[#003] Connecting theme and mechanics, structuring a rulebook, and a one-card contest

Chris Backe talks board game design.

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Chris Backe
December 26, 2022

Welcome to your weekly dose of board game design!

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend, however you spent it. It's a great time to unwind, reflect on the year, and begin making plans for the next one. 

Something I learned about game design this week

So it's not a new term, but I've had ludonarrative dissonance on my mind lately. Wikipedia says it was first coined by Clint Hocking, a video game designer, back in 2007. In both video games and board games, ludonarrative dissonance is what happens when the mechanics (what you do) don't match up with the theme (who / where / when you are).

I've used the term thematic-mechanic connection, and I think you get ludonarrative dissonance when these don't line up. You wouldn't have pirates shooting Star Trek-style phasers in a game set in the 17th century, and you probably wouldn't show dinosaurs lecturing on quantum mechanics in a game unless you were trying to be more than a little absurd. These things don't match what people expect to see in those games.

It's also possible to get so lost in making everything feel real that we forget to make it fun. Focus on the feelings you want players to have (exhilarated, thrilled, terrified), consider what expectations fit the game (party games don't last for three hours, for example), and abstract as needed.

On one extreme, you have Risk, which abstracts moving a large force of troops across a continent by moving one piece one 'space'. On the other, you have Campaign for North Africa, a game that supposedly takes 1,500 hours to complete, and defies all reasonable expectation of description in its complexity and setup. The fact that Risk is an extreme abstraction doesn't change the feeling of being powerful or the exhilaration of the dice going your way.

This week's tip: structuring a rulebook

Reader Brian M. asks:

How do I structure a rulebook for the first version of the game?

First and foremost, I'm a firm believer in keeping your rules and your prototype (virtual or physical, whichever one you use the most) in sync with each other. When you update a prototype, update the rulebook as well. That might mean reprinting or recreating some components, but it's a necessary task. The more versions presented at the same time, the more confusing and complex the game will feel to a playtester.

OK, side story over.

Early on, the only person reading the rulebook will be you. Ideally it'll help you keep the current version of the game straight, not whichever version of the rules you remember best.

My starting skeleton for a rulebook looks like this:

  • Overview

  • Component list

  • Setup

  • Play / on your turn

  • End of round / phase / turn

  • End of game and scoring

  • About [this element]

  • About [that mechanic]

  • Frequently Asked Questions

  • Reference

Hopefully all of these are pretty obvious. The two 'About' sections are just placeholders to start, but the intent here is to create space for whichever elements are going to have more rules or details attached to them.

It goes without saying, of course, that this is a generic structure. As your game evolves, so will the structure. Consider what someone needs to know, and when they need to know it.

Want more ideas? Look at the rulebooks in your collection of games and you'll see lots of different structures. Don't have a game like the one you're making? Googling '[name of board game] rules pdf' usually finds it online.

What I’ve been working on last week

  • Playtest Smite (deck-builder about gods and mortals)

  • Playtest How Does Your Garden Grow (a play-and-pass game about community gardening)

  • Worked on a one-player puzzle version of a game

  • Review a book I've recently received

What's coming up this week

  • Setup some social media automation

  • Research publishers going to Nuremberg

  • Iterate on some mass-market game ideas

  • Make first versions of a couple of games I'm working on with co-designers

ICYMI

The Game Crafter's one-card contest deadline isn't for another couple of weeks, meaning now's the time to get designing! The rules and game have to fit on a single poker-sized card, though you can use some other pieces. Here's my entry (and yes, I had a bit of fun writing that description): https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/talimens.

A shoutout to Jasper at pineislandgames.com for publishing some great blog posts about game design and behind the scenes look at things like manufacturing. His most recent post is about manufacturing some unique-looking elements for a high-end pledge.

One from the virtual archives: Back in 2015, Tommy Maranges, the co-designer of Secret Hitler, wrote a great post about how many cards went into the policy deck, and balancing that.

Random picture of the week

OK, so this one's not from a thrift store, but from a chain of toy stores here in England. I don't know how it plays, but since it's Hasbro, I'm fascinated by just how much life a near-100-year-old IP still has. It knows the game can overstay its welcome, and has made a version for people with that specific objection.

Got a question about game design you'd like answered? Find an amazing new resource that would help fellow game designers? Reply to this email and share =)

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!