Last week, I got to play Stronghold for the first time. I liked it, more than I thought I was going to, although I think there may be some question over its long-term replay value. It wouldn’t be fair to reflect further on the game after one play, but it is entirely fair to reflect on the board art. The Stronghold board is both striking to look at, and entirely functional in terms of allowing players to easily access and digest all the information they need to play. This is, sadly a relatively rare combination.
One of the things I enjoy about board games over computer games, and indeed the experience of playing a board game in reality rather than electronically, is the simple tactile pleasure of handling pieces and appreciating art. Maybe it’s the miniatures gamer in me, but those little things make a big difference. It’s one thing to co-ordinate at Zerg rush in Starcraft, but quite another to pull off the same tactic successfully with little plastic Zerglings you can pick up, feel, press into your skin, hold into the air as part of a victory celebration.
But boardgames have a difficult balancing act required on top of visually stimulating and appealing design, one which is shared, curiously, with everyday household kitchen items. What, you might well ask, does a game have in common with a kettle, or a toaster? Well the answer is that both are supposed to look nice within a number of constraints set by their physical function. Kettles have to be roughly jug-shaped so they can hold water, toasters need to contain toast, and designers have to abide by these basic functions whilst also making them look good on your countertop.
That’s harder than it sounds. If you’re shopping for a new kettle or toaster, how many do you feel really engage you with their visual design? Board games have the same problem: we expect them to look good, but we also want them to be quick to set up and put away, and to ensure we have all the information we need to make good decisions and enjoy the theme while we play at our fingertips, often when all the components are spread out over a wide area. That’s a tough ask. It’s difficult enough to make the information needed available at a glance on a single card, let alone an entire game. And very few games indeed manage to do both this and remain visually appealing.
Games designers, thankfully. can cut corners more than engineers. Often we put up with fudged designs in which we can get everything we need, but only at the cost of a little more effort and annoyance than we’d ideally like. For my money, the best-looking board game ever is Napoleon’s Triumph with it’s stunning recreation of the sort of map an 18th century commander might well use to track the course of a battle. And it doesn’t have a lot of information needed to allow the players to plot their tactics. However, one each space side, across which opposing forces line up to do battle, there is printed a little symbol which tells you what kinds of units suffer a penalty attacking across that direction. They’re clear enough on the board. But as formations move they obscure these important symbols, and once combat is joined, the units involved sit on top of the symbol on each side. So whenever you want to see the symbol on a side where there are units sitting (which is often), they have to be removed, the symbol inspected and the pieces replaced neatly. It works, and it’s a great game, and a wonderful looking one. But the visual design impairs its usability as a game.
There are other visually beautiful games games that are less appealing from an informational point of view. War of the Ring springs to mind, for example. Games that are more successful in balancing the two tend to be those in which there’s not so much information to track. Claustrophobia and Cadwallon are a fine examples. But of course that’s not a wide-ranging solution to the problem: we want games that are complex and challenging as well as lighter fare and in such games, as the amount of information involved rises, so does the need to display it in a clear and accessible manner for all the players, and so do the problems in doing so effectively, an unfortunate Catch-22 situation.
The issue, and the number of games that fall short of the mark, has spawned a popular cottage industry in free fan-made play aids to try and improve the situation. Many are, as you might expect, pretty poor although you have to give credit to the authors for t least trying, rather than just complaining about it like I am. One notable example that bucks the trend is the work of Peter Gifford, better known as UniversalHead. As a professional graphic designer and a lover of games, he understands the peculiar problems in communication and visual art that games represent and has developed a fine skill at overcoming them. Given the popularity - and effectiveness - of his player aids, I’m surprised work in visual design for games hasn’t been more forthcoming for him than Tales of the Arabian Nights, Prophecy and a few other lesser known games.
But it hasn’t. And I can’t help but wonder if that doesn’t indicate that this issue is held in relatively low regard by publishers, who are more concerned with getting exciting looking, visually appealing product out of the door and onto the shelves to entice people to buy, worrying about playability as a secondary problems. As it stands, whatever the reason, Stronghold remains sadly rare as a game with beautiful components which actually aid rather than impede the complex information flow of the game, where it should be the norm.
Communications Intercepted
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Yeah, modular boards are a mess for a number of reasons. More on that subject soon.
I'm glad to see usability getting more attention, and one of the issues I'd throw into the conversation is fading eyesight. One of the things I do when I play games now is count how many times I have to switch between looking over and looking through my reading glasses. Card-driven games are the worst, expecially when they move fonts down to five-point in order to get meaningless art onto 75% of the card surface. Nightfall is a complete hassle for me with cards all over the table, all facing different ways.
I'll tell you what Matt -- I don't think most Euro or Ameritrash board games have a long enough develpment cycle or budget to go through multiple iterations of the game board. Wargames with their interminable P500 cycle do, but I'd be curious to know how long the artists have the project in hand in the other genres. Getting it right takes iterations. There's good heuristics for usability, but to make sure they work the way they're intended (as in Napoleon's Triumph's overlay problem) you need to have all the pieces in place to discover unforseen issues. I'd wager NT's artist had no understanding that the pieces would overlay during development.
Valor & Victory's designer Barry Doyle is trying to figure out how to better convey Line of Sight on his maps. When displaying built up areas it's almost impossible to make rules that clearly delineate it, but embedding the information into the map itself is very hard as well. It's not a trivial issue by any means.
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I've been valuing usability a lot more in board game visual design. I recently made a remark to someone that I think the deluxe edition of Twilight Struggle is one of the my favorite games, graphically. Everything I need to know is up there, the game looks really good, and the components themselves look good too. There are a lot of other GMT games that accomplish this as well.
As far as modular boards go, I don't think anything has yet beaten Settlers of Catan for a sharp-looking game that is completely user-friendly. A big part of that is the little player aids, which are indeed necessary for new players but are instantly understandable.
Another one that belongs in the hall of fame at least is Merchants & Marauders, which I played last night for the first time in several months. What a beautiful game, so full of style and nice components. And for such a complex game, the components and player aid and board all streamline it to the point of being very accessible.
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KingPut wrote:...and will never have the stunning complete look that stand alone boards have....
Space Hulk 3rd EditionQuote:...modular boards you won't probably won't have as much player information on the board game itself...
Earth Reborn
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Victoria Cross II (not modular) does a great job with line of sight. Each zone lists which other zones you can see into. Clear as day.
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Jeff White wrote:Victoria Cross II (not modular) does a great job with line of site. Each zone lists which other zones you can see into. Clear as day.
That's what I recommended to Doyle, either embedding the information into the map edges with color or text or creating a second copy of the map with the information displayed that could be used as a sort of overlay. But with a lot of regions it's tough. Victoria Cross II has big regions with a lot of room for text and not many of them. I'll bet they're still covered by the chits though.
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Thanks for the kind words Matt. I do a game job now and again - the last two were Ninjato and the soon-to-be-released Aztlan - and could probably do more, but the issue isn't so much lack of offers as modest budgets for the amount of hours required to do them. As a professional graphic designer, most of my work is websites, corporate identity, packaging etc - jobs that have larger budgets and take far less time to do than boardgames. I'd be very happy if I could do creative boardgame design exclusively, but unfortunately I can't afford to.
As for the rules summaries, I see them as a separate discipline to boardgame design because they're not really about visual communication, but about summarising rules text in the most efficient way possible. Perhaps some games would benefit by including these in the box, but I guess since I'm usually doing them for free and making them publically available, there's no incentive to pay me for them! Still, I very rarely get offers for free games in return or anything like that. Oh well! (sniff ... maudlin self-pity).
Anyway, while I agree that boardgame design has a lot of little specific design issues that must be kept in mind (some of which I've forgotten myself - the reversed-out text on the Tales of Arabian NIghts cards is a decision I'm not too proud of!), in the end it's just another form of visual communication (a better term than 'graphic design').
So the aim is to make something that works and is beautiful, with function and form feeding off and informing each other. Go too far either way, or get the combination wrong, and the result is communication that is not as effective as it could be. It's the perfect combination of both that makes the most memorable design (so too with industrial design and designing a kettle). So to me boardgame design, with its strong emphasis on mechanics and theme and the interplay between the two, is a perfect example of the challenges of creating quality visual communication.
But I think the really unique thing about designing for games (and working with talented illustrators, who really bring the design alive) is having the luxury of attempting to capture and convey some of that indefinable sense of wonder that most of us boardgamers tap into when we play games.
(PS One of the worst boards for my money is both editions of Horus Heresy - both simply don't provide enough space for units in the palace, and the FFG edition compounds the problem with plastic pieces and a 3D palace insert - a classic example of ignoring function in favour of aesthetics).
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UniversalHead wrote:As for the rules summaries, I see them as a separate discipline to boardgame design because they're not really about visual communication, but about summarising rules text in the most efficient way possible.
Think you're being overly modest there. How is summarising things in an efficient way not visual communication? Different sides of the same coin, I'd say.
UniversalHead wrote:So the aim is to make something that works and is beautiful, with function and form feeding off and informing each other. Go too far either way, or get the combination wrong, and the result is communication that is not as effective as it could be. It's the perfect combination of both that makes the most memorable design (so too with industrial design and designing a kettle). So to me boardgame design, with its strong emphasis on mechanics and theme and the interplay between the two, is a perfect example of the challenges of creating quality visual communication.Yes, it's a particularly interesting conundrum.
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How is summarising things in an efficient way not visual communication? Different sides of the same coin, I'd say.
A summary is an exercise using language and writing skills. Visual communication is about color, space, layout, typography, etc. :)
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UniversalHead wrote:How is summarising things in an efficient way not visual communication? Different sides of the same coin, I'd say.
A summary is an exercise using language and writing skills. Visual communication is about color, space, layout, typography, etc. :)Ah but, laying out that summary - especially if it's substantive and text-dense - in a manner that allows quick and easy location of required information is a visual thing. Which you manage to achieve in most of your player aids.
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Great to see an article (and discussion) on this topic.
Here's my take:
Right now I think there's a problem of players (and some publishers) not distinguishing between illustrations and graphic design at the cost of the latter and as consequence we arrive at worse playability. Of course this is connected to other problems, like publishers trying to get the customers what they all think they want (but we know better, ehem...), and then the overall impression that visual part of a game and the rules part and not really that connected, when indeed I believe that it take good interconnection of the two in order for a game (rules?) to deliver the best gaming experience it can.
Illustrations and graphic design serve two different functions
- Illustrations are on one hand eye candy, they're there to make you buy the game and make people play the game (nongamers in particular will tend to pick better looking game, whatever that means). Or to say it in a different way: it serve the function of a spectacle.
- The second function of illustrations is immersiveness: trying to hint at and to help players get into the right kind of atmosphere that the game needs in order to deliver what it does best (specifically if the game tries with light hearted / humorous approach)
- Graphic design serves another function, that of user interface that tries to (a) help players learn the game and (b) then play the game with as minimal interference as possible. This means: a)underlining the rules structure with highlights and player aids and easily understandable iconography, b)making all crucial informations visible and easily discernible.[to be continued with specific examples]
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All I know is that Universal Head is awesome. His site is awesome. His game references are awesome.
If you look up awesome in a paperback dictionary, your iPad spontaneously turns on, irrespective of battery state, and Safari goes directly to Headless Hollow.
The only thing that would make him and the site more awesome, if that is even possible, would be if a reference sheet for Strange Aeons (www.strange-aeons.ca) would magically appear. Were that to happen, though, I expect that it will bring about the collapse of our sun as it bows to the brilliance of Universal Head.
That is all. Carry on.
One thing I've heard publishers, designers and gamer debate about is stand alone boards vs. modular boards. Modular boards are an easy way and low cost way to create replayabilty in games. This is why you'll probably play M44 more times than Napoleon's Triump. However, modular boards require additional set up time and will never have the stunning complete look that stand alone boards have. Also, with modular boards you won't probably won't have as much player information on the board game itself.