Board games have grown into a rather substantial global business, with established publishers selling games around the world and new releases reaching audiences far beyond your friendly local game store. Yet, behind the scenes, you find an industry that is made up of small companies, independent designers, and project-specific contractors. The industry has grown, but its businesses and careers have not necessarily become more secure. In this article, I want to look at this in more detail.

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A board game designer can spend years refining a game. They know the game inside out and understand every rule intimately. Yet, when you open a game for the first time, you don't have access to their knowledge. Players have to learn how a game works all by themselves. A game design can be sound, yet it's still difficult to learn and teach. A clear rulebook certainly helps, but often it all begins with the design itself. Following on from my article about dealing with complexity as a board game designer, this article looks at how a good design can help with a game's teach.

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There comes a time when you look at the rules for a new board game, when it suddenly stops feeling exciting and starts feeling intimidating. The rules are too long and convoluted, the main game board is cluttered, and every mechanism seems to have another exception. Complexity itself can be very appealing when it creates meaningful choices and rewards repeated play. However, complexity is also a kind of burden for the people playing the game. More complexity means more time to learn a game, more effort to remember everything, and more focus when playing it. In this article, I use episode 364 of Ludology as my starting point for examining where complexity adds interest to a game and where it simply makes it unnecessarily hard to play.

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A board game can feel very different depending on what surface it is played on. Cards slide differently across different surfaces, dice make different noises, and even picking up a small wooden token can become either effortless or frustratingly fiddly. A kitchen or dining room table has been doing the job perfectly well for generations, but a soft, printed mat can make the same game feel rather more special. Neoprene has become increasingly common, bringing cushioning, durability and a little sense of luxury to the table. Yet a gaming mat's life begins long before it reaches your table, and it may not end until a long time after we stop using it. So in this article, I want to look at neoprene's environmental cost across its full lifecycle.

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Board games that represent real historical events face a problem that fiction can largely avoid. The designer can't start with a blank page. Players are going to expect that the game somehow mirrors what actually happened in the past. Yet, a board game can't faithfully reproduce an entire historical period. The designer has to select and simplify, turning the subject into rules and mechanisms. A historical board game can't ever be completely accurate. The question really is how designers decide which parts of reality belong in the game, which can be abstracted, and which should be left out. In this article, I look at this question from the perspectives of five designers, each with a different answer to the problem.

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As we all know, there are a good number of board games that haven't aged well, if I may put it like that. In the past, games happily made colonialism their central setting and gameplay, gave women little or no place in their worlds, or treated cultures through the eyes of the oppressor. Yet, these games remain in people's collections and come back to the table. In this article, rather than asking whether we should still play these problematic games, I explore why we don't just choose different games from the large swathe of new releases.

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Waiting for your turn is very common in board games. One person has all the fun while everyone else just watches. Too much waiting is often described as a flaw in game design, particularly when players have nothing useful to do and gradually lose interest in what's happening. Modern board games tend to avoid downtime, yet waiting isn't necessarily wasted time. Sometimes it gives us something to think about, sometimes it leaves us with nothing to do, and sometimes it gives us something that a game cannot provide on its own: a chance to talk.

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Art is often something we look at, listen to or watch, while board games are discussed in terms of entertainment, strategy and social interaction. Yet, board games are created through imagination, skill and deliberate choices. Board game designers can shape emotions, represent ideas and create systems that shape how players experience a perspective. Of course, the artwork in a board game is art in the traditional sense, but that is not what I want to explore in this article. Instead, I want to look at how board games themselves, their mechanisms and systems, function as a form of artistic expression in their own right.

The post Artistic Board Games – how board games are more than visually pleasing (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

When I play a board game with my friends, I know that they have the same intention: to win. Yet, they actually all want quite different things. One friend is happiest when they find a strategy that works and keeps working. Another wants to take a game apart until they understand the most efficient route to victory. I want to win too, but as a reviewer, I am usually more interested in understanding what a game is trying to do, how its mechanisms produce an experience and how the people around the table respond. Listening to episode 673 of the 99% Invisible podcast, I found that C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Utah and author of the book "The Score", has really well described these differing expectations of wanting to win a board game.

The post Striving for Achievements – the difference between achievement play and striving play (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Trick-taking games have been around for centuries, and they continue to inspire new designs. Everyone has their own idea of what makes for a great trick-taking game, but mine was shaped by growing up in Germany playing Skat and, especially, Doppelkopf. Those games use mechanisms that still appear in modern games, yet designers keep finding new ways to create new twists on them. So in this article, I want to look at the trick-taking mechanisms I find most interesting, why they work, and how modern trick-takers have changed them while keeping the characteristics that make the genre so long-lasting.

The post Magic Tricks – what makes trick-taking games great (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Like a lot of people, the board game hotness excites me because it potentially offers new mechanisms or clever twists on something familiar. Sometimes a new game draws me in because it has my favourite setting. When I finally hold the new game in my hands, the excitement continues when I read the rulebook, set up the game and pull levers or push buttons to see what happens. Yet, as amazing as new games often feel, the ones I return to most often are games that have become familiar friends. Somehow, knowing them so well has not made them any less interesting, but it has changed what I enjoy about them.

The post The New Old – classic games vs the cult of the new (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Imagine playing your very first indoor bowls game, but there is no jack. Everyone simply rolls a bowl towards an imaginary target. Somehow, your experienced opponent seems remarkably confident, while you try to copy what they do and hope for the best. At the end of the first end, someone reveals where the jack had been all along and awards the points accordingly. Then the second end goes in the same fashion, with a target that no one can see. Every end, you know how well you've done, but you never have any hope of getting better. Learning to bowl that way would feel practically impossible because every bowl would be complete guesswork. Surprisingly, some board games seem to want us to learn them in very much the same way.

The post Score! – in-game vs end-game scoring (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

I never enjoyed history at school. I understood why it mattered as a subject, but learning names, dates and events off by rote simply didn’t work for me, no matter how hard I tried. Events were never taught in their chronological or geopolitical context. Things just didn’t make sense to me. So it seems ironic that historical board games are now one of my favourite genres. Of course, they’ve not made me any better at remembering names and dates, but they replaced my fear of history with a new curiosity that I hadn’t felt before. Horrible History To be clear: I never dreaded having history lessons because of my teachers. No, my fear came from somewhere else. Every new era of history introduced yet another collection of rulers, battles, dates and important events that I was expected to memorise. Learning those facts off by heart was just impossible for me. They always simply felt like a random collection of pieces of information that had nothing to hang them onto. So revising for history tests was always not just a terribly frustrating exercise, but often ended up in tears, because I realised that the further I fell behind, the harder things got. I often felt physically sick and had a tight knot in my chest when another exam was approaching. Somehow, history never felt like one very long connected story thread. Instead, it was just a giant jumble of disconnected facts that were supposed to fit together, but never really formed any sort of pattern for me. Of course, history is a hugely important subject. You don’t need to tell that to a German. Every war, political decision and social movement affected real people, families, communities and often, entire generations. Forgetting historic events means forgetting the people who experienced them, something…

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At a time when many people feel democratic culture is under strain, it is worth looking at our own everyday behaviours that allow democracy to function. Elections, laws and political institutions are all important, but democracy also depends on how people treat one another every day. Listening to different opinions, accepting compromise, respecting agreed-upon rules and recognising opponents as people rather than enemies are all part of a healthy democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, board games are a place to look for those values. I mean, the simple act of sitting down together to play a game, following the same rules and taking on a role, is an opportunity to act out democratic values.

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Colour is one of the first things I notice when opening a new board game. Bright player pieces, colourful resources and beautiful illustrations immediately grab my attention. Colours tell me where to look and how the game is organised. Yet, like around 1% of men, I have protanomaly, a mild form of red-green colour vision deficiency. I often see pink or purple flowers as blue, and when driving in fog, I see a car's rear red lights much later than other people. So I appreciate it when I can rely on something other than colour to tell me what I am looking at. In this article, I want to explore a century's worth of board game history and look at how colour-vision considerations have changed over time.

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Designing a board game that works well for exactly two players is a very different challenge from designing one that supports a range of player counts. Many games include a two-player mode, but board games such as 7 Wonders Duel, Patchwork, and Jaipur show that a dedicated head-to-head experience can be unique and not simply an adapted and reduced version of a game that is really aimed at larger player counts. In this article, I want to look at the design challenge these dedicated two-player-only games present.

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Over the previous four articles in this series, I have explored the history of Spiel des Jahres, the purpose behind its awards, the way its jury works, and the wider activities funded through its income. Together, those articles painted a picture of an organisation that sees its annual awards as a means rather than an end. Promoting games as a cultural asset, encouraging people to play board games together and providing guidance to newcomers to the hobby have all remained at the core of its mission for almost fifty years. In this article, I want to look at the 2026 nominations and see whether the association's values can also be found in the games the jury has selected.

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Awards often attract attention because of the games they recognise. Far less attention is usually paid to how the organisations behind those awards operate. In the case of Spiel des Jahres, the financial side of the story is particularly interesting because it helps explain how the association funds its activities while maintaining the independence that it considers central to its mission. The famous Red Pawn appears on millions of game boxes, yet many players know little about the licensing system behind it or the way that income supports projects far beyond the annual awards ceremony. In this fourth article in the series, I look at the finances that reveal how the organisation has transformed the commercial success of its award into support for a much broader cultural mission.

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Every year, the announcement of the Spiel des Jahres nominations leads to a lot of discussion across our hobby. Some people agree with the choices, others question why certain games were not included, and many try to predict the eventual winners. What most people don't realise when they discuss the nominations is that the jury does not gather for a single weekend to decide the best game of the year. No, jurors spend many months playing hundreds of new releases several times with different groups of people. It is a lot of work that often goes unnoticed, but that explains why the award continues to carry such influence nearly fifty years after it began. In the second article of the series, I look at this in more detail.

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