Five 🧩Pieces To Explain The Board Games

We need to understand the nature of the Board Game to talk or classify or create a Board Game. Let me explain further. In order to do it, I’m going to describe the Board Game like a composition of five pieces. These are intended to be interchangeable for recreating a new board game.

Fictional universe

the Board Game is like an autonomous mini-world that is disrupted by players to achieve their goals. Except the players help the system to live, unlike in video games! This universe is composed of three pieces.

1 — The engine ⚙️

The engine is a set of generic rules to describe the behaviour of each possible entity. In our real-world, it is like four fundamental forces of nature.

2 — The microcosm 🌎

The microcosm is a set of entities that implement the engine. In fact, the entities are characters, locations, objects. Moreover, they are described by properties to apply the generic engine rules…

3 — The background 🎭

The background is the context of the microcosm: geographical, political, epoch… Therefore this piece is optional like in the abstract Board Games.

We have already spoken about the stage and the puppets, now we are going to talk about the strings to manipulate the microcosm!

Physical-world

To interact with the fictional microcosm, we need two additional pieces.

4 — The media🎲

The media used for board games is concrete stuff: card, dice, token, meeple…! this is the representation of the microcosm to play.

5 — The script🎯

The goal of the last piece is to motivate the players! Indeed it is not fun to obverse the microcosm! So the script gives aims to the players.

Bonus — The play️ 🎁

Now the Board Game is completely defined. We can play! In that respect, each play is different. Moreover, the players can imagine for themselves a background beyond the author. And so we could consider the play like a bonus piece.

Conclusion

Actually, in this model — Five 🧩Pieces To Explain The Board Games — many cases in the Board Game industry are described:

• Many scripts are added to change the purposes of players.
• Wargames reuse the equipment with a different engine.
• Editors change the equipment to create a pocket version.
• Authors reuse the engine to implement a new game with a different background…

This sounds nice. I think this model is not Board Game exclusive. It could be used for movies, books: just the media is different! And the other obvious application is the video game and generally speaking the software development. Each case is a representation or modelisation or abstraction of the reality with stories and user experiences.

This brings me to think about the bridge between the dramaturgy and the board game: a good Board Game is a good story!