Board Game Design 092:

a brief introduction

Foreward

First: This is one goat's opinion. There are many different ways to design a game and none of them are wrong if they end up with a game being made by the end. I'm not an expert (I've never even been a pert!). I have published a game, but that was a group effort by three other designers, myself, our developer, and other staff at our publisher. What I'm saying is being published is not necessarily any indication of me "knowing what I'm doing."

Second: If you're going to do a historical, social, or political topic one of things I cannot stress enough is read exhaustively about your subject. Go find the best academic books and papers you can and absorb everything. Become, if not an expert on the subject, at least well read on it. You need that footing to create a model of the subject and do it the justice it deserves.

Third: Have fun. Don't stress over it. Play around with ideas. Don't be afraid to change things wildly if your initial ideas don't work. Seek collaboration from online board game design spaces, there are many.

Playable Models

Alright so you want to design a board game. Cool. There are a bunch of ways you could go about this from relatively minor modifications to creating brand new things that have never existed before from whole cloth. I've briefly sketched these out below and compared them to the various levels of Hell from Dante's Inferno.

Largely what I will talk about is designing a game as a playable model for a thing. A description of the idea can be found here from Jason Carr but the salient quote is:

What do I mean by playable model? First, what is a model anyway? In this context, a model is an attempt to create a set of abstractions that provide explanatory power about the setting.

- Jason Carr

The goal I have is to:

  • Make a thesis
  • Provide a setting/mechanics to model that thesis
  • Provide the tools to interact with and understand the thesis

And ideally I'd like it to be fun, but it's important to note these kinds of games don't always have to be fun, they can also exist to be instructive.

Types of Design

First, the Eighth Circle of Design Hell:

Flattery and Imitation

You can take a game and retheme it. This is as simple as making Settlers of Catan into a game set on a different planet, making a local version of Monopoly, redoing a Vietnam war game as a Space Marines vs Tyranids warhammer 40k war game... you name it. This is the easiest to do and generally only requires theming components, not changing mechanics. It can also be a disservice to both the new and old theme such as in the case of the Vietnam to Warhammer 40k pipeline. Tread lightly, don't make light of the plight of others. Repsect your subject.

But it's a valid way to "create" a game, and you should keep this in mind for when you're getting started. It's a way to get comfortable with the language (metaphorically speaking) of design.

Second, the Sixth Circle of Design Hell:

Heresy and Expansion

Expanding a game is a really good way to come to grips with both how all the mechanics of a game work together, and how one or two specific mechanics, systems, or ideas can be done. This would be adding different islands to Catan (Seafarers of Catan) or maybe adding some more complexity to armies and city building (Knights and Cities). It could be expanding a historical game to a related time period, or just grafting a combat mechanic on to Monopoly because you're a sadist and why we can't have nice things.

Third, the Fourth Circle of Design Hell:

Greed and Stealing Everything That Isn't Nailed Down

Taking a game that you like and using its system and mechanics to support a different subject is a lot of designers first foray into game design. I'm part of staff for the COIN Series Player's Club Discord and people who started as fans of that series have created volumes set during: the Bakumatsu (1853 - 1867 Japan), the Onin War (1467 - 1477 Japan), modern day Somalia, the British Emergencies (1940s - 1960s: Malaya, Kenya, Palestine, and Cyprus) among many others. If you find a system and you think to yourself "Y'know... that could underlay the model for this other thing pretty well..." Do it. Give it a shot. You'll have to touch every part of the system in one way or another so it's a really effective crash course in game design. Some systems are easier to do this with than others, and fictional subjects are generally easier than historical ones but don't let that stop you. Just treat your subject with respect.

Fourth, The First Circle of Design Hell:

Limbo and the Virtuous Nerds

Make a whole ass game from scratch without directly borrowing significant pieces of it from the giants who shoulders you would otherwise be standing on. I have no real advice here - this is really hard to do in a way that's A) authentic and B) good. Good luck, god speed if you go this route.

What I'll be Demonstrating

I'm going to show the Fourth Circle of Design Hell, by stealing a bunch of neat things in service of the idea I want to model.

In case you're wondering why I'm describing design as hell, think of it as development hell/production hell and not in terms of being hell to go through. It just (mostly) takes a lot longer to design things than you think it will. You'll be done with 90% of it pretty quickly, but that last 10% takes forever. This is just the way things go.

The Plan

The Idea

I like elevator pitching things so the way this started is:

What if Submarines. In. SPACE.

The idea is this: I think space warfare is going to hew closer to how modern submarine warfare works (think like The Expanse) instead of the naval/air warfare way that most sci fi represents it (Star Wars dogfighting being like modern air warfare, Star Trek capital ship combat being like modern Naval warfare). The most important part of combat will be finding your enemies or hiding from them, the actual combat won't really be an after thought per-se but will be brief and largely deterministic - the first side to find the other will be able to shoot first and that might be all that's needed.

There are some other ideas that go with this:

    Space Flight Will be:
  • Hideously expensive
  • Very slow
  • Logistically complicated
  • as a result Space Warfare will be
    • Limited in scale
    • Fought for small, but important gains

This isn't important so much to the scope of this article but to understanding how your idea influences your model which will largely be your game.

Images for flavor!

Space Pirate Captain Harlock's The Arcadia... totally a submarine in space. Submarines! Space Battleship Yamato!

The Inspirations

Game mechanic wise Pacific Fury is the main influence, my eventual goal is to have something like that games task force programming as the way you set up and launch fleets. A Billion Suns is giving me ideas for differing ship classes and the silhouette system might be modified for use in my detection rolls eventually.

Space Battleship Yamato! Space Battleship Yamato!
Space Battleship Yamato! Space Battleship Yamato!

The Process

So what's the process? For the kind of model driven game we're talking about here it is:

  1. Come up with your subject and a thesis.
  2. Figure out the abstractions that allow you to transfer that subject and thesis into game mechanics
  3. Figure out what mechanics you need.
  4. Create/Steal from other games the components you'll need for those mechanics
  5. Create the most basic of rules - you will marry the mechanics and components you have into BEING the model.
  6. Test it with yourself.
  7. Something broke, we both know it did - fix it.
  8. Test it again.
  9. Repeat the two steps above many times before showing it to a friend, ideally someone that's brutally honest.
  10. Test. Refine. Test. Refine.
  11. Test it Publicly - get feedback and be gracious about it.
  12. Eventually you'll wrap it up - either it'll be what you want it to be, or you'll be done with it.
  13. Release it into the wild!

With a process that is as iterative as this you might be able to see why I modeled the types of design section after Dante's Inferno.

Iterating The Design

TTS Screenshot 1 TTS Screenshot 2

So for my first test I have simple tokens with a class, a firepower value, and a structure value. I have seven location cards providing slots for fleets to hide and areas for the players to fight over.

The cards were made in google slides (yes, really) and the tokens were made with a program called Nandeck that lets you programmatically create cards and tokens. You'll see some screenshots of them to the side, and I want you to remember that art doesn't matter at this stage: in fact, while designing you should keep art as simple as possible because you're going to throw things out constantly.

I load this into Tabletop Simulator and play around with it - I don't have any strong rules in mind at this point. I'm a very iterative designer. Some people will have a much more solid idea put together before they start making and moving pieces around but I find this helps me think things through.

So problems:

  1. I don't have an objective system, I want one to focus the combat.
  2. I have no ship limits currently, but I want a way to represent the expensive nature of combat.
  3. My initial ideas for firepower were muddled.
  4. Fleet detection sucks.

Solutions:

  1. I'm adding 5 Objective Tokens and 5 Objective Cards

    2. Players will take turns placing tokens at the start of the game then will draw a card to specify what objective they really care about, but all objectives are worth some points at the end of the game.

  2. Unsure

    3. I'm going to start with a limited counter mix and if you have any reserve counters at the end of the game they'll be worth extra points but I don't like that necessarily.

  3. Changing and lowering values

    4. I've decided on currently a more limited system of a value that you need to roll under to score a hit.

  4. Varied ship classes

    5. I started with an idea where the size of a fleet determines how easy it is to detect, roll under the number of ships in a fleet to be able to find it. I don't like this. Ships will have a detection value and if it beats the other players stealth value + stack size they can detect them and shoot first.

Iteration 2

So we've put new components into the TTS module, somewhat half-assedly. I'm keeping a small rules notes document to the side instead of writing any sort of formal rules for the moment, it's too early for ME to do that personally.

And so I test.

The verdict is:

  1. Objectives:

    2. good addition but I want the location cards themselves to have effects that matter too.

  2. Attack roll system:

    3. better and also simpler.

  3. Detection rolls:

    4. needs more time in the oven. Still not quite what I want.

  4. Limited counter mix:

    5. not super happy with this. This is meant to abstract the difficulty of logistics and expense in waging interstellar warfare without making the player track anything directly. This will be one of the abstractions I talked about earlier.

TTS Screenshot 3 TTS Screenshot 4

It's worth noting at this point I also don't know when the game will end. I think maybe if you start a turn with four of the seven systems under your control that'll be game end but I'm unsure. Maybe that and a turn limit.

This is as far as I'll go for the purposes of this article for showing how this works but I hope that showing the iterative process was instructive to the kind of design I'm describing here.

Conclusion

I hope this has been somewhat helpful in showing the start of the design process for model based board games.

Anyone can design a game, anyone can design a good game. For these kinds of model based games the process is a little different than just creating either a medium to heavy euro game (like Barrage, Brass, Teotihuacan, Castles of Burgundy etc) where the game is very algorithmic in nature and the theme is set dressing for interacting with that algorithm or an extremely thematic game where the theme is all that matters (like Zombicide, Arkham Horror, Dead of Winter etc).

If you have any questions, if you want to get feedback on designs, if you want to chat about this - shoot me an email: chaosgoat@omg.lol

Resources

Programs

  • Game Engines:
    • Tabletop Simulator
    • Vassal Engine
    • Tabletopia
    • Screentop.gg
  • Nandeck
  • Component Studio
  • Card Creator
  • CIDEr
  • Powerpoint/Google Slides

    • Yes, really. Using Powerpoint is an old school way to make simple tokens and cards.

  • Excel/Sheets

    • Great for old school tokens, resize the grid to be squares and you can use it to layout simple tokens.

Board Game Design Groups

Websites & Creators