Integrating theme with mechanics

I think it’s fair to say that every designer approaches the issue of “theme” in a slightly different way.  A game has to have theme, or else it’s just an excel spreadsheet with a random number generator.  But it’s also clear that some designers are willing to sacrifice thematic relevance for game mechanics.  Eurogames, classically, have been guilty of this.  Many Eurogames possess clever mechanics which interlace in fascinating ways – encouraging players to explore the gamespace and become proficient in manipulating the various levers and pulleys.  The thematic overlay is simply there to provide an attractive backdrop.

Lately, I’ve been playing some Alien Frontiers.  I like the game quite a bit, and everyone I’ve played it with has been quickly impressed with its intricate design.  I like how it combines dice-rolling, worker placement, resource management, and area control.  And I like the retro sci-fi look to the whole package.  But the two - mechanics and theme – are not intertwined in any meaningful way.  There is nothing about rolling doubles, for instance, that screams out, “build a new ship” – or rolling three in a row that evokes “raiding.”  The only minor exceptions to this lack of thematic integration are some of the alien artifacts, like the Plasma Cannon.  Because of this disparity between theme and mechanics, Alien Frontiers ultimately leaves me a bit cold.  Again, I like it – but it won’t ever be one of my favorites.

One of my guiding principles in designing Clockwork Wars was thematic integration.  I love steampunk, especially for how it flaunts anachronisms and envisions alternative histories.  I also think it has enormous potential to influence game design, since it’s so evocative and “culturally diverse.”  Let me see if I can explain this.

I knew early on that my best opportunity to weave theme into the game mechanics was within the Discovery cards.  Like in any good civilization game, I wanted the player’s personal narrative to unfold both within the realm of conquest and exploration, as well as technological discovery.  When you’re playing Civilization or Nations or Through the Ages, your civilization is largely shaped by what you research.  Setting a game in a steampunk universe opens up the technology tree in fun and unexpected ways - especially, if you also allow magic and sorcery in.  Now you can have a game where one player is researching Necromancy and Philosophy, while another player is developing Gunpowder and Dirigibles.

 But beyond the simple anachronistic pleasure of this, I wanted to ensure that each of the discoveries made mechanical sense.  As such, the specific rules for each discovery are very much guided by theme.  They are not arbitrary.  For example, the Dirigible lets you move units around the map and reinforce your battles easier.  The University helps you generate Influence Points faster.  Inquisition forces your opponents to discard sorcery and science influence.  Divine Right grants VPs for every Shrine you control at the end of the game.

Developing the discoveries was an interesting design process.  I did start with some guiding concepts.  I wanted sorcery discoveries to be aggressive, powerful, and relatively expensive.  I wanted science discoveries to provide flexibility.  Religion discoveries were defensive, often focused on enhancing your villages and shrines, and cheap.

Then I started making lists of “cool things” I wanted to include in my game.  Like dirigibles, and druids, and a colossus, and pestilence.  So I started with images – narrative – first.  Then, for each image, I tried to conceive of a mechanic that would make sense for that card.  I got surprisingly far using this approach.  Indeed, it was only later in development when I began looking through the rules for mechanics which were available to manipulate through new potential discoveries (in other words, starting with a mechanic and trying to find a theme to match it).  For example, once I came up with the idea of discovery tokens being placed on the map, I wanted there to be a discovery that could help you defend them.  Thus, the Golem (right) was born.

In contrast, I get the sense that a lot of games (even heavily thematic, “Ameritrash” games) are developed through spreadsheets.  Let’s use an imaginary game example.  Let’s say I’m developing a civilization game where there are 3 civilization “attributes”:  military, economy, and culture.  There are also 2 resources:  gold and science.  In this game, there are dozens of potential discoveries for the players to research.  For example, a discovery that gives you +1 military and costs 1 science to research.  It is now a simple matter to generate a spreadsheet and create all possible permutations.  You can even have very complex techs, like something that gives +5 military/+2 economy and costs 4 gold/6 science.  But it’s all numbers.  Once you have your list of permutations, you give a name to each one.  Cheaper ones might come from ancient times (like a granary, or polytheism), and more expensive ones from modern times.  But the thematic integration is bare-bones here.  You might be calling that +8 military card an aircraft carrier, but nothing about the card itself – or its effect on the game – has anything to do with a ship that carries jets.

I suppose I could have approached the design of Clockwork Wars' discoveries in that fashion, but it wouldn’t have been as fun – and it wouldn’t have created a thematically meaningful steampunk game.

The one major obstacle to creating game elements that consistently tie theme with mechanic is balance.  It’s (relatively) easy to balance cards, for example, generated from a spreadsheet. But when every card is different – and breaks the rules in fundamentally different ways from every other card – balance becomes a nightmare.  It’s been a major design challenge for me – one that I enjoy greatly – but one that is not easy to address.    For example, the late age Sorcery discovery, Necromancy says:

For every Shrine that you control at the beginning of the Recruitment Phase, you may recruit 2 additional workers.

What’s the value of this card?  How many Influence Points should it cost?  Is it a “better” card than the similarly priced Dirigible?  This part of game design feels uncomfortably like intuition at times, since play-testing can only reveal so much.  In one game, Necromancy might be used to great effect – in another, hardly at all.  So player feedback on its value will vary wildly.  Again, I really enjoy thinking about this kind of stuff, but it’s also a constant source of anxiety for me.

Leaning on what's logical

In this post, I’d like to riff off an idea that emerged in my last one:  designing games that mesh theme with mechanics in such a way that the game becomes more accessible to the players.  I used Fresco as my example, since I think it’s a moderate weight Eurogame that is easy to learn because the mechanics “make sense” in the context of the world it inhabits.  In other words, some of the more intricate rules are logical, which in turn makes them easier to remember and integrate.

   

Last night, my wife and I had another couple over for a lovely evening of scotch, conversation, apple pie, and boardgames.  The kind of event I wish we had more time for but which is regrettably quite rare.  As for game choice, I didn’t want something too meaty or mathematical – just fun and vicious, with some light social elements.  I’ve been looking forward to getting Survive: Escape from Atlantis and The Downfall of Pompeii to the table, so we went with a “survival” theme for the evening.  I've decided I love games that let you really screw with your opponents, and encourage pleading, cajoling, and outright threats.  That's good times.

Our experiences with these two games last night bring to light the importance of making rules “logical,” within the context of the game’s theme.  Let’s start with Survive.  In Survive, you’re trying to save as many of your people from a sinking island as possible before the volcano erupts.  You can try to swim to safety, but it’s a lengthy and dangerous process.  Instead, it’s more efficient to load up on boats – but you might need to share space with another player or two.  This in turn makes you a target for the “creatures” of the game:  sea serpents, whales, and sharks.  Your opponents can move these creatures onto the tile your ship inhabits, potentially sinking the ship and gobbling up your poor little meeples.  Needless to say, Survive is a blast to play, as long as people get into the spirit of the game and don’t take getting attacked too seriously. 

Survive (picture from http://www.macho-head-games.com/)

One great example of how Survive successfully meshes theme with mechanics is its rules for sea creatures.  Sea serpents can only move one space at a time, but they destroy and kill anything they land on (boats and people).  Sharks can move two spaces, eat swimmers, but can’t do anything to boats.  Whales can move three spaces, don’t affect swimmers, but can capsize boats, dumping all the people into the water.  I only had to explain this once to everyone around the table and that was it (it doesn’t hurt that a nice visual summary of these rules is printed on the game board itself!).  The rules are silly (in the sense of being based upon a fantastical setting) but perfectly logical.  Sharks can’t tip over boats but can eat swimmers.  That’s easy to remember!  And that’s part of what makes Survive accessible to new players, such that they can start having fun and strategizing sooner, rather than struggling over half-remembered rules and exceptions. 

In contrast, I’d argue that Downfall of Pompeii, while equally light and unburdened by complex rules, is not as intuitive to learn – and therefore not as satisfying on a design level.  Downfall of Pompeii is a game of two acts.  In Act I, the players populate the city’s buildings with their game pieces.  In Act II, the volcano erupts, lava flows down the streets, and the players compete to get as many of their pieces out of the city before time runs out.  Thematically, it sounds great.  In fact, there’s even a three-dimensional volcano on the board where you dump the citizens who have been overcome by the lava.  

Downfall of Pompeii:  now out-of-print, I believe.

However, some of its rules regarding piece placement in Act I and movement in Act II are unintuitive and frustrating, especially for non-gamers.  Here’s a quote from the rulebook regarding the movement of your pieces once the lava is flowing:

“On his turn, a player has two moves, with which he can move two different of his game pieces. He may move a game piece forward by as many city squares as the total number of game pieces (his own and/or other players’) on the square on which he begins his move. Note: In those buildings which stretch across two city squares, game pieces now count as being in two separate squares…

Usually, a player must move two different game pieces on his turn. Exception: If a game piece is alone on a city square at the beginning of the player’s first move, that player may move the same piece again with his second move.”

So there are a few confusing things here (and these aren’t even all the rules governing the movement of pieces).  First, players typically will be moving two pieces – unless you’re not.  I hate “exceptions” in rulebooks – nothing’s more frustrating when you’re explaining rules to novice gamers than having to go through a rule, and immediately follow it up with “except when…” statements.  People’s eyes just glaze over, and they’ve already forgotten the original rule as well as the exception.  So, in Pompeii, you usually will be moving two different pieces – and once you move a piece, you can’t move it again on that same turn.  However, you can decide to move a single piece twice – but only if it starts the turn in a space all by itself.  There’s nothing intuitive, logical, or thematic about those rules.  It’s just a game design mechanic existing in the ether.  Why not have the rule simply be:  you can make two moves each turn.  End of story.  That might be with two different pieces, or the same piece two times.  Did play-testing reveal that being able to move the same piece two times was "over-powered" unless it started in a square by itself?  I doubt it.  Pompeii is too light and random of a game for such a rule to matter.  

And there’s another confusing rule in there:  the number of spaces your piece can move is determined by the total number of pieces on its original square.  So, if it started on a space with 3 other pieces, it could move a total of 4 spaces this turn. Why?  What’s the theme underlying that mechanic?  You panic more and run faster when you're in a crowd? There isn’t any logic to it, and as such, I find it harder to teach and less interesting to play.  

Throughout our game of Pompeii last night, a couple of our players continued to struggle with these rules on piece movement and it significantly interfered with the entertainment value of the game.  It also made it impossible for those players to really grasp the strategy of the game, since they couldn’t get a logical hold on the base mechanics.  Now, I know a lot of gamers are going to scoff at that and argue that rules can’t always be over-simplified to the point of being obvious.  If you play enough games, you grok rules like those found in Pompeii and can roll with it.  But my point is that meshing theme with mechanics always makes for a better game design – one quicker to grasp and play with, for novices and experts alike.  I’d argue it’s especially important in so-called “gateway” games, but it’s never something you should avoid entirely – which is perhaps why neither thematically vacuous Euros nor abstracts have ever appealed to me.

Accessibility in boardgames

A central issue in game design is accessibility.  Meaning, how easy is it for someone new to the game to “grok” it and begin extracting fun from it.  I’m going to focus my thoughts on boardgames, since this is a big issue for me.  Here’s the problem (and I know this is common):  I’m the person in my social circle who buys and collects boardgames.  It’s my hobby – it’s something I’m passionate about.  I love the social aspects of table top games, I love the physical presence of cardboard components, and I love learning the intricacies of a strong design.  However, most of the people I play with are not regular gamers, although they are often interested in trying a game every now and then.  So when those situations occur, I have to think very carefully about what game to pull off the bookshelf.

People often call these “gateway” games.  Games that are attractive, accessible, and, often, not too cognitively taxing.  I’ll use Ticket to Ride as the prototypical example, in part because I have used it successfully to introduce new people to the hobby.  Ticket to Ride (all of its many manifestations) features a lovely map upon which players place tiny train pieces, as they attempt to form routes from city to city.  There’s a visceral pleasure in manipulating the train pieces, there’s joy in imagining the traveling you’re representing as you play the game, and there’s just enough strategy and competition to make things interesting.  At least for a few games.  Personally, I’m fairly tired of Ticket to Ride – not because I think it’s a poor design at all, but because I don’t think it hits that sweet spot of combining accessibility with strategic depth.
 

In Ticket to Ride, you basically take one action per turn.  That’s absolutely lovely if you’re looking for a game that you can teach in 10 minutes and that even young children can play competitively.  However, the design space of the game is limiting when it comes to strategic options and choice.  And here’s the important bit – I think even “novice” gamers often detect this and walk away dissatisfied. 

Ticket to Ride Europe:  pretty but shallow

People sit down to boardgames for many different reasons.  Sometimes, it really is just to socialize – and if that’s the case, I suggest you pull out some paper and play Eat Poop You Cat (or Telestrations, if you must).  Or for something a little more polished and hip, Dixit.  But a lot of the time, people play boardgames to exercise their minds.   Certainly, that’s my primary motivator.  Sure, I love boardgames that tell a good story (Castle Ravenloft) or let you be a hero (Talisman, Relic).  But I especially love games that let me feel smart. And that’s my biggest issue with most “accessible” games.  In the interest of keeping rules simple, elegant, and quick-to-learn, they sacrifice cognitive challenge.

Not all “accessible” games do this, however!  And those games are among my absolute favorites.  I’ll just give one example here:  Fresco.  Ha!  You probably thought I was going to say Settlers of Catan!  Well, that’s for another entry, I suppose.  No, Fresco.  Fresco is a “eurogame” in which you play a master painter working to restore a fresco in a Renaissance church.  Each turn you take several actions in an attempt to most efficiently paint sections of the fresco and thus score points.  You need to buy paint from the market, mix paints into different colors, and ensure that your apprentices are happy.  There’s a fair amount to think about and good decisions pay off. 

Fresco (thanks to ckirkman on BGG for this image)

The reason why I think Fresco works as an accessible, gateway game even though it carries a heavier weight is that the theme is well-integrated with the mechanics.  Buying and mixing paints makes sense thematically.  Yes, those are “just” actions on the board that your workers take but they make intuitive sense, and I've found that new players "grok" Fresco after a single turn.  Including beginning to see the basics of good strategy!  And that's important - players need to feel that hook of "Ah!  This decision I'm making is meaningful" quickly when playing a new game.  Fresco is also very good at giving you immediate feedback on whether you've made some poor choices; sometimes players send too many (or too few) apprentices to the market, for example.  And by the end of the turn, you've seen the consequences - which means that you can improve your play on the next.

Too many euros utilize mechanics that are just too far dissociated from the theme to make sense to non-gamers.  As an example, consider the feeding mechanics in Agricola.  I’ll quote from the rulebook here:

“At the end of this phase, each player must feed his or her family by paying 2 Food per Family member. Offspring that were born during the current round (“Newborn offspring”, typically from a Family growth action) only consume 1 Food for this round, but will require 2 Food in future Harvests. Each unprocessed Grain or Vegetable may be converted to 1 Food at any time. Fireplaces and Cooking Hearths, as well as other specific Occupations and Improvements, allow players to convert Vegetables at any time, at a better exchange rate. Improvements with the ___ symbol can be used to convert animals to Food at any time. Improvements with the ___ symbol can be used to Bake bread, but only when the player takes a Bake bread action during a round. Unprocessed animals have no Food value.”

Uggg.  Try explaining all that to novices.  Sure, some of it is thematic and intuitive (you can’t just eat an unprocessed cow), but there are so many exceptions and minor rules in there, it’s a bear for people to remember.  Which is one reason why no one would call Agricola accessible.

How does this inform my own game design?  Well, I should first say that I don’t want my games to be niche products – for example, I don’t want to design hyper-complex wargames that appeal to only a small subgroup of hardcore gamers.  I want my games to be accessible insofar as everything makes sense – the mechanics fit within the theme, so that new players can approach the game with pre-existing notions (based upon their understanding of the theme) that are useful.  For example, I’m designing a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior-esque card game.  One way that players can lose the game is if they are “decked” (their draw pile runs out).  I call this running out of gas.  And there are a number of card effects that cause you to lose gas (discard cards). 

Meshing theme with mechanics well means that you don’t need to sacrifice strategic depth or cognitive challenge.  Instructions can even expand beyond 10 pages (!), as long as the rules are logical, there aren’t a million exceptions, and the basic gameplay (what the player does on each turn) is straightforward.  If you give people an accessible game that also makes them feel brilliant when they’ve won, you’ve created something quite special – and something more likely to bring them back to the table in the future.