Boardgaming Innovations

One consequence of the board-gaming boom has been to help designers come up with a set of principles and rules-of-thumb that add up, more or less, to a theory of fun. One way to get a sense of it is to look at a well-known game that violates many of this theory’s tenets. Monopoly is, by most calculations, the bestselling board game of all time. Yet it languishes near the bottom of a list of games as reviewed by the users of BoardGameGeek, a popular website. In the eyes of a modern game designer, it does almost everything wrong. (One reason may be that Monopoly is a polemic disguised as a board game, designed to warn of the dangers of untrammelled capitalist power. It was not intended to be a jolly Christmas pastime.)

One of Monopoly’s big mistakes is positive feedback, designer-speak for a mechanism by which a small advantage early on snowballs into a big, insurmountable one later in the game, which makes things boring for the other players. Modern designers tend to prefer negative feedback, in which life gets harder for those doing well. Sometimes that is enforced by explicit penalties. Sometimes it emerges by itself, or through political dealing by other players. Conquering too many planets in a game of Twilight Imperium may make it hard to defend existing territory, for instance, especially if other players decide to gang up on the leader. That helps to keep things interesting for everyone.

Another problem is that Monopoly has a large element of luck (movement is controlled by rolling dice) and limited strategic depth. Some properties simply offer a better return on investment than others: buying them is always a good idea. Better to offer players less obvious, more thought-provoking choices: advantages that come with significant trade-offs, for instance, or whose usefulness varies depending on what is happening in the rest of the game. Hidden information opens up the potential for bluffing and misdirection. In Ticket to Ride, players compete to build railways across Europe. At the beginning, each player is given a set of secret objectives. If her opponents are to thwart them, they must first try to infer these from how she is playing. Introducing elements of politics, diplomacy or trading can give players things to do even when it is not their turn, helping to keep their interest from wandering.

And the new ideas are still coming. Pandemic, in which the players work together, fuelled a boom in co-operative games, uniting players to work together against the game itself. Computers are finding their way into board games directly: in X-Com (which is based on a bestselling video-game franchise) the players must work together to defend Earth from an alien invasion. The alien forces are marshalled by a smartphone app, which reacts to how the players are doing. By hiving the book-keeping off to a computer, designers are able to experiment with more complex sets of rules that would be fiddly and tedious for human players to administer.

The latest innovation is so-called “legacy” games, named for Risk: Legacy, a 2012 reboot of the classic game that founded the genre. As with modern TV series, the idea is to introduce an overarching narrative, which advances as you play the game multiple times. As an extra twist, the rules change between each playthrough. Depending on the results of a particular game, players could receive instructions to draw new features onto the board, rip up existing rules or be given new powers or obstacles. One such game, Pandemic: Legacy, is, according to the denizens of BoardGameGeek, the single best board game ever made.

Tim Cross, Table-Top Generals (2017-11-13)

• board gaming
• game mechanics
• mechanics