Exposition and Denouement

While there are a number of ways to introduce your game world to players, I think some methods are both more straightforward than others while also more effective storytelling. In the previous post, I discussed using the introductory lore paragraph in the rulebook as an inciting incident for the narrative of gameplay. In this post, I'll be looking at using setup as exposition and scoring as denouement. (NB: I am assuming that setup includes at minimum a brief rules review.)

But first, why would we want an inciting incident before exposition? When we place the inciting incident in the lore paragraph in the rulebook, it functions similarly to a cinematic cut scene at the beginning of a video game. We get dropped into a dramatic narrative moment, then we pause to learn who we are and what we are doing. In a video game, this might happen in a tutorial level. In board games, often all we have is setup. 

How can setup function as exposition? Setup is when the game world is literally built on the table. You learn who you are, what you are good at, how much you possess. You learn your goals. Take Sheriff of Nottingham for example: The world is a line of carts waiting to get through a city gate. You have limited funds that you can use to bribe the sheriff. You have the goods you are bringing to market. The law prohibits the sale of contraband at the market, but a well-placed bribe could circumvent it. The Sheriff makes money either through bribes or penalties. All this is learned during setup. This is the game world; the player decides how honest they will be at the city gate. The inciting incident, as described in the rulebook, is that Prince John has placed the Sheriff at the gate to inspect all incoming goods. According to the lore paragraph, the merchants are overtaxed and trying to make a living and the Sheriff is greedy. Setup, rules, and gameplay all flow together to create a single story. 

Setup as inciting incident (something I mentioned in the last post) is trickier to pull off. It is harder to include important story moments while learning the rules of the game. Vengeance has an initial draft that functions as the inciting incidents for why the player characters want revenge. Importantly, the exposition of Vengeance is largely "you have seen these types of movies before; you know what to expect." When players have preexisting knowledge of a genre, designers can get away with less explicit exposition. To have inciting incidents in setup, the game should be strongly story driven and some element of setup should be variable. Otherwise, let the lore paragraph do the heavy lifting for you rather than drag out setup for the sake of story beats. The goal of the players will always be to get into the game quickly; don't stand in the way of that goal. 

Not all story-driven moments in setup can be inciting incidents, however. In my game, Deadly Dowagers, players choose a husband before the game starts. Different husbands grant different temporary benefits. However, the inciting incident is not the act of getting married, but the scene in the rulebook where a PC discovers an older woman who can set her on the path to becoming a deadly dowager. Choosing what character you will play or their starting gear is not an inciting incident. Inciting incidents must create motivation for characters to act out the actions of gameplay. 

Gameplay is made up of rising and falling action and turning points. (I've seen it argued that board games are all rising action. I disagree.) Before the game starts we can provide exposition and inciting incidents. What about denouement? (Read about story structure here if you aren't familiar with these terms.) Not all game structures need or can accommodate a denouement. However, games with post-game scoring can have the scoring phase integrated into the theme by treating the scoring phase as denouement. This is where Sheriff of Nottingham breaks down. Nothing in the game world explains why it is important or desirable or profitable to be the king or queen of apples. The bonus points are necessary for the mechanics to feel balanced. We can make inferences about the economy, but the extra steps needed to rationalize a game rule will make the game feel less thematic even if the theme can be justified. (I feel this maxim applies most glaringly to the 'thematic' nature of the drafting in Sushi Go!, whereas Sushi Roll does not require the extra steps of rationalization and thus feels much more like a conveyor belt sushi restaurant.) In the case of Sheriff, additional exposition could have been used to explain why the merchants wanted to sell a lot of one good. 

Regular scoring should tie directly to the players' main goal in the game. Bonus scoring should, where possible, make sense in the overall story. We should have an idea of what happens to a character in the immediate aftermath of the game: they won or lost a contest, they amassed wealth, they lost a war, etc. Board games are stories as snapshots; we won't know much about the lives of characters after a (non-narrative) game is over. But we should known how their position has changed from when the game began and what that might mean to them. 

A game begins at setup and ends when a winner is declared. Designers have opportunities to make their games more thematic simply by including the whole game in the theme. Every game tells a story and I want to see designers become better storytellers.  

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

Inciting Incidents

One of the most common pieces of design advice is to start the game when the turns get interesting. This is similar to the narrative concept of starting a story in medias res—in the middle of the action. If a game should begin mechanically when things get interesting, it only follows that the theme should as well. A well-knitted theme should begin with the same intensity as the mechanics. 

That doesn't mean that we can't have any exposition, however. The introductory paragraph in the rulebook gives us a chance to tell players what they are doing and why they are doing it. In general, rulebook lore is most effective when it gives context to gameplay. The entire history of your world is not only unnecessary but can be detrimental to the goal of giving players context for their actions. In other words, too much lore is as bad, or worse, than no lore. 

There are many ways of incorporating lore in rulebooks that will enhance player experiences, but I want to (again) focus on the introductory paragraph. Specifically, I want to look at one method for introductory paragraphs that meshes well with the game design advice described above: using inciting incidents. If we want games to start with rising action, one way to jump directly into the action on turn one is to have an inciting incident described in the rulebook. (Another way is to have the inciting incident occur during setup.) 

An inciting incident is the event at the beginning of a story that sets the main characters on the path that becomes the rest of the story. What caused the player characters to act in this way? Why are they in opposition (or cooperation) with the other characters? Ideally, you can also use the inciting incident to explain why the main characters want what they want. 

This is an especially good way to use snippets of fiction. Instead of an unconnected short story, an inciting incident scene at the beginning of the rulebook can propel players into the action of the game. The main caveat here is that the inciting incident should be about the characters that are in the game, not other characters in your lore and the incident should lead directly into the action of the game. The players won't be propelled into the action of the game if the lore does not directly apply to them and what they're doing. 

Inciting incidents are not the main action of the game, merely what sparks the action. As such, you really shouldn't need more that a couple paragraphs at most to set up the action of the game. Best case scenario, the player that reads the rulebook internalizes the reason for the action of the game and the motivation of the characters and relays all of that to the other players. In order for players to internalize the why of the action, the lore needs to be brief and to the point. Much in the same way that the theme provides logic for the mechanics, the introductory lore of the game should set up the logic of the theme. 

A pretty good example is So, You've Been Eaten. The title itself serves as exposition, providing the setting and tone of the game. The lore is styled as training propaganda for the employee character who mines the worms. This tells us who we are and why we are doing the actions in the game. The main thing we don't learn is why we would have signed up for this job to begin with. 

Inciting incidents can help us frame the narrative by showing what sparked the events of a game. By placing inciting incidents in the rulebook (or setup), we free up our games to start at the point when the action really gets going. Focusing introductory rulebook lore on inciting incidents keeps the lore focused on the action and motivation of the player characters. 

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

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.