A board game design process: Lessons learned
By: Diego Beltrami
Tags: Design Process, Games, Product Design, Design, Board Games

Designing games is no different than designing experiences or products, but like with any medium there are peculiarities. Through this series, we covered most of the design process but I would like to finish by going over some of the peculiarities I got to experience firsthand during this project of mine and some of the things I learned along the way.

Meaningful choices

Let’s start with one of the core ideas. Board games are all about meaningful choices yet many times the systems we are designing need a certain amount of bookkeeping and minutiae to function. There’s a fine line to consider between a “must-have” activity and one that’s only there because it’s easier for the designer or because of a desire to conform to an idea of “simulation”. I’ll refer to the famous quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

As a designer one has to be mindful of pruning away these meaningless choices. A way to approach this challenge is to create default settings, so it’s always yes or no instead of having the player choose. Another approach that I like is to condition actions through components. This is doubly useful as it not only removes some meaningless choices but it also removes the mental load of bookkeeping.

The fewer rules there are the better. Having components work in a way that conditions the players into following the system rules organically without them having to remember arbitrary information. For example, in my game, the amount of “shield pips” a system can have is directly related to its damage. It’s complicated to keep track of those fiddly rules in your mind and it’s easy to become confused. That is, unless the physical components use the same slots for both tokens and through that limitation, you have no choice but to respect the system rules. You can see that in the way the damage and shield pips fit into the ship model.

The importance of defining the correct mental model

There are a lot of rules and behaviour attached to a game system. Leaning heavily on the theme of the game can help align the mental models of the designer with those of the player by relying on a set of “unwritten assumptions” or expectations born out of the setting and aesthetics. There are ways a car works that we all understand and the game has to respect that even if it’s in an abstracted way. If done right many of the game rules will be easily understandable and coherent, making them almost intuitive for the players.

Depth and complexity

Depth could be understood as the richness of interactions and possibilities within the system. In that sense other mediums, like videogames can achieve this through a lot of unseen complexity, taking advantage of a computer’s processing power to take track of most of the stuff in the background. In a boardgame this type of complexity would make things more complicated as it leads to a lot of mental load for the player. That doesn’t mean that boardgames are lesser to their video counterparts. That only means that they have to approach depth from another angle. As I see it they are much more dependant on the richness of the interdependences within its elements and mechanics. This involves more design work up front, but ends up with a tighter and more accessible design. Part of my game design philosophy is that it’s better to have fewer parts but have them all interact in interesting ways rather than having many interesting but separate parts.

In order to achieve this, a designer needs a deep understanding of the system and the interdependencies between components and mechanics.

This is a map I made in order to understand the relationships between components. This helped me identify spaces for improvement and also how to allow players to bend the rules with special cards.

Working to make everything connected is not an easy task but it does bring more depth and more meaningful choices into the game. In my experience, it was all about removing components and integrating their functions together. For example, at one point I had several card decks, one for combat actions and another for special actions, the game changed radically once I found a way to combine them into a single deck, adding another layer of choice. Does the player use this high-value card that can be useful for attacking or is it better to use the special action to get out of a tight spot?

Leveling the playing field

One of the hardest things is to put checks and balances in the system in order to avoid a snowball effect where the winner keeps winning because of the advantages of winning. There need to be many balancing loops keeping the losing player in the race, otherwise it might feel like a futile attempt to keep playing and a bad experience. In order to achieve this there are what are called “Catch-up” mechanics intended to give the losing player a chance to get back into the game negating the mechanical advantages of the winning player. In my game, it’s related to the number of cards available to each player at the start of the round. Players pick up an extra card for every system that has been lost, giving them more choices each turn.

Controlling length

Perhaps one of the most difficult things when designing a game is getting it to an appropriate playing time. Open systems can lead to unpredictable situations, spiraling in an eternal draw, or sudden endings. It’s funny but many of my attempts at controlling length by adding mechanics always ended up in failure. I once tried to add a parallel ending counter, but the mechanics to play against the counter not only meant more stuff to keep track of, but also made the game even longer. What I found to be a more effective approach was to actually remove stuff. Fewer damage points before winning, fewer cards, fewer actions. Every time I removed something the game became leaner and also much more engaging. Right now the most effective way of ending the game I found is to stop once the cards are all used up, it’s an obvious instance of the game, the player doesn’t have to remember or keep track of anything else and adds another tactical layer to the game.

Rulebooks

Rulebooks are probably one of the most important components of a game. Creating a completely intuitive game is almost impossible if we are designing a complex system. The greatest game in the world is worthless if no one understands how to play it. A rulebook is a tool we give players in order to decode the game system, and thus rulebooks have different uses and audiences. Rulebooks have to respond to the different needs of first time players, learning how to play; returning players just wanting to refresh their memories, and players checking the rules during the game. We need different types of content, clear hierarchies, and structures for the information to support these different needs.

Original photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash

A rulebook is also a great design tool. It provides the designer a way to decode and understand the game, writing down a lot of assumptions made during the design process and it helps to organize mechanics in a coherent form.

Randomness and choice

There are two ways to approach randomness, either you include it or you come up with a completely deterministic game. Both are valid strategies but personally, I find randomness to be an important enabler of emergent storytelling in games. If you hear players tell stories about their games you’ll often hear about that creature that was untouchable or the unlucky player that ended up winning the game in the end despite all odds. Randomness is what adds spice to an encounter.

Still, including randomness is not a random choice in itself. What to randomize, how and to what extent are some of the key decisions a designer faces. I really liked how another designer put it:

“It’s better to have your players act in response to random conditions than it is to randomize their outcome after they’ve made their choices” -Mikey NG

The key concept here is agency. As designers we want players to feel in control, we want them to feel that the game is being defined by their -meaningful- choices, not chance. Randomness can quickly become chaos and unpredictability, giving way to frustration. To avoid that we need to give players clarity of information, making them aware of the possibilities before committing. If we do things right then it becomes a balancing act for the player between risk and reward.

As an example, during the early design phases, I used dice a lot and in order to give agency to the player, I started to incorporate more and more mechanics to mitigate the extreme randomness. This became counter-productive and I ended up solving it by removing dice altogether and using numbered cards. The cards the player gets are random but the player still has a choice on how to use them, so there is room for strategizing around a bad hand or taking full advantage of a good one.

Closing thoughts

What I like about board games is that they are self-contained complex systems. I get to tinker with them without worrying about all the complexity of real-world problems (and their socio-cultural-economic dynamics). There’s a lot of fun to be had tinkering with a system and trying to predict how it’s going to work and thinking about ways to steer the behaviour towards the desired outcome.

It feels like designers, particularly service designers, can learn a lot by trying their hand at board game design. In my experience, it was a great way to explore the design process by experimenting with a small self-contained project.

Much like any design work, it’s all about trust in the process, and that’s why I’ve shared mine here. And much like any design process, it is about understanding, exploring, and testing. And having fun, let’s never forget that.