The Heaviest Mechanism

What is the heaviest mechanism? I'd say there are a few clear contenders that all share similar traits. But I'd like to point out one mechanism that while not the absolute heaviest in existence is far more difficult than it gets credit for. 

Most of the 'heaviness' of games comes from how mechanics fit together—either their resulting rules overhead or their emergent strategy, depending on which you qualify as being heavy. Individual mechanics are generally pretty light, unless they require multiplication or division. The heaviness of strategy games generally comes from spinning a lot of plates. 

Ideally, each mechanism in board game design could be 1) performed on one turn and 2) explained with one line of text. But some mechanisms need context to reveal themselves. So, "pickup resources" and "deliver resources" combine to become something more distinct as "pickup and deliver." And mechanics that reveal themselves thru context cannot usually be explained by a single line of text. I classify these mechanics as inherently heavier. 

For my money, the various multi-phase auction mechanics are probably the heaviest mechanics currently in the BGG database (but I'm not combing thru all of them or even all of the auctions to give a definite winner). They require the context of multiple players over multiple bids before they can be understood. This in turn requires a more in depth rules explanation. (They also require implicit understanding of the value of items and a certain amount of mental math and probability tracking to strategize well.) 

The mechanic I want to bring to your attention is nearly as difficult: multi-turn, multi-player context is required. It requires a paragraph of rules text. It has certain unintuitive conditions that trip up new players. It's pick-and-pass drafting. 

Pick-and-pass drafting (here on out, drafting) is a mechanic that has to be described in full, across an entire round and often into the following round before players have full context of what they are doing, let alone why. Just telling them to "take one card and pass the hand to the left" leaves out what you do with the card you take and whether you can swap that card for a future card. I'm blaming Spoons for making drafting so difficult to teach. (At least with American players above a certain age.) In Spoons, you keep a hand and pass a single card. There is only one hand that is yours. In drafting you can have your tableau, your hand, and the hand of cards you are passing. Players have to be taught explicitly what cards they own, what are locked in place, what gets passed, what can be discarded. And then they have to not get those categories confused. Which is difficult because it's all the same deck of cards. How many times have you played Sushi Go! only to have a player run out of cards before everyone else? For me, it's every time. 

To add to the rules complexity, most drafting games have additional rules around the direction of the draft. Whether it's left-right-left or a snake draft, these rules add complexity to an already complex system. Then you get the 2-player variants, which require you to understand the original rules so you can know what to do differently. I play a lot of games 2-player on the first play, so this standard of rules writing is maddening. Give me the whole turn structure in the variant section. 

Designers tend to think of drafting as a simple mechanic. Then they add it to games to increase complexity (e.g. Terraforming Mars). As someone who has designed a drafting game, how we are using the mechanic is more in line with what drafting really is: a complexity adder. In my experience, drafting is heavier than engine building. Both require knowledge of all of the cards and what they do, but drafting requires that knowledge to be given beforehand since the draft isn't open the way placing a card on the table is. This is why card glossaries are necessary. I can hand the rules to a player and tell them to look up the card in their hand, rather than having to explain out loud what the card does. Pool drafting is inherently lighter because the drafting is open on the table but also because it can be explained as a single action. (For what it's worth, "I cut; you chose" is heavier than drafting—because you are predicting other players' wants—but is often open information.) 

Engine building generally doesn't generate player interaction (expect maybe when you run your engine). Drafting requires consideration around not only what you are keeping but what you are giving away. Not only do you have to understand all of the cards, but also their values at given points in the game and what your neighbor may find valuable based on what they have played thus far. We've racked up a lot of spinning plates for a single mechanism. 

We often assume that everyone in the hobby has played a drafting game. I have playtested with a lot of designers who had never played a drafting game. I rarely had a playtest where I didn't have to teach "how to draft." Drafting is by far the heaviest mechanic in my game. Even if you aren't designing a drafting game, be aware of how context creates complexity. The longer something takes to explain the heavier it is. Some gamers may come to your game with context pre-installed, but you can't count on that. 

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

A Close Look at Endowment Effect

I've been struggling with the endowment effect since around July 2018, but I didn't know what it was until a few months ago. Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk a lot about one of my designs in this post. 

Endowment effect is related to loss aversion. When you give a player something that is 'theirs' they will not want to give it up, even for something of greater value. You can deal with endowment effect in two ways: you can make it easier for players to progress by reducing the feeling of loss (by not taking their stuff or by not giving them stuff to begin with) OR you can ramp up the feeling of loss to create tension. Geoff Engelstein breaks these options down mechanically in Achievement Relocked. In his examples, the options above are presented to make a game feel more forgiving or less forgiving and that seems to correspond to lighter or heavier games. Which is a good starting place for understanding endowment effect. But I want to look at a third option: embracing endowment effect in lighter (or any) games as a way to drive home the theme. And I can really only do that by taking a close look at my upcoming game, Deadly Dowagers (signed and in development; not yet announced). 

Deadly Dowagers is a pick-and-pass drafting and tableau-building game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes. Players take on the roles of Victorian women who would kill to marry a Duke. 

When I invite players to join a game of Deadly Dowagers, the ones who agree are typically excited at the prospect of the theme: Victorian women killing their husbands to marry richer ones (rinse and repeat). But once they start playing they seem to have a change of heart. Why can't they just get a divorce, they ask. Or, they will stay married long after they should have 'ended things' in order to win the game. The second and third (and so on) husbands are usually dispatched much more quickly. What makes the first husbands special? Well, for one they are the first, but, more importantly, the first husbands are 'purchased' as a part of set up. They are your starting gear. And unlike items in digital RPGs, you have to get rid of one before you can upgrade to the next one. That by itself creates some feelings. But then you layer on the cultural context of the theme. You are married to that portrait on that card. That is your husband. Players already wouldn't want to give up starting gear that they are still actively using. Starting husbands are that much more emotionally charged. 

I think at this point I need to make clear that this is a light, fun game. This moment of tension in the early game isn't there for every player and doesn't seem to ruin the experience (for people who are willing to play a game with this theme to begin with). Still, some designers would try to avoid that negative feeling in a light game. Not me. I wish that feeling happened with every husband in the game. However, as it stands, the fact that the first murder is the hardest feels metaphoric of a descent into a life of crime. The player psychology and rhythm of gameplay feed into and reinforce the theme. Which is always my goal in game design. 

So, if you wanted to leverage endowment effect for emotional effect, how should you go about it? First you must give the players (or let them choose from a selection) something of value. This needs to be the only task occurring. In Deadly Dowagers, players make two choices during set up: which portrait represents them and which husband they want to marry. (Husbands cost a certain amount of your starting money. It's a dowry system.) Later husbands are married while players are juggling tableaus of property, larger amounts of cash, and other players who are at a different phase of the game. (Play is mostly simultaneous.) I would have to slow the game down a lot to recreate the first husband feeling. 

Layering value deepens the emotional experience. Importantly, husbands are of mechanical value but also thematic value as mentioned above. Scarcity is another way to add perceived value, even if the item doesn't have the largest intrinsic value. Making players pay for the item adds another layer of value. (Creating loss around something of cultural value also creates the sense of violating a taboo. I'd be careful about making that the goal of the game, but it works in Deadly Dowagers.)

Once players have something of value, that item must be pitted against an opportunity loss. Husbands have special powers while they are alive, but leave you fortunes when they die. Do you need the power more or the money? If you run out of money, you may have a dead turn because you will be unable to build your tableau. This tension is what makes the negative feelings about loss worth it. 

If you really want to ramp up the feeling, make the loss permanent and have consequences. Obviously, death is permanent in Deadly Dowagers and creates an emotional response. But players also have to juggle the infamy of having buried their husbands under "mysterious" circumstances. To drive this home, not only is there an infamy track, but players place dead husbands in a personal husband graveyard that generates infamy for the rest of the game. The husband cards don't return to the 'market' but are left in the tableau as a momento mori. This system creates immediate and delayed consequences which is both thematic and adds tension. 

Make the loss player-driven. Every round in Deadly Dowagers has a husband phase during which players can get married to or murder a husband. Or they could pass. The decision to advance is on the players. Making the choice deepens the emotion. Forcing the loss thru a regular event feels scripted which decreases the tension. Forcing the loss thru a random event feels arbitrary and bad. If you give players an out by forcing the loss or avoiding the loss, they will take it to avoid mechanics that make them even slightly uncomfortable. On the other hand, you can give your players the hope of a way out. There is one single card in all of Deadly Dowagers that kills your husband by natural causes. Players feel better knowing there is a chance that they could avoid the decision that makes them feel bad, even though they would see that card at most twice in a game (you need to kill four husbands on average). 

Be aware of the goal gradient effect. Players' motivation to achieve a goal increases as players near the goal. What this means for Deadly Dowagers is that the closer players get to the end of the game, the more  murder-for-profit takes precedence over any other consideration. Again, this plays into the narrative arc of a descent into a life of crime. It also means that endowment effect would be even harder to implement past the halfway or two-thirds point in the game. "This thing is mine" becomes increasingly less important over time compared to "reaching the goal." 

I didn't have a language for any of this when I designed my game. I stumbled into a dynamic that worked the way I wanted it to and leaned into it. If I had known about endowment effect, I would have spent less time banging my head against a wall trying to make every husband feel valuable and would have embraced the arc present in the game sooner. You don't need to know every design term to design a good game, but knowing why something works the way it does can prevent you from wandering down too many rabbit trails during the design process. 

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

Tools to Create Emotions

For this post, I'm combining some thoughts from Emotional Design, Achievement Relocked, these videos by Cogito Design, and my thoughts on resonance. 

I'm developing a list of tools and resources for ways to create emotions in players. I've divided the list into three sections: rhythm, transportation, and loss aversion. My thoughts on this subject are still evolving, so my categories may shift in the future. 

Rhythm sets the mood of a game. Rhythm is the feeling of a game's mechanics during play across the whole game. Turn structure, when a strategy pays off, the amount of randomness, etc. all impact the flow of a game. Setting the mood through mechanical flow primes players to have certain emotional experiences. Games can be casual activities, intense duels, exciting adventures, and each of those types of experiences relies on a different rhythm of play. Rhythm can also be used to create investment in a game. This video talks about anticipation arcs in games. A well-crafted sense of anticipation leads to investment and excitement. (Go watch the video, because there's too much for me to break down here.) Rhythm is also powerful because once established a rhythm can be broken. Unexpectedness creates surprise. A succession of surprises can inspire a sense of discovery, however each surprise is likely to be less individually impactful than a single major plot twist. Too many surprises could just lead to a game feeling overly random. Breaks in rhythm should be carefully crafted to build the desired emotional experience. 

Rhythm is mechanical. Let's take a look at theme. Transportation is what most people mean when they talk about immersion. In other words, transportation occurs when the theme 'transports' you into the world of the game. Role-play is one method that can lead to immersion, however it is not the only method. Role-play is generally an 'above the table' activity in board games. To encourage role-play, designers should focus on mechanics with player interaction that requires communication: bluffing, trading, cooperation, etc. Then, those mechanics have to be closely tied thematically to who the player is playing as. While both games have high player interaction, Sheriff of Nottingham does an excellent job encouraging role-play; Bohnanza does not. Either related to role-play or not, relationships add verisimilitude and emotional impact to games. How does a PC relate to the world around it? Worlds feel more real when characters are in relationship with the people and things around them. This is why Sheriff of Nottingham works so well. Every player knows what their relationship is to the other players in a given round. Simulative actions are more mechanical methods to create transportation. They are mechanisms that simulate a real activity (for example, the pointing mechanism in Ca$h 'n Guns). I've mentioned it before, but Gil Hova's player/avatar/agent model is an excellent look at how the relationship between theme and mechanics can affect player experiences if you want to explore this dynamic further. 

Loss aversion is a psychological and economic phenomenon that has a huge impact on board game design. At its heart, loss aversion is the tenet that players are more bothered by losing something than they are excited by gaining something. There's a lot to unpack here for game designers and I highly recommend reading Achievement Relocked. The elements that jumped out to me while reading the book were the ones that provoked certain specific emotions. Clear consequences, created when actions affect the story of the game, build tension and investment because players know what they stand to gain or lose based on their decisions. Obfuscated outcomes have fewer emotional hooks (which is sometimes desirable when trying to avoid the "feels bad" experience in players). Permanence is clear consequences taken to its logical conclusion. The appeal of legacy games comes from the "permanent" effect your decisions has on the game. (Permanence is one way to enhance transportation as well.) One way to signal clear consequences of a decision is by creating scarcity. Scarcity indicates what players should value. Gaining or losing something that has clear value creates a stronger emotional response. Lastly, the endowment effect is the "tendency to give something more value because it belongs to you." Players are loathe to give up something they've been given, even if doing so is how you advance in the game. I'm going to dedicate a whole, separate post to this concept, because I think it can be leveraged to create truly interesting emotional experiences. 

This is just a collection of the methods I've come across (mostly) recently that designers can use to craft emotional experiences. Obviously, I think this is a topic that deserves more focus in board game design. 

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

Creating Emotions in Players

I've been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman. This book is half a philosophical discussion of product design and half speculation about future technology. But the parts I found the most useful were the descriptions of how emotions result from and guide a user's interaction with a product. In this post, I am distilling out those emotional chain reactions (my term) and applying them to board game design. [NB: I'm not an expert on emotion and this information is not meant to be used outside of game design.] 

There are two main chains of emotions described in the book (although not as explicitly as I have depicted them here): the anxiety chain and the happiness chain (again, my own terms). The anxiety chain starts either with frustration or confusion.  Frustration can result from struggling to learn or to execute actions or from a sense of danger (such as the danger of losing). This type of frustration can be used to build tension in a gameplay arc. Frustration can also result from feeling a lack of control. Feeling a lack of control can lead to a lack of trust in the design. Frustration can lead to anxiety. Confusion should be avoided in game design, but will lead to a similar state of anxiety as frustration does. Anxiety causes increased concentration on the details of a problem. Anxiety produces focus. Focus is useful in heavy strategy games. High levels of anxiety can produce the desire for escape. These sensations can create fear. Fear, if overcome (or if the threat is overcome), produces pride and a sense of achievement. Players also feel pride in overcoming obstacles and refining their strategy. However, high anxiety coupled with lack of control will lead to anger. 

Notice that this chain of emotions is fairly linear, which mirrors the style of thinking created by this chain, which is marked by intense focus. Emotions in parentheses are the undesired emotions that can occur at the same point in the chain as more desirable emotions. I have extrapolated that struggle and danger are created by challenges and threats, which I include on my model. Also, this is more a look at how emotions progress and less how to create each emotion in the chain. I'll be writing more about creating emotion in future posts. 

There are some important things to note about anxiety chains. Too much frustration will drive away players. On the other hand, shared experience of these "negative" emotions can lead to increased social bonding—a positive outcome. Players in a state of anxiety will be less open to interruptions, as such prevent the concentration created by their anxiety. Humans are less able to learn while in a state of anxiety. Any new rules must be presented clearly and be easily referred back to. Anxiety chains seem best suited to intellect-challenging designs or horror-themed games.

Emotional Design helpfully includes a list of things that can produce feelings that belong in the anxiety chain: heights; sudden, unexpected loud sounds or bright lights; looming objects; extreme hot or cold; darkness; empty, flat terrain; crowded, dense terrain; crowds of people; rotting smells; decaying foods; bitter tastes; sharp objects; harsh, abrupt sounds; grating, discordant sounds; misshapen human bodies; snakes and spiders; bodily fluids and vomit. I don't think these are needed to produce tension in a euro game, but in horror games they fit right in. You could also use only one or two elements—a few sharp objects in an eerily empty terrain, for instance—to shift the tone of a location to a tenser, more anxious feel. 

The happiness chain starts with some combination of attraction, fun, and/or pleasure. Attraction is our response to aesthetics, in this case specifically non-utilitarian pleasure. (Much of aesthetics, fun, and pleasure overlap, so I attempted to emphasize the least overlapping, most relevant aspects.) Of the eight types of fun, I feel that fantasy, narrative, discovery, and expression best fit as a description of "fun" within the happiness chain (again, due to overlap). However, the only type of fun I would leave out of the chain is challenge, as it clearly belongs on the anxiety chain. Don Norman cites Patrick Jordan's study, Designing Pleasurable Products, to explain the four types of pleasure. Of those four, two are useful here: physio-pleasure and socio-pleasure. Simply put, pleasure arises from our physical senses and our social interactions. Clearly, these two elements could be lumped into "fun," but I will leave fun and pleasure separate as Mr. Norman did. Attraction, fun, and pleasure lead to positive feelings of enjoyment, which he terms happiness. Players in such a positive state will be more inclined to curiosity and creativity. Problem solving and learning are also more likely outcomes. Positive emotions such as in happiness chains produce better conditions for brain storming than negative emotions. 

The happiness chain is not very linear. It resembles a method of brain-storming, which is fitting since the style of thinking promoted by this chain is well suited to brain-storming. 

Happiness chains allow players to be more open to interruptions and more receptive to new ideas. However, happiness chains produce less concentration and focus as a result. Happiness chains are well suited for party games, games with high randomness, and games that require a certain amount of flexible thinking during gameplay. 

Dan Norman also supplies us with a list of things that produce the positive emotions found in the happiness chain: warm, comfortably lit places; temperate climate; sweet tastes and smells; bright, highly saturated hues; soothing sounds; simple melodies and rhythms; harmonious music and sounds; caresses; smiling faces; rhythmic beats; 'attractive' people; symmetrical objects; rounded, smooth objects; 'sensuous' feelings, sounds, and shapes. Kids' and family games tend to showcase art emblematic of this list. These images produce feelings of peace and safety. You probably don't want to visually design your combat game around this list, although Root made a high-conflict, high-strategy game more approachable by using friendly looking art. Just be aware of what emotions your design choices will create. 

In addition to the two main chains, Emotional Design mentions how to create other emotions or what those emotions in turn inspire. Joy (a subset of happiness, presumably) creates an urge to play. Interest (perhaps another term for curiosity) creates a desire to explore. Hope is created by the expectation of a positive result. (Anxiety can also be characterized by the expectation of a negative outcome.) Relief occurs when an expected negative outcome doesn't happen. Disappointment results from an expected positive outcome not occurring. Remorse occurs when you perceive a negative outcome as your fault. Reproach occurs when a negative outcome is perceived as someone else's fault. Gratification is the result of a positive outcome that you are responsible for. Admiration results when a positive outcome occurs because of someone else. Surprise occurs when a situation does not unfold as anticipated and results in the need to reassess plans. Trust requires reliance, confidence, and integrity. Trust is required for cooperation. Embarrassment reflects your individual sense of appropriateness of behavior. 

Hopefully, this breakdown provides useful tools for designing emotions (intentionally) into games as well as diagnosing why some emotions feel out of place in certain games. The anxiety chain can additionally be used to figure out why playtesters are frustrated at various times while playing a prototype. Understanding the 'logic' behind emotions is a powerful tool in a designer's toolbox. 

Everything a Game Does

Here's something a little different. At GDC (online) this year, I watched a presentation on research surrounding app assisted games by Dr. Melissa Rogerson of the University of Melbourne. The research focused on categorizing how apps are/can be used in tabletop games. The unintended consequence (in my opinion) is that the list also doubles for many of the ways a game can require upkeep outside of player-driven actions. This makes sense because the main reason to have an app is to automate those elements of a game. 

The researchers identified eight functions used in apps: timing, randomizing, housekeeping, remembering, calculating, storytelling, teaching, and informing. Timing refers to actually tracking time. Randomizing is what it sounds like. Housekeeping includes game AI/automa upkeep. Remembering involves tracking progress, high scores, and unlocking new content. Calculating does all the mathy stuff like scoring. Storytelling is where all the lore/dialogue/flavor text is found. Teaching provides answers to rules questions or presents examples. Informing includes stuff not in the other categories like providing gates to hidden information. 

When using an app, all of these functions are (ideally) presented in a streamlined, optimized way. The existence of apps makes players less forgiving of analog upkeep. After all, apps remove the necessity for components like sand timers. So, is the solution to always go with an app? I would argue that apps and their functions are pointing us toward areas of analog design where we need more innovation, elegant solutions, and general creativity. 

This list also points us to the pain points of many games: the parts that feel like work. That's why these elements get moved to an app. For those of us designing app-less games, it's up to us to keep the work load low and the fun quotient high. I plan to use this list as a diagnostic for my games: How clunky is the calculation? How fiddly is the housekeeping? How effective are the informing elements? 

Short post today, especially given the title. And I probably misrepresented one or more of the functions to a degree, my apologies. However, I thought this was a useful list, and maybe you will too. 

Limitations in Art

I swear I won't transition this blog to be about the philosophy of artistic creation. I promise. However, understanding what art is and how people create art is foundational to my perspective on board game design. Today's post is a continuation of my series about art. In those posts, I outlined the ideas that design is art, art and craft are inextricably entwined, and that making art does not have to be a solo creative event. 

This post is about limitations. All art is created within constraints. I'm tired of seeing posts in design fora about how "designers shouldn't be limited in what they can design." This concept is nonsensical. Design in particular is more about constraints than other artistic fields, because design places a higher emphasis on usability. So let's take a look at some possible constraints and how they interact with various forms of art. 

Let's start with physics. Gravity is possibly the biggest limitation in the art world. I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not. Making sure performance spaces are structurally sound and safe is a huge part of technical theatre. I have been party to many conversations between designers or directors and technical directors that revolved around what was designed on paper versus what is physically possible. And since gravity is responsible for weight, it is also the cause of transportation costs and restrictions. Gravity, safety, durability— physics dictates a lot in the art world. Good designers design with physics in mind. 

Art is also limited by human physiology. A singer has to breathe. There are only so many tones audible to the human ear. An architect must design stairs and doors to human scale, both for usability and safety.  Board games have to be easily manipulated by the average human user. Human physiology dictates usability. 

Usability is about how function dictates form. The artistic medium also dictates form. Structurally sound materials will always behave and look a certain way. A block of marble contains different limitations than a canvas. Oil paints and acrylic paints produce very different paintings. Chip board tokens have different design constraints than poker chips. The materials we use when making art are themselves a limitation. 

Cost may be the second biggest limiting factor after gravity. (Although, as discussed, a lot of cost exists because of gravity.) Not every movie has Avatar's budget. A concert hall built with perfect acoustics costs more than installing a sound system. Manufacturing in China is more affordable than building the printers needed to manufacture board games in the US. The art we make is limited by what we can afford.  

Cost also affects audience. Mass produced art may cost more in total, but the per unit cost is much lower than handmade art. Movies will always be more widely available and accessible than plays. Video games will likely always have a greater market share than board games. (In terms of games, we have to factor not just per unit cost, but also the cost per hour of average playtime to understand consumer motivations for purchasing.) The higher the per unit cost, the smaller the audience. 

Cost to consumers is just one aspect of marketability. How marketable a piece of art is will limit it's audience size and it's longevity. And marketing is just one aspect of cultural mores. What and how something is marketed reflects what we value as a culture or society.  I had a theatre history professor tell my class about how avant garde theatre in the 1970s experimented with performers having sex on stage. Not as a part of a larger show, either. Perhaps you could argue these performances were pushing boundaries within the art world. But it turns out that real sex on stage is awkward and somewhat boring for an audience. These types of performances quickly died out. Today, our cultural values dictate that simulated sex scenes have intimacy choreographers and other safety measures in place to prevent abuse of or by performers. Culture limits what art succeeds and what fails.

Cultural values inform the types of stories we tell— which stories are in good taste and which are in poor taste. These values do shift overtime. Baywatch would have been banned in the early 20th century. However, no individual artist has the power to shift cultural values very far one way or the other by creating something that falls outside of what is currently acceptable. Art gets greater mileage by instead critiquing the existing cultural values. This requires that artists be engaged in a conversation about cultural values thru their art. Whether a piece of art is celebrating the current cultural values or critiquing them, art is always a reflection of the culture. 

And since creating art is one side of a conversation, artists also have to be prepared for criticism. Criticism doesn't limit art so much as it explores how a piece of art intersects with cultural mores. Critics are an informed proxy for the audience. (You can win a Pulitzer Prize in criticism.) All mature art fields have critical analysis in the form of journalists, academics, and popular trend setters. Criticism is an inevitable by-product of making art. 

All art has limitations. You could go so far as to say that art is the creative decisions we make within our limitations. 

Creating Resonance: Part 4, GDC '21

I was honored to participate in the Board Game Summit for the all virtual GDC this year. My talk was pre-recorded and aired for participants on Monday, July 19th. This is Part 4 of the script for my GDC 2021 talk: Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. (Part 1 is available here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.) The script has been lightly edited for ease of reading and annotated with links to other posts for additional thoughts on certain topics. 

Now I’d like to look at two games as case studies for how they implement the traits I’ve outlined. The first is Tokaido. Let’s start with the rules lore, to see what the game says about itself: 

    “The players are travelers in Japan in the days of old. They will follow the prestigious Tokaido [road] and try to make this journey as rich an experience as possible. To do this, they will pass through magnificent countrysides, taste delicious culinary specialties, purchase souvenirs, benefit from the virtues of hot springs, and have unforgettable encounters.” [Tokaido rulebook, p.2] 

Or as most gamers have described the game: you’re competing to have the best vacation. I like the brevity here. There’s additional historical information at the end of the rulebook, but this introduction only tells you what you need to know to get into the game. It’s not amazing writing, but it gets the job done.

The board itself is fairly abstract, but we still clearly see a road stretching across it, with wayside points to stop at. In this case, the suggestion of a road is just as effective as a more realistic illustration. After all, the character movement reinforces the idea of a road, as does the elongated board shape. Without these signifiers, however, the abstract representation would not have been very effective. 

Tokaido is a masterclass in evocative actions. Let’s look at the action names in the game: first, a player moves a traveller and lands on a space. I’d prefer if the player ‘travelled to a location’ and ‘visited’ or ‘stopped’ there, but we can’t have everything. However, each of the spaces is evocative in a way that aids rules comprehension. Shops sell souvenirs, temples accept donations, encounters reveal people, and inns provide meals. Ending a round or ‘day’ with essentially dinner is particularly evocative. The remaining locations require a small amount of imagination but we can assume that farms produce money because you spend time there as a day laborer, panoramic views appear to produce panoramic artwork (the location and the cards are just called panoramas, which is a touch confusing), and hot springs presumably produce relaxation. 

Nowhere on the board is there a generic board game symbol to draw a card. The thematic graphic design is effective at reinforcing the rules while also helping reduce the abstraction of the board, particularly the road. Tokaido deftly uses time and location elements to create the feel of gameplay without needing full-bleed art on the game board. This is good news for designers— you can create rich experiences in prototypes even if you are not an artist. 

The cards do have generic game graphics in the form of scoring tables and transformation arrows. However, the larger art of the cards (as opposed to the locations) offsets the necessity of [displaying] this information. There is a balance struck between thematic expression and usability.

We find plenty of familiarity in shopping, sightseeing, and stopping at an inn for the night. The unexpectedness of Tokaido came from the clean visual design of the board coupled with the thematic gameplay. That same clean design keeps the game feeling uncluttered, a rare feat in a point salad style game. It’s also still unexpected, almost a decade later.

For the next case study, I’ll be looking at a much more detail-filled game: Everdell. Once again, let’s start with the lore in the rulebook: 

    “A new year begins. Within the charming valley of Everdell, beneath the boughs of towering trees, among meandering streams and mossy hollows, a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. Ever since famed adventurer Corrin Evertail discovered the hidden realm long ago, the citizens have prospered under the shelter of the Ever Tree. From Everfrost to Bellsong, many a year have come and gone, but the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host- it will be a busy year! Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?” [Everdell rulebook, p. 1] 

It’s not great. There are too many details in general, but also too many details that exist only here and don’t appear in the game. This is a game with a lot of flavor text, both on the cards and in the rulebook, including a short story and a poem, but most of that text is very clearly “opt-in” lore. The beginning of a rulebook is a place most players don’t want to dwell on. Lengthy fluff like this with lots of adjectives and place names feel like a loss of momentum before the game has even begun. 

I would prefer something more like this: 

“A new year begins. Within the charming valley of Everdell a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. But the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host- it will be a busy year! Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?” [an edit of the above paragraph]

The focus changes to what the players will be doing in the game and not the geography and history of the world. But don’t get me wrong, this is perhaps my biggest criticism of Everdell’s expression of theme and it’s one that is shared by many games. One lesson here is to read your lore fluff out loud to easily see if you’re giving the reader too much detail. 

The art of Everdell is highly evocative. Reminiscent of other works such as The Wind in the Willows or the Redwall series, the art immediately establishes the tone of the game— cozy but not completely free from conflict. 

The resources in Everdell are delightfully tactile. The berries, which are made of a squishy plastic, are a standout example of how materials used in components can create resonance. The rest of the resources are nearly as good. The resin is translucent plastic; the pebbles are opaque hard plastic; the twigs are made of wood. Tactility that matches our expectations provides a strong emotional response. Tactility can also be an avenue of unexpectedness. I’m not sure that I can name another game that uses the same kind of squishy plastic as the berries in Everdell. 

The building cards produce resources or effects that are highly thematic. Mines produce pebbles, farms produce berries, storehouses store resources. Buildings also attract critters whose profession matches that building. Postal pigeons move into post offices. Kings move into castles. Placing a closed door token on a building that has already attracted a critter is a simple and thematic reminder that that building is occupied. We get a sense of location from the materials used to build the buildings, from how the buildings are used, and from the critters that inhabit the buildings. Coupled with the game board, Everdell has a strong sense of place. One small element of dissonance is that positioning in your tableau has no game effect. I’m far from wanting Everdell to be more complicated, but I wish that neighboring buildings or critters had some slight mechanical relationship, rather than just being a random assortment in front of the player. 

While discussing location, we have to talk about the tree. The tree adds a sense of scale to the world relative to the wooden critter workers. It also adds unexpectedness through sheer verticality. It makes an attempt to be incorporated into the game board as a place to store components, which ultimately isn’t that useful, but I would rather it have some use rather than for it to be just a cardboard sculpture. The tree impairs usability somewhat by blocking lines of sight during gameplay and when storing it afterwards, however. I suppose the lesson here is that if you are going to include an element that is even slightly difficult to use, it had better be gorgeous and highly thematic to offset its potential downsides. 

Everdell is not the only game to divide rounds or phases into seasons, but it uses this structure pretty well to create a sense of time passing. Players can imagine harvests, births, and rests after long journeys during the prepare for season phase. My only complaint here is that the theming is so strong that it conflicts with the rules. One player can move into a new season while other players are still in the previous season, which is so counterintuitive that I got this rule wrong the first time I played Everdell. 

Everdell uses illustration, tactility, verticality, and timing to create a rich world while mostly not over cluttering this world with distracting details. 

These were just two examples of games that use a variety of tools to create resonance, particularly with regards to location and time. I hope to see more games in the future that leverage character motivation and relationships for resonance, especially in shorter games. Campaign and legacy games are already exploring more complex characterizations. And I hope that you leave today with a better sense of what it means for a game to be resonant. To recap, resonance is the combination of emotions and story elements with some attention-grabbing twists that focuses on the core experience and nothing else. Familiarity plus unexpectedness minus chaff. If you want to dig more into thematic design concepts, I have a blog at shippboardgames.blogspot.com which I update most Mondays. Thank you. 

This concludes my GDC talk.