obstacles within a scene. So it makes sense when designing a thematic game to consider the mechanical strategies as thematic opportunities. Probably the easiest way to handle theming strategies is to design different player powers that lean into different strategies and give each power a specific character who has a motivation for behaving that way. Another way would be to have thematic endgame achievements for employing certain strategies. When playtesting, observe the types of strategies used and see if you can develop in-world reasons for characters behaving that way. To help you on your way, I have compiled a list of player strategies (and a few tactics) that you might encounter or purposely design into your game. I've tried to focus on non-degenerate strategies, although some of these are borderline depending on how they interact with your specific design. I've tried to group similar things together and have had to invent a number of names. Let me know if there are common strategy names I have missed. I've grouped the strategies into optimization, misdirection, defense, and timing categories. For other ways to shape character/player motivation and strategy, read this article from Games Precipice. 

• Optimization strategies break into two overall types: positive and negative. Most games have at least one type of optimization strategy. 

Positive Optimization is getting the highest possible value from each of your turns. Often games that encourage positive optimization won't contain other viable strategies. And when there are other strategies they can feel out of place, like take that in a resource management game. Examples of positive optimization include drawing extra cards, maximizing resource production, selling high, and timing payouts to buy low. Positive optimization is usually found in efficiency puzzles or cycles. Themes that blend well with positive optimization include almost any type of technology or production, including farming. 

Negative Optimization is the strategy of reducing the scope your opponent's options for their turn. Both positive and negative optimization are a form of 'action economy,' a term I learned from Matt Colville's YouTube channel. Colville uses action economy to describe combat balance in Dungeons and Dragons, which dovetails nicely with negative optimization. This isn't merely a 'take that' strategy. Rather this strategy is mostly found in PvP or PvE games, where you can kill/damage/capture something that your opponent uses to generate actions. The simplest example is a squad-based skirmish game, where if you kill off some of the opposing forces, their options become more limited on their turn. However, casting a slow spell or imposing some other condition has a similar effect of worsening the action economy of your opponent. A scorched earth strategy would be an extreme form of negative optimization. Negative optimization is almost exclusively found in open conflict games, although Citadels is a covert conflict game that has two roles in the base game that negatively impact other players' action economies. Themes should be amenable to conflict; in the case of Citadels the negative optimization roles are assassin and thief, which are thematically appropriate. 

The following strategies are subtypes of positive and/or negative optimization strategies. 

Raising the Floor is a type of positive optimization that involves improving your base economy or statistics. This strategy centers improvement and long term goals over short term gains. An example is moving up the income track in Space Base. Themes for raising the floor could be economic in nature or emphasize mechanical or physical improvements (like going to the gym to raise your strength score). 

Specialization is focusing on a single path within a game. It is often a style of positive optimization, but sometimes players may want to specialize for reasons other than optimization (especially in games where specialization isn't the best path to victory). This strategy could also be negative optimization if used to cut other players off from a type of resource. Specialization allows players to identify with their character's career, such as 'pig farmer' or 'cloth merchant.' Roles, objectives, or achievements can further allow players to invest in their character's business successes (or failures). 

'A Boat in Every Port' is optimization by way of spreading out your forces. This is the opposite of specialization. While most likely positive optimization, it could be a negative optimization strategy by taking resources or opportunities before your opponents can. Rarely will spreading out result in total dominance, rather this approach often gets rewarded when coming in second enough times allows for a cumulative first place finish, for example in Pandemic: Contagion. This strategy may also put pressure on other players to go after opportunities before they planned, which could put them off balance.  Business related themes (like market penetration) work well here, as do more abstract concepts like viral spread (of either kind of virus). 

Denial is a form of negative optimization built around neutralizing your opponents powers. This strategy takes its name from Magic: The Gathering. Counterspell, take that mechanics, and blocking are all forms of denial. Themes can emphasize defensiveness or battlefield control powers for characters that make use of denial strategies. 

• Misdirection strategies seek to signal to your opponent that you aren't a threat and can be safely ignored. Games with covert conflict benefit from misdirection strategies. 

'Keep Your Head Down' is a strategy of quietly earning points or completing objectives in such a way that no one notices when you take the lead. While this can manifest as players being physically quiet, mechanically it can look like un-flashy play styles and gradual progress. This strategy is often seen in games with open conflict but alternate win conditions. In King of Tokyo, the player who goes after victory points rather than damage can sometimes eke out a surprise victory if other players aren't paying attention. However, like in King of Tokyo, going for gradual points may be the least thematic part of a design. While it would make the tone of the game darker, the rolling for victory points strategy in King of Tokyo could have been themed around eating bystanders: the more you eat, the more points you get. While this strategy crops up in other styles and structures of games, it's more likely to be an 'above the table' strategy of keeping quiet if there isn't an alternate win condition involved. 'Keep your head down' blends well with diplomatic or pacifist themes when in conflict games. 

Intentional Underdog is a strategy of hanging back behind the leader. This could be to take advantage of catch-up mechanics or to avoid getting ganged up on by other players. Intentional underdog is distinct from 'keep your head down,' because 'keep your head down' is about getting ahead while no one notices, but intentional underdog is about artificially putting on the brakes to stay out of the lead. Theming your catch-up mechanics and placement bonuses and penalties could give players in-character reasons for employing this strategy.  

Sandbagging is when a player hoards resources only to convert them into points at the last possible moment. When a player sandbags, their true standing in the game is obscured for most of the game. In this strategy the player is never truly behind, but appears so. Sandbagging is more common in resource management games while intentional underdog is more common in conflict games, but there is a certain amount of overlap. Sandbagging may be undesirable in a game, in which case limits can be placed on the amount of resources that can be hoarded. But if the strategy is desirable, themes of stockpiling, hoarding, or misers (or dragons) would be appropriate. 

Social Leveraging is a meta-strategy of convincing your opponents that you aren't a threat through persuasion, cajoling, pleading, etc. The meta-strategy of not drawing attention to yourself in 'keep your head down' falls into social leveraging. Mechanics such as bluffing, negotiation, and trading require players to employ a certain amount of social leveraging. Social leveraging benefits from themes where characters have in-world reasons to talk to one another. 

• Defense strategies are about protecting yourself and your possessions. While negative optimization focuses on slowing your opponent, defensive strategies focus on dealing with hindrances and penalties that come your way. 

Turtling focuses on defensive measures at the expense of everything else. This can end up looking very similar to sandbagging, except that turtling is fairly exclusive to open conflict games. If this strategy is desirable, you could theme a faction around paranoid isolation or a history of getting invaded. 

Weatherproofing is the strategy of always having enough resources to cover possible penalties on top of what you need for regular gameplay. (This strategy could also be called 'feeding your family' after the mechanic in Agricola.) Weatherproofing is usually less extreme than sandbagging and has a different motivation. Themes could emphasize a character's foresight, prudence, wisdom, or even community care. 

Taking the Hit is the opposite of weatherproofing. (You could think of it as 'starving your family.') This strategy could be employed in resource games with penalties or in open conflict games. In covert conflict games you could 'take one for the team' by getting eliminated to draw suspicion off of another team member. Themes could emphasize a character's willingness to sacrifice or toughness or fearlessness. 

Cutting Your Losses focuses on retreating from a battle so as not to lose the war. This strategy is found in open conflict games, but also in games with betting, push your luck, or market investments. Themes could emphasize a character's business savvy, strategic brilliance, or inability to stay the course. 

• Timing strategies and tactics are about choosing your moment or window in order to succeed. Timing strategies are so in the moment and often brief that you could also consider them tactics. 

Rushing the Objective focuses on achieving a goal before your opponents have time to fully power up. It is the opposite of sandbagging. This strategy undercuts attempts at optimization but is risky because there is usually a narrow window before a game ramps up. This strategy can be deployed in any sort of point scoring game where players control when the game ends. It can also be found in open conflict games where a player may attempt to wipe out all other players before more advanced units can be unlocked. Rushing could lead to specialization where a player has a monopoly on a resource. Themes could emphasize hastiness or greed. 

'No, After You' is a delaying tactic that attempts to force one of your opponents to take the undesirable choice. This is the strategy that occurs late in every round of Azul. This strategy also occurs in competitive games with global threats where all players could lose. Themes could emphasize cooperation/selfishness, market forces, or the downsides of pioneering/innovation. 

Hail Mary is a tactic of attempting to pull out a victory from the jaws of defeat. This tactic can help players feel like they still have a chance at winning, but if it succeeds too often games will feel overly random. If you have a deus ex machina card in your game, try to tie it into your theme. (Imagine, for example, if the 'You Win' card in Space Base had a theme.) 

If the actions of a game constitute the plot elements, then player strategies are how the story gets told. A fully integrated theme will take into account how the game is played and not just what comes in the box. So much of the experience of playing a game comes from deploying different strategies. It just makes sense to consider those strategies when designing your theme. 

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

Theming Game Structures

Different mechanical game structures lend themselves to different types of stories. There is a reason that most dungeon crawlers look and feel similar. Understanding how high level structure impacts storytelling can help you design themes that feel organic to the game. In this post I outline six categories, but those categories can be combined in different ways to produce distinct, interesting games. I divide these categories less on how mechanically distinct they are from one another and more on how they feel and what types of themes fit well with them (especially when looking at the first two). Any themes and mechanisms listed are just common ones to get you started and should not limit you from exploring other ideas that might fit with the experience of play. 

1. Solving a Puzzle

This category could potentially be divided into two categories: puzzles with a set of single answers and efficiency puzzles that could have multiple right answers. I've lumped them together because I find that figuring out the best answer feels similar across multiple genres (when you control for the emotional experience of the theme). Single solution puzzle structure encompasses logic puzzles, deduction, code-breaking, and other terms that are basically synonyms. Efficiency puzzle structures includes bingo-style mechanisms and time/resource management. These two substructures can be frequently found in the same game. Puzzle-solving structures lend themselves to mystery stories, detective stories, and horror stories, but also stories about hackers, cryptographers, and code-breakers. Efficiency puzzles are frequently structured around expanding power and options, diminishing choices, or sometimes both. Try to match your theme to the dynamics present in the puzzle. Stories about players trying to survive/outlast what the game throws at them could lean into either substructure or both. Themes that don't benefit from a feeling of 'running out of time' will fail to tap into the full potential of puzzle-solving structures. 

2. Cycles

On the surface, cyclical structures can look a lot like efficiency puzzles, but I think they lend themselves to very different stories. Cyclical structures contain repeating events that lead into one another. Cyclical structures rely heavily on timing, but in a vastly different way from puzzle-solving structures. Cycles demand that you tactically take advantage of certain game states at just the right moment, but may not lead to the 'running out of time' feeling of puzzle-solving structures. Because events will recur again and again, cyclical games feel less hurried and pressured. However, they still require an emphasis on efficiency to play well. Traits of cyclical structures include intermittent scoring, multiple phases, set collection, and engine building. Cycles may be player dependent like the seasons in Everdell or they may be global like the ages in 7 Wonders. Keep in mind that a game could be an efficiency puzzle and cyclical. I wouldn't describe a game with two distinctly different halves as cyclical, although either or both halves could be cyclical. Cyclical structure lends itself to themes such as natural systems (like life cycles or weather), industrial systems, generational storytelling, and cooking. Any theme that lends itself to templates or formulas (especially if a character might do it multiple times in a row) works well in a cyclical game. I have a prototype about writing songs that includes set collection and intermittent scoring where timing concerns and limited resources give the experience of trying to creatively write on a deadline. Cyclical structures may be my favorite to design in. 

3. Race to Finish

'First past the post' can refer to victory conditions or to other goals within a game (or cycle/phase). This structure focuses on rewarding the player (or NPC) who meets a requirement first. Alternatively, race to finish structures can be used to qualify players for scoring, a form of endgame player elimination. Race to finish structures can be a layer added to other structures to increase the tension of gameplay. On its own, this structure often utilizes more randomness than other structures (except open conflict). Race to finish mechanics include dice-rolling, betting, ladder climbing, headwinds/tailwinds, and pawn movement mechanics. Themes that mesh well include competitions or contests, which of course includes actual races. If a theme emphasizes speed, race to finish is a good go-to structure. Cooperative games may have a race to finish oriented around a race against time or against the game AI. For a much more detailed examination of this structure, read this post from Games Precipice about late game structures. I should note that race to finish is either about the whole of the game or a goal within the game, whereas 'go the fastest' in the linked post is about the endgame state. One hallmark of race to finish games is that the momentum of the game is strongly focused on the objective/win condition.

4. Race to Fill

Race to fill structure is a race to expand or exploit. This structure pairs well with other structures that emphasize efficiency. Race to fill differs from race to finish in that the player who gets somewhere first may not be the winner but rather the player who does the most (similar to 'go the farthest' in the above linked post). This structure includes mechanisms such as area control, area majority, tile laying, city building, and set collection. Race to fill games create tension through scarcity of resources/space. Pick-up and deliver games can combine race to fill with race to finish and/or cyclical structure. Race to fill is often cyclical, but the addition of race to fill adds tension to cyclical games. Common themes in this structure include city planning, forest planting, territory conquest, exploration, and order fulfillment (such as a short order cook). 

5. Open Conflict 

Open conflict structures center on players giving and receiving damage from other players and/or the game. These are pretty much always fighting games although damage could be to anything, not just health. The defining aspect of open conflict is that objectives and sides are known by all players; damage is not done in secret. Open conflict games often have player elimination, alliances, and leveling up mechanics. Most 'take that' mechanics are forms of open conflict. Common themes are war, survival, and adventuring (or 'murder hobos' if you will). Open conflict can be cyclical, especially when using leveling up mechanisms. The danger of having open conflict as only one aspect of the game is that it will often feel like a separate mini game that interrupts the flow of the overall game. 

6. Covert Conflict

Covert conflict structures involve secrets: secret objectives or roles or teams or some combination of the above. Covert conflict also has player elimination, but often via vote instead of damage. In addition to player elimination and voting, common mechanisms include negotiation, bluffing, trading/deal-making, deduction, hidden movement, and traitors. Covert conflict games often fall in the party game adjacent category (social deduction, etc), but there have been larger games with an emphasis on covert conflict. Larger/heavier games are likely to combine covert conflict with other structures, especially open conflict. Bang! is an example of blended open and covert conflict. Themes commonly paired with covert conflict are spies and diplomats. Covert conflict usually contains a high social factor in gameplay, as a result the well-integrated themes of such games usually center on who the characters are and their interactions both mechanically and thematically. 

7. Special Hybrids: Pivot Points

Sometimes games have two distinct halves or phases, such as Bosk. These halves may have different structures, but the game controls when they occur. Other times, games have player-controlled pivots. Pivot points allow a game arc to have a distinct rising-action-pivot-falling-action arc. There are two very common pivot point structures: Grab the Treasure and Run and Reaping What You Sow. In 'grab the treasure and run,' the rising action is acquiring as many point scoring items as possible (usually an efficiency puzzle). After the pivot, players must move as quickly as possible to the zone that will allow them to score their loot (race to finish). These games usually center push your luck mechanics. In 'reaping what you sow,' the rising action is building up resources or an engine and the falling action is cashing in on your hard work. Deck builders and other engine building mechanics employ this type of pivot. Classic examples of these substructures are Clank! and Dominion. Done well, pivot points can make the story of a game come alive because their structure closely resembles narrative structure. Even when not well-integrated with theme, pivot points add excitement to gameplay.

Mechanisms suggest themes by their rhythm and structure and ability to create tension/excitement. Mechanisms also tend to gravitate to certain game structures. Themes might feel pasted-on if they aren't a good match for the game structure. There is a reason player elimination feels wrong in a multi-player solitaire style game. Analyze the games you have designed. What structures did you use? What structure are you drawn to most? I avoid open conflict, as a rule. I tend to design in the same structures as the games I enjoy playing. Because I enjoy designing cyclical games (which I think is the coziest structure), I tend to brainstorm game ideas around themes that employ templates, like cooking. When starting a new design, you could brainstorm by combining two structures then looking at what themes and mechanisms would work well together within those structures. 

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