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.

The post Small World – the business behind the board game boom (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

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.

The post Costly Complexity – the limits of complexity in board games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

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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Simon Schmieder is the designer of Jakarta Traffic, Durian Smuggler and Food Alley. He is from Germany and currently lives in Indonesia. I got to know him through boardgame fairs around South East Asia. We were both in Bangkok for the Bangkok International Game Festival (BIGF) in August, and he, Jon and I met up for a playtest session.  The Airbnb Simon stayed in was like a mini

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.

The post Kaleidoscopic Games – the history of colours in board games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

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.

The post The Two Body Problem – design challenges of two-player only games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Designers don't like it when players criticise their board game, and the response often is that the game was intentionally designed that way. Players complain that a strategy feels unfair, a mechanism is frustrating, or a game simply isn't very clear. Designers reply that that just misses the point. Similar disagreements exist in films, novels, and art, yet board games seem to have them more often, and they are often more personal. Part of the reason may be that board games are not passive experiences. Players are not simply watching events unfold, but instead are interpreting rules and shaping the experience themselves every time the game hits the table.

The post Intentional Experience – designer intent and player experience (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Many of us play board games because they offer us some certainty. There are rules, objectives, specific actions, and so on that define how a game is played. These things provide a clear, well-defined framework. We know what is possible, what is not allowed and what we are trying to achieve. At the same time, board games also contain uncertainty. It is uncertainty that creates tension, excitement and a range of other emotions. In many cases, this uncertainty is exactly why we look forward to playing them. Inspired by Bez from Stuff by Bez, in this article, I want to explore why uncertainty in board games matters.

The post Clearly Uncertain – the role of uncertainty in board games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

A recent episode of the Game Design Deep Dive, featuring the podcast host, Dan Bullock, in conversation with prolific board game designer of many historical and storytelling games, Cole Wehrle, got me thinking about something I had never really questioned before: who we actually are when we play board games. Player roles are often afterthoughts, taken for granted as part of the theme or setting. However, the more I thought about it, the more it became clear that they shape how we understand a game, how we make decisions, and even how they influence our emotions as we engage with what is happening on the table.

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Legacy games have probably had their golden days. They were something new that hadn't been done before in our hobby. They promised a unique experience of a game that would change as you played it. Not only that, the change would be permanent, requiring you not to only remove components, but actually destroy them, or put stickers into the rulebook, onto the main game board or otherwise apply them to make an irreversible change to the game. However, as exciting as the idea was, it never sat comfortably with me. In this article, I want to talk about this in more detail.

The post Throwaway Legacy – legacy games as a symbol of our throwaway society (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Hello everyone! I'm Eugene, founder of Genie Games and creator of Rats to Riches, Peranakan: Tiles and Tactics, and Singapore Showdown. This is my first time ever writing a guest blog, and I'm incredibly honoured to be given this opportunity by Oliver to share my story with you. As the title states, I'm 29 years old as of writing this. Nine months ago, I quit my job as a Singaporean Navy Officer, to start my own company to design and publish board games full-time. How did I end up here? Well, the answer to that goes back 20 years ago.

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Ryan Dancey was, until last Wednesday, the Chief Operating Officer at Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG). On LinkedIn, the self-help site for managers who want to tell each other how great they are and how little their subordinates/customers appreciate them, Dancey published a post (link to a photo of the post, because I do not link to LinkedIn) in which he explained that he is firmly convinced that AI (or rather the LLMs that are usually labelled as AIs) will, in just a few years, be as useful as any employee.

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Historical board games occupy an awkward space in our hobby. They are usually not designed to teach history in any formal sense, and they are also not entertaining in the sense of being fun. These games stop short of education, offering no syllabus, no claims of being a detailed treatise of their setting, and no obligation to explain themselves. The subject matter historical board games draw on, war, exploitation, inequality, famine, and systemic violence, doesn't suit the lightness or escapism people often expect when playing board games as a leisure activity. The result is a form of play that somehow feels serious but incomplete. In this article, I want to explore this in more detail.

The post No Man’s Land – historical board games’ position between entertainment and education (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Let me be clear from the start: there is no such thing as a "good game". I know, it sounds controversial. After all, at the end of every year and often many times during the year, lots of people publish lists of the best games and regale you with how "good" these games are. If you're seen as the board game expert in your family circle or friendship group, you will be asked what "good game" they should buy or play next. Yet, "good" by itself is pretty meaningless - but let me explain.

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I have long been fascinated by historical board games. I was never very good at history in school, but whenever I play a board game with a historical setting, I feel I learn something. Often, I feel compelled to find out more about the events that took place back then. No class in school ever evoked that curiosity in me. These days, I look at historical board games from an additional angle: the human element. While war games rarely identify individuals and often work on a larger scale, there is a new breed of historical games that bring players closer to the human experience. In this article, I want to explore these games further,

The post Historical Humanity – the human element in modern historical board games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

As I was listening to an episode of the Ludology podcast recently, one focused on games and health, I started to think about how much the people we play with influence our gameplay experience. Selecting board games based on the audience is much more important than we may like to believe. Get it wrong, and you have one player rebelling and playing opposite to expectations, another disengaging completely, and the overall mood shifting from playful enjoyment to uncomfortable tension. In this article, I want to discuss how a mismatch can impact the enjoyment of the whole group, alter the tone of reviews, and even affect playtest outcomes.

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