Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design (Second Edition) PDF

A crucial testimony to how issues of power and exploitation are negotiated and used while researching vulnerable groups and how more consideration of ethical issues turns the researched into co-researchers. An outstanding and thought-provoking book that provides an exceptionally powerful addition...

A crucial testimony to how issues of power and exploitation are negotiated and used while researching vulnerable groups and how more consideration of ethical issues turns the researched into co-researchers. An outstanding and thought-provoking book that provides an exceptionally powerful addition to the scarce literature on the needs of refugee professionals and the language teachers who work with them, whilst enhancing understanding of intercul- tural communication. Dr. Mohammed Ateek, Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linuistics Birkbeck, University of London This book tells a success story about refugees. It is a much-needed addition to the literature on language and intercultural communication which shows, through action research and an ethically motivated agenda, how displaced people can be helped to succeed in a new society by accessing key intercul- tural and linguistic skills that will help them integrate into the workplace. We need positive stories about refugees and asylum seekers. Hans J. Ladegaard, Professor and Head, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University  Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design Second Edition  Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms Second Edition Geoffrey Engelstein Isaac Shalev Second edition published 2022 by CRC Press 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742 and by CRC Press 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC First edition published by CRC Press 2019 Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use. 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For works that are not available on CCC please contact mpkbookspermissions​@tandf​.co​​.uk Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-01583-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01581-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-17918-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184 Typeset in Adobe Garamond pro by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To Susan, for a wonderful 40 years, and to our children, Brian and Sydney, for always challenging my strategies across the game table and my ideas across the kitchen table. Geoff Much of the work of this second edition was done in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to everyone who provided medical, food, and other essential services in this difficult and dangerous time. Thank you for helping us get back to the game table. Isaac  Contents ўў List of Abbreviations xxiii Foreword xxv Acknowledgments xxix Author Bio xxxi Introduction xxxiii Introduction to the Second Edition xxxvii 1 Game Structure 1 STR-01 Competitive Games 2 Discussion 2 STR-02 Cooperative Games 4 Discussion 4 STR-03 Team-Based Games 8 Discussion 8 STR-04 Solo Games 12 Discussion 12 STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games 15 Discussion 15 STR-06 Single-Loser Games 18 Discussion 18 STR-07 Traitor Games 20 Discussion 20 ix x C ontents STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games 22 Discussion 22 STR-09 Score-and-Reset Games 25 Discussion 25 STR-10 Legacy Games 27 Discussion 27 2 Turn Order and Structure 31 Terminology 32 TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order 34 Discussion 34 TRN-02 Stat Turn Order 36 Discussion 36 TRN-03 Bid Turn Order 38 Discussion 38 TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order 40 Discussion 40 TRN-05 Claim Turn Order 43 Discussion 43 TRN-06 Pass Order 47 Discussion 47 TRN-07 Real-Time 50 Discussion 50 TRN-08 Punctuated Real-Time 53 Discussion 53 TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection 55 Discussion 55 TRN-10 Role Order 57 Discussion 57 TRN-11 Random Turn Order 59 Discussion 59 TRN-12 Action Timer 61 Discussion 61 TRN-13 Time Track 64 Discussion 64 TRN-14 Passed Action Token 66 Discussion 66  C ontents xi TRN-15 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases 69 Discussion 69 TRN-16 Lose a Turn 72 Discussion 72 TRN-17 Interrupts 75 Discussion 75 3 Actions 77 ACT-01 Action Points 78 Discussion 78 ACT-02 Action Drafting 81 Discussion 81 ACT-03 Action Retrieval 84 Discussion 84 ACT-04 Action/Event 87 Discussion 87 ACT-05 Command Cards 90 Discussion 90 ACT-06 Action Queue 92 Discussion 92 ACT-07 Shared Action Queue 95 Discussion 95 ACT-08 Follow 97 Discussion 97 ACT-09 Order Counters 99 Discussion 99 ACT-10 Rondel 102 Discussion 102 ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions 104 Discussion 104 ACT-12 Variable Player Powers 106 Discussion 106 ACT-13 Once-Per-Game Abilities 108 Discussion 108 ACT-14 Advantage Token 110 Discussion 110 xii C ontents ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking 112 Discussion 112 ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Track Bonuses 115 Discussion 115 ACT-17 Events 118 Discussion 118 ACT-18 Narrative Choice 120 Discussion 120 ACT-19 Bingo 123 Discussion 123 ACT-20 Layering 125 Discussion 125 ACT-21 Slide/Push 130 Definition 130 Discussion 130 ACT-22 Matching 134 Discussion 134 ACT-23 Drawing 137 Definition 137 Discussion 137 4 Resolution 141 RES-01 High Number 142 Discussion 142 RES-02 Stat Check 145 Discussion 145 RES-03 Critical Hits and Failures 147 Discussion 147 RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table 149 Discussion 149 RES-05 Die Icons 152 Discussion 152 RES-06 Card Play 155 Discussion 155 RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors 157 Discussion 157  C ontents xiii RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma 159 Discussion 159 RES-09 Alternate Removal 162 Discussion 162 RES-10 Physical Action 164 Discussion 164 RES-11 Static Capture 167 Discussion 167 RES-12 Enclosure 169 Discussion 169 RES-13 Minimap 171 Discussion 171 RES-14 Force Commitment 174 Discussion 174 RES-15 Voting 177 Discussion 177 RES-16 Player Judge 180 Discussion 180 RES-17 Targeted Clues 182 Discussion 182 RES-18 Tiebreakers 184 Discussion 184 RES-19 Dice Selection 187 Discussion 187 RES-20 Action Speed 189 Discussion 189 RES-21 Rerolling and Locking 191 Discussion 191 RES-22 Kill Steal 193 Discussion 193 RES-23 Hot Potato 195 Discussion 195 RES-24 Flicking 198 Discussion 198 RES-25 Stacking and Balancing 201 Discussion 201 RES-26 Neighbor Scope 208 Discussion 208 xiv C ontents 5 Game End and Victory 213 VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State 214 Discussion 214 VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions 217 Discussion 217 VIC-03 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points 219 Discussion 219 VIC-04 Victory Points as a Resource 221 Discussion 221 VIC-05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points 223 Discussion 223 VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses 225 Discussion 225 VIC-07 Race 227 Discussion 227 VIC-08 Player Elimination 229 Discussion 229 VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds 232 Discussion 232 VIC-10 Exhausting Resources 234 Discussion 234 VIC-11 Completing Targets 236 Discussion 236 VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events 238 Discussion 238 VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time 240 Discussion 240 VIC-14 Connections 242 Discussion 242 VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/Sudden Death 244 Discussion 244 VIC-16 Finale 246 Discussion 246 VIC-17 King of the Hill 248 Discussion 248 VIC-18 Catch the Leader 250 Discussion 250  C ontents xv VIC-19 Tug of War 252 Discussion 252 VIC-20 Highest Lowest 255 Discussion 255 VIC-21 Ordering 257 Definition 257 6 Uncertainty 261 UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing 263 Discussion 263 UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck 267 Discussion 267 UNC-03 Memory 271 Discussion 271 UNC-04 Hidden Roles 275 Discussion 275 UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information 280 Discussion 280 UNC-06 Communication Limits 283 Discussion 283 UNC-07 Unknown Information 286 Discussion 286 UNC-08 Hidden Information 288 Discussion 288 UNC-09 Probability Management 290 Discussion 290 UNC-10 Variable Setup 293 Discussion 293 UNC-11 Hidden Control 296 Discussion 296 UNC-12 Deduction 298 Discussion 298 UNC-13 Induction 301 Discussion 301 UNC-14 Questions and Answers 305 Discussion 305 xvi C ontents 7 Economics 307 ECO-01 Exchanging 308 Discussion 308 ECO-02 Trading 310 Discussion 310 ECO-03 Market 312 Discussion 312 ECO-04 Delayed Purchase 315 Discussion 315 ECO-05 Income 318 Discussion 318 ECO-06 Automatic Resource Growth 320 Discussion 320 ECO-07 Loans 322 Discussion 322 ECO-08 Always Available Purchases 324 Discussion 324 ECO-09 I Cut, You Choose 326 Discussion 326 ECO-10 Discounts 328 Discussion 328 ECO-11 Upgrades 330 Discussion 330 ECO-12 Random Production 332 Discussion 332 ECO-13 Investment 335 Discussion 335 ECO-14 Ownership 338 Discussion 338 ECO-15 Contracts 341 Discussion 341 ECO-16 Bribery 343 Discussion 343 ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources 345 Discussion 345 ECO-18 Negotiation 348 Discussion 348  C ontents xvii ECO-19 Alliances 350 Discussion 350 ECO-20 Resource Queue 352 Discussion 352 8 Auctions 355 AUC-01 Open Auction 357 Discussion 357 AUC-02 English Auction 359 Discussion 359 AUC-03 Turn Order Until Pass Auction 362 Discussion 362 AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction 365 Discussion 365 AUC-05 Sealed Bid with Cancellation 368 Discussion 368 AUC-06 Constrained Bidding 370 Discussion 370 AUC-07 Once-Around Auction 373 Discussion 373 AUC-08 Dutch Auction 375 Discussion 375 AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction 379 Discussion 379 AUC-10 Selection Order Bid 382 Discussion 382 AUC-11 Multiple-Lot Auction 384 Discussion 384 AUC-12 Closed-Economy Auction 387 Discussion 387 AUC-13 Reverse Auction 389 Discussion 389 AUC-14 Dexterity Auction 392 Discussion 392 AUC-15 Fixed-Placement Auction 394 Discussion 394 xviii C ontents AUC-16 Dutch Priority Auction 397 Discussion 397 AUC-17 Bids as Wagers 400 Discussion 400 AUC-18 Auction Compensation 403 Discussion 403 9 Worker Placement 407 WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement 409 Discussion 409 WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types 411 Discussion 411 WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers 413 Discussion 413 WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice 415 Discussion 415 WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings 417 Discussion 417 WPL-06 Single Workers 420 Discussion 420 WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards 422 Discussion 422 WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order 424 Discussion 424 10 Movement 429 MOV-01 Tessellation 431 Discussion 431 MOV-02 Roll and Move 435 Discussion 435 MOV-03 Pattern Movement 437 Discussion 437  C ontents xix MOV-04 Movement Points 440 Discussion 440 MOV-05 Resource to Move 442 Discussion 442 MOV-06 Measurement 444 Discussion 444 MOV-07 Different Dice 446 Discussion 446 MOV-08 Drift 447 Discussion 447 MOV-09 Impulse 448 Discussion 448 MOV-10 Programmed Movement 450 Discussion 450 MOV-11 Relative Position 453 Discussion 453 MOV-12 Mancala 456 Discussion 456 MOV-13 Chaining 458 Discussion 458 MOV-14 Bias 460 Discussion 460 MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units 463 Discussion 463 MOV-16 Map Addition 465 Discussion 465 MOV-17 Map Reduction 467 Discussion 467 MOV-18 Map Deformation 469 Discussion 469 MOV-19 Move Through Deck 471 Discussion 471 MOV-20 Movement Template 472 Discussion 472 MOV-21 Pieces as Map 475 Discussion 475 xx C ontents MOV-22 Multiple Maps 477 Discussion 477 MOV-23 Shortcuts 479 Discussion 479 MOV-24 Hidden Movement 480 Discussion 480 11 Area Control 485 ARC-01 Absolute Control 486 Discussion 486 ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence 488 Discussion 488 ARC-03 Troop Types 491 Discussion 491 ARC-04 Territories and Regions 494 Discussion 494 ARC-05 Area Parameters 496 Discussion 496 ARC-06 Force Projection 499 Discussion 499 ARC-07 Zone of Control 501 Discussion 501 ARC-08 Line of Sight 503 Discussion 503 12 Set Collection 507 SET-01 Set Valuation 509 Discussion 509 SET-02 Tile-Laying 513 Discussion 513 SET-03 Grid Coverage 516 Discussion 516  C ontents xxi SET-04 Network Building 519 Discussion 519 SET-05 Combo Abilities 523 Discussion 523 13 Card Mechanisms 527 CAR-01 Trick-Taking 529 Discussion 529 CAR-02 Ladder Climbing 532 Discussion 532 CAR-03 Melding 534 Discussion 534 CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion 536 Discussion 536 CAR-05 Deck Building 539 Discussion 539 CAR-06 Drafting 543 Discussion 543 CAR-07 Deck Construction 548 Discussion 548 CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards 552 Definition 552 Discussion 552 CAR-09 Tags 556 Discussion 556 Game Index 561 Index 581  Abbreviations ўў AI Artificial Intelligence CRT Combat Results Table FIFO First In, First Out KotH King of the Hill LIFO Last In, First Out PD Prisoner’s Dilemma RPG Role Playing Game VP Victory Point xxiii  Foreword Eric Zimmerman ўў A game is a language. In a way, when you sit down with someone to play Chess, Poker, or Cosmic Encounter, you are beginning a conversation. Each move you make in the game is a way for you to express yourself to your partner—a way for you to make meaning. Every reckless aggression and coy bluff, every greedy power grab, and defensive stall for time is a word, a phrase, and a statement in the language of the game. These conversations we have with each other, as we play games, can be awkward and confusing. Or deliciously cruel. Or wildly creative and unex- pectedly beautiful. The kind of conversation that tickles parts of your mind that you didn’t know were there, the kind of conversation that sticks with you, which turns acquaintances into bitter rivals and later into the best of friends. But a game is not just a language. It’s more complicated than that. The moves we make as we play are a lan- guage built on top of yet another language. Beneath the meaning we express through the moves of the game is a kind of hidden grammar. You move a pawn, pass a ball to a teammate, or maneuver your virtual avatar: all of them are statements made through gameplay. But what are the structures that make those meanings possible? The rules that permit action? The blood and bones and spirit that animate the body of the game as it is played? That, exactly, is the subject of Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design. So prepare yourself. Between these covers lies the hidden grammar of games. The structures behind the structures. The DNA of fun. This book is a dictionary for the secret language of games. You see, although games and play are ancient human endeavors (the Egyptian game Senet is at least 5,500 years old), it’s only in the twentieth xxv xxvi Foreword century that games shifted from folk culture to authored media. And as tabletop games, role-playing games, and video games have become industries of their own, we’ve done our best to understand them. If you are reading this book, you are likely to be a serious game player. Like many others, you play games, discuss them, dissect them, and some- times even design new ones. And for many years, many smart designers, crit- ics, players, and scholars have been searching for the right way to talk about games, to understand how they work, and to figure out how best to approach the creation of new designs. That’s why Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design is so significant. The incredibly detailed pages that follow, pages that crack open the inner compo- nents of tabletop games, constitute a kind of Rosetta Stone for game grammar. Make no mistake. This book is a big deal. Building on their own impressive accomplishments as designers, their relentless intellectual curiosity, and seemingly limitless connoisseurship of analog and digital games, Geoff and Isaac have put together a tremendously rigorous, wonderfully insightful, and astoundingly accessible encyclopedia of the elements that make tabletop games tick. Why is this project so important? As someone who has studied, designed, and taught game design for 25 years, this volume is the sort of book I real- ize now I always needed. A manual for game mechanics. A foundation for structural analysis. An inspiration for new ideas. A sourcebook for teaching design. On its surface, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design might seem like a deeply geeky endeavor, an obsession with rules and structures. The kind of overly formalist ludology that has (rightfully) gotten into so much trouble in recent years. And in part it is. But look deeper. In games, what seems like a pure abstract structure is inseparable from human experience. Chapter 4, on resolving game actions (those things players do to make meaning), begins in statistics and the mathematics of randomness. But then, it moves into the thorny terrain of the prisoner’s dilemma, engaging with psychology and diplomacy, and even ethics—structures that help shape how people treat one another. Reading any one of the dozens of modules in this book is like lifting up a big mossy rock in the forest. Underneath, there’s an unexpected universe of complexity, a miniature ecosystem of moving parts, just waiting to be discovered. The language of games is everywhere.  Foreword xxvii All of this gushing praise is well deserved. This book is a landmark in the study of games. But don’t let that fool you. As enchanting as it is, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design is not a magic bullet that is going to suddenly let you understand exactly how every game works, to help you become a tournament winner, or to guarantee that your next design will be a hit. The hidden grammars that this book describes, the structures behind the structures, are only part of the picture. Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design doesn’t investigate how games tell stories, impact the lives of their players, embody ideological values, fit into larger cultural landscapes, or even make a profit. That’s just not what this book is about. And that’s perfectly all right. Its titanic strength comes from its incredibly tight focus on the funda- mental elements of games. Despite these limitations, is this book still useful? Hell yes. I was recently trying to design a bidding structure for a game and found myself jaw-drop- pingly enlightened, reading Chapter 8 on Auctions, which details no less than 16 distinct bidding structures. Without a doubt, I will use this text in my classes. I am planning, for example, to assign a project by having each student turn to two random pages in this book and then create a game that combines both mechanics. But there’s more. The insights and ideas in Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design can be applied outside of games. How can we resolve an argument between two entrenched opposing posi- tions? How should a winner in a multicandidate election be determined? What economic incentives lead to the best distribution of wealth? What’s the right way to ensure fairness for all? These are dilemmas of modern society. And they are also the kinds of problems with which game designers wrestle on a daily basis. Believe it or not, the answers to these deeply important ques- tions might begin to be answered by looking at the structures of this book. Lastly, games are beautiful. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that this book is valid only because it is useful. It doesn’t matter that Building Blocks of Tabletop Games might be used to help teach classes or even make society better. This book is important because it is a heartfelt and soul-enriching love letter to games. It is a lens to help us see the games we adore with fresh eyes. An advanced seminar in the complexity of systems. A spell book filled with recipes for creative play. Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design unpacks the mystery of how these nerdy, knotty collections of rules—boxed up with cards, dice, xxviii Foreword and colorful tokens—produce something which is, in fact, the very opposite of rules. For those ready to appreciate the beauty of games, the joy leaps off of every page. Isaac and Geoff have given us whole new ways to have conversations with the people and the games we love. Happy reading. Eric Zimmerman Game Designer and Arts Professor NYU Game Center New York City, April 2019  Acknowledgments ўў Thank you to Erik Zimmerman and Doug Maynard for your excellent feed- back and insightful comments on the manuscript. The readers thank you even more! Rob Daviau, Tim Fowers, Mark Herman, and Sen-Foong Lim provided key early enthusiastic support, without which we would not have embarked on this project. This work would also not exist if not for those who blazed this trail and whose writings have shaped our thinking. Greg Costikyan’s I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games (Tampere University Press, 2002) was Isaac’s introduction to the world of critical thought about games. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1994) by Erich Gamma, John Vlissides, Ralph Johnson, and Richard Helm showed Geoff how design concepts could be broken down and built back up again. Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003) by Katie Salen and Erik Zimmerman was another foundational text. We would also like to recognize the books, lectures, and blog posts by Jesse Schell, Bruno Faidutti, and Mark Rosewater, who continue to contribute to the growing body of thinking about games and game design. Daniel Solis created delightful diagrams that illustrate each mechanism. His ability to concisely capture complex concepts is uncanny, and this book benefits greatly from his participation. We are also indebted to Donald Dennis, Erik Dewey, Seth Jaffee, TC Petty III, Dirk Knemeyer, Adrienne Ezell, Sen-Foong Lim, Ben Begeal, Peter C. Hayward, Raph Koster, James Ernst, Eric Lang, Ralph Anderson, Stephanie Straw, Nicole Kline, Anthony Amato, Jr., Gil Hova, Ryan Sturm, xxix xxx Acknowledgments Mike Fitzgerald, Tom Vasel, Eric Summerer, all the fans and listeners of the On Board Games and Ludology podcasts, and our board game Twitter family. This work is, if nothing else, a memento of our relationships, conversations, and friendships. Thank you. Finally, Sean Connelly and Jessica Vega at Taylor & Francis Group were absolutely stellar to work with and deftly handled two demanding authors.  Author Bio ўў Geoffrey Engelstein is the designer of many tabletop games, including The Ares Project, the Space Cadets series, The Dragon & Flagon, The Expanse, and more. He is the host of Ludology, a biweekly podcast about game design in its seventh year, and a ten-year contributor to the Dice Tower podcast with his biweekly “GameTek” segments discussing math, science, and psychology of games. He has published GameTek: The Math and Science of Gaming (2018), which was republished as GameTek: What Games Can Teach Us about Life, the Universe and Ourselves by Harper-Collins in early 2019. He is on the faculty of the NYU Game Center as an adjunct professor for board game design and has been invited to speak about game design at PAX, Gen Con, Metatopia, and the Game Developers Conference. When not talking about designing or playing games, Geoff runs Mars International, a product development firm focusing on consumer and medical device engineering. He has a BS in physics and a BS in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Isaac Shalev is the designer of board games including Seikatsu, Waddle, Ravenous River, and Show & Tile. He is also the co-host of On Board Games, one of the longest-running and most-respected tabletop game podcasts. Isaac also writes about game design at www​.kindfortress​.com, and his series on tabletop game design patterns is a favorite among game designers. Isaac’s eclectic work in games includes advising publishers, editing rulebooks, con- sulting on game-based learning and gamification, lecturing about game design, and running board gaming fundraisers. When he’s not playing games, making games, or talking about games, Isaac runs Sage70, Inc., a data strategy consultancy that works exclusively with nonprofit organiza- tions. Isaac lives in Cary, North Carolina, with his wife, three kids, and a dog who is a very good girl. xxxi  Introduction Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev ўў There is no better time to be a tabletop board gamer. Hobbyists will debate whether the mid-1990s, which saw the rise of The Settlers of Catan and Magic: The Gathering, was the golden age of gaming or whether today is that golden age. No matter what your personal view may be, there is no doubt that mod- ern tabletop gaming is in a period of exceptional fertility and is flourishing. Games have come a long way since humans invented dice, pawns, and boards, and archeologists regularly turn up these artifacts at sites dating back 6,000+ years ago. The standard deck of cards has its beginnings over 1,000 years ago, and with the advent of the printing press, games became an ever- cheaper and more ubiquitous luxury. The history of the last century or so of games encompasses mass-market titles including Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, and Trivial Pursuit, as well as the emergence of a whole new genre of table- top games. The genre is so new that a single name has yet to meaningfully describe it, though suggestions have included hobby games, designer games, and other strange terms like TGOO (“these games of ours”). No matter what you call them, today’s games feature higher levels of player agency, meaning- ful decisions, and substantially improved production values and offer some- thing entirely new to players as compared to mass-market games. Others have written about how war games developed into modern games in America and the countervailing rise of a European design sensibility in the post-World War II period that rejected war as a setting and direct conflict as a game dynamic. Our goal here is different. We’d like to address not how games evolved but how games are designed. Even as gaming itself has taken flight, and even as thousands of new games are published each year to an ever-expanding audience of gamers, one xxxiii xxxiv I ntroduction critical aspect of gaming remains in a nascent stage: the art and craft of game design itself. Games have taken great advantage of modern communication networks and methods to spread, but we encounter challenges in spreading the knowledge and skills needed to design these games. In substantial part, this is because we do not yet have a strong shared vocabulary for discussing design. In creative industries, from literature to films to video games, practitio- ners, participants, and critics develop a shared language, a common reference library, and a set of skills, approaches, and techniques for their fields. Film directors learn the difference between a jump cut and a dolly zoom and how different technical approaches produce different effects. Audiences and crit- ics follow along, recognizing homages and allusions, and appreciating varia- tions and innovations. Tabletop game design is at a somewhat earlier stage, and this book is our attempt to begin to build a broader game design vocabulary and body of knowledge. Rather than attempting to formalize a specific game design lan- guage—an approach that is both daunting and perhaps premature—we’ve chosen to look at the building blocks of games themselves: the mechanisms or, if you prefer, the mechanics, as they’re also frequently called by gamers. (We’ll use the terms interchangeably through this book.) The second-best piece of advice any new designer gets is to play more games. (The first piece of advice, by the way, is to create a physical prototype as quickly as possible.) Playing more games helps designers learn and grow by seeing, first-hand, a large variety of possible game experiences and mechan- ics. This is no different from any other creative field: every artist is enriched by experiencing the art and craft of other creators. Yet games, like books, can take a long time to experience, to master, and to fully appreciate, particularly for games that require large player counts, have long play times, or demand many repeated plays. In an effort to accelerate the learning process, we present this book, which is a compendium of game mechanisms, grouped together themati- cally, that map the territory of modern gaming. Our goal is not to give a list of steps or instructions for how to design a game. To use a cook- ing metaphor, this is not a recipe book but rather a catalog of ingredi- ents and how they can enrich a dish. We define close to 200 different mechanisms and variants, spanning topics like Movement, Game End and Victory, Economics, and more. Within each topic, we discuss how differ- ent mechanisms create different player experiences, what types of games  I ntroduction xxxv these mechanisms give rise to, common pitfalls in implementing them, and even some of the physical user-interface issues raised by these mecha- nisms. With each mechanism, we present illustrative examples and games for further study, running the gamut from modern classics to contem- porary new releases, as well as some lesser-known titles that nonetheless have much to teach. A good resource for learning more about the included examples is the website BoardGameGeek​.co​m, which contains a massive game database featuring images and rulebooks that can assist in further inquiry. Our hope is that this book serves many purposes. New designers can cer- tainly benefit from reading this book and taking in many mechanisms in a short period of time, but this book can also be used as a reference. Whether you’re an experienced designer looking for an overview of auctions, for exam- ple, or a gamer interested in exploring the worker placement genre, this book offers an easy way to review the topic and learn more. We feel this book will be of use to educators, students, professional and amateur designers, and anyone interested in reading about game design. As important as what this book is, is what it is not: a comprehensive listing of all game mechanisms. Though we strove to be broad and inclu- sive, an exhaustive compilation of all game mechanisms was never our intention and is arguably impossible. While we do brush lightly on top- ics like narrative, dexterity, and pantomime, for example, there remains a lot of unmapped terrains. Similarly, while we do sometimes bring in examples from war-gaming, miniatures gaming, classic card games, and collectible card games, we largely center ourselves on modern board and card games. These lines are certainly artificial, and we have not sought to put forward a definition of what games are in drawing the lines as we did. Rather, we are eager to look to a future that continues to stretch, experi- ment with, and reconsider what games can be in light of new innovations in gaming. We also do not mean to imply in any way that the well of new mecha- nisms has run dry. The opportunity for innovation in gaming is limitless. Our intention is to make it easier for designers to learn to design, to talk with one another about design, and to mine the existing canon of board games for insight into how to design better games. We hope this collection is useful and inspirational to designers, and we look forward to playing the next generation of their games. xxxvi I ntroduction A Note on References in This Book For your convenience, whenever we refer to another part of this book, we include a chapter reference, presented as an abbreviation. For example, the abbreviation ACT is for the chapter about Actions. A reference like ACT-02 means the second section of the Action chapter. This additional information may be helpful to you in understanding the context of the reference, even if you don’t choose to look it up right away and may help in searching for refer- ences in digital versions of this text. Introduction to the Second Edition Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev ўў As we were writing the first edition of Building Blocks, we swung back and forth between thinking it was a terrific idea and a horrible idea. Games are so varied, and the creativity and imagination that designers bring to the medium are so expansive that it seemed quixotic and hubristic for us to attempt to draw boundaries around gameplay and say here is something that is worth naming and learning about. Getting laughed out of the room was a distinct possibility. Instead, we have been overwhelmed by the support this project has received since publication and gratified that it was accepted in the manner in which it was intended—as a stepping-stone to building a common vocabulary among game designers and not an exhaustive, definitive reference. It has been excit- ing to hear from teachers who have used it to give students a good grounding in core concepts, new designers looking for a place to start, and experienced designers brainstorming and drawing connections between mechanisms they may not have considered or may have simply forgotten about. Shortly after publication, we were approached by BoardGameGeek​.co​m, the premier online database of board game information, about incorporat- ing the nomenclature of Building Blocks into their mechanism classification system. We were very pleased to work with them to develop that and also to review the classification of new games as a way to help us hone our defini- tions of certain mechanisms and identify new and overlooked mechanics, many of which have been incorporated into this new edition. We were also approached by Matt Smith and Andrew Peterson of Ferris State University, who had incorporated the mechanisms into their curric- ulum and developed a card deck to help designers brainstorm and iterate xxxvii xxxviii I ntroduction to the Second Edition through their designs. We were happy to support the project, which has since been published as The Rapid Prototyping Game by CRC Press. We are also very grateful and pleased that Building Blocks has been trans- lated into several foreign languages, with more languages on the way. Creating a common design language means reaching across and bridging many lan- guage and culture gaps, and we have been lucky to work with partners from around the world who are as passionate as we are about game design. The success of the first edition has enabled the publication of this expanded and enhanced version. We have added many mechanisms which needed to be cut from the first edition due to space constraints, as well as incorporated color photographs of game elements to better illustrate certain mechanisms. We hope that you find this new version even more useful. For those who are familiar with the first edition, these are the new mecha- nisms that have been added: ACT-19 Bingo ACT-20 Layering ACT-21 Slide/Push ACT-22 Matching ACT-23 Drawing AUC-17 Bids as Wagers AUC-18 Auction Compensation CAR-07 Deck Constructions CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards CAR-09 Tags ECO-20 Resource Queue RES-23 Hot Potato RES-24 Flicking RES-25 Stacking and Balancing RES-26 Neighbor Scope UNC-12 Deduction UNC-13 Induction UNC-14 Questions and Answers VIC-21 Ordering In addition, many of the mechanisms have been updated and expanded with new examples and considerations. We have also replaced some of the examples from the first edition in response to the revelations of unacceptable conduct and odious beliefs,  I ntroduction to the Second Edition xxxix including misogyny, violence against women, racism, homophobia, and transphobia among designers of many beloved and excellent games. When we wrote the first edition, we did not consider the impact of including these games in our discussion, and we now try to rectify that mistake. We have replaced references when we could find equivalent examples, but we did retain references that we felt we could not omit or substitute for because of their uniqueness or importance. This is an uncomfortable and imperfect compromise that we reached in consultation with a diverse group of advisers, including people directly impacted by the conduct in question. We hope we made an honorable and constructive decision, and we are grateful to every- one who guided us. This book is better thanks to their labor. Thanks again to the gaming community that has supported this project and made it a success. Isaac and Geoff  1 Game Structure ўў The first choice that designers make about a game is the game’s basic struc- ture. Who wins? Who loses? What is the overall scope of the game experi- ence? Will it be just one game or perhaps a series of hands? Maybe, the game will encompass many scenarios, with game-state information persisting from play to play? The last 20 years of tabletop gaming have brought us enormous innovation in game structures, with no signs of slowing down. Consideration of game structure raises the question of what it means to actually play the game. In a cooperative game, is the discussion among the players over which action to take the core of the gameplay, or is it the active player executing the action that is core? In games which limit communica- tion, is the main gameplay overcoming the communication limits or solving the puzzle that the game presents? Designers need to be sensitive to partici- pation issues in team games as well, because the game itself may force most of the action over to one teammate at the expense of another, which impacts player experience. An increasingly popular trend is the inclusion of multiple game structures in the same box. For example, Mage Knight includes ways to play competi- tively, cooperatively, and solo. This extends the potential audience for the game. In this chapter, we’ll consider both the traditional structures like competi- tive and team games, as well as the latest ideas in scenario-based, legacy, and consumable games. DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-1 1 2 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-01 Competitive Games Description A game with two or more players and a single winner. Discussion This is the most familiar game structure, the one we encounter as children in games like Candyland and Snakes & Ladders. Competitive games still make up the large majority of the market for tabletop games. They typically offer a symmetry of expectations: putting aside the impacts of unusual luck and skill, each player begins the game with a roughly equivalent chance of victory. When this promise is broken, the game is considered imbalanced and may even be tagged with the label “broken.” As we’ll discuss later (see “Variable Player Powers” in this chapter and “Variable Setup” in Chapter 6), players may have perfectly symmetric factions and starting conditions or highly asymmetric ones. But, in both cases, it’s important that the game offers roughly even chances of victory to each player (Illustration 1.1). In many games, there is an asymmetry that in-game balancing alone can’t solve, like the first-mover advantage in chess or the service advantage in ten- nis. Competitive games often balance these advantages through meta-struc- tures, like tournaments, that offer each player an equal number of chances to play from the advantaged position. In multiplayer games, this may be less practical. Instead, players may be offered other opportunities to balance any perceived or actual inequities, like the bidding in Bridge, betting in Poker, or the early alliances in Diplomacy.  STR-01 Competitive Games 3 Illustration 1.1 The Egyptian game Senet is one of the oldest board games known, going back to 2600 BCE. This set dates around 1350 BCE. The promise of balance in a competitive game gives rise to several related issues, like methods for determining victory and breaking ties. Tie-breaking (RES-18), in particular, is interesting because crowning a winner in a com- petitive game depends upon the game storing information that allows players to determine who played the better game. For many games, this information may not be available. Once we have to look beyond who scored the most vic- tory points or who crossed some finish line first, there may not be relevant game-state information that could allow us to reasonably determine which of the tied players played best. And yet, in competitive games, many players disdain a game that ends in shared victory. Experience-oriented designers should consider that players tend to recall how a game ended more than the rest of the play experience, and hence the designers should seek to avoid an indecisive conclusion. Sample Games Acquire (Sackson, 1964) Candyland (Abbot, 1949) Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Diplomacy (Calhamer, 1959) Senet (Unknown, ∼2600 bce) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) 4 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-02 Cooperative Games Description Players coordinate their actions to achieve a common win condition or con- ditions. Players all win or lose the game together. Discussion Quite a few games call for cooperative play among players, including team games, one-vs.-many games, role-playing games, and games with secret trai- tors. These can be viewed as belonging to a hierarchical category of coop- erative games. Some might even include solo games in this group. For our purposes, we’ll treat each of these as separate categories and limit ourselves here to “pure” cooperative games in which all players play on one side and win or lose as a group. Since 2008, when Matt Leacock released Pandemic, the genre of coop- erative tabletop games has exploded. Earlier games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Arkham Horror, and Lord of the Rings laid a foundation and enjoy enduring popularity, but Leacock started a wave of innovation in cooperative gaming that continues to reshape modern gaming a decade and more later. Cooperative gaming is accessible because it lowers barriers to entry for a game. Disparities in skill level can often make a competitive game a sour experience both for the expert and the newcomer. Complex competitive games can be intimidating to new players. Being coached by your opponent in such a game introduces some negative play dynamics because of the mis- aligned incentives of helping your opponent. The power imbalance between the players can also create awkward social dynamics. Cooperative games put  STR-02 Cooperative Games 5 players on the same team and foster comradery while allowing experienced players to help teach both the mechanics and strategy of the game, without facing conflicting incentives. For many new players, cooperative games are not only a gateway into gaming but a mainstay of their ongoing consumption of games. Cooperative games can broadly be placed into two categories: those with artificial intelligence (AI) and those without. Cooperative games with an AI, like Sentinels of the Multiverse and Mice and Mystics, feature an oppo- nent or opponents who behave according to a simple artificial intelligence, encoded by the designer. In Sentinels, the AI is driven by a deck of cards that governs the actions of the enemy villains and the players they will target. Mice has a simple algorithm that players use to control the play of enemy figures. Non-AI games like Hanabi, the revolutionary Antoine Bauza title, and Mysterium present players with a puzzle to solve and limitations on time, resources, and interaction that players must contend with. However, these games have no villain or opposing force that drives the action and actively confronts the players. Another consideration for the designer of cooperative games is keeping the difficulty consistent while scaling with a number of players. If each player has a set number of actions they may perform on their turn (as in Pandemic, for example), four players will have twice as many actions per round as two play- ers. While there are many techniques, a very common design pattern is alter- nating between a player taking a turn and the game taking a turn—basically alternating “Good thing” (player actions) with “Bad thing” (game actions). This scales naturally as the number of players increases. Another distinction between different kinds of cooperative games is whether each player retains agency over their in-game resources, actions, and choices or they seek consensus for all decisions, even if they nominally repre- sent separate in-game characters. We might call the former game a partner- ship game and the latter a collaborative one. In general, cooperative games will tend to be played collaboratively unless the rules specifically and sub- stantially impede this collaboration and force players to make independent decisions rather than build consensus. Examples include limits on commu- nications, time, and focus. For some players, collaborative play contributes to the “alpha player prob- lem,” also known as “quarterbacking,” in which some player takes control of the group discussion and decision-making and creates a negative play expe- rience by overriding other players. There are many possible reasons for the 6 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design rise of an alpha player problem, many ways that problem can manifest, and a thicket of contributory social dynamics that are beyond the scope of this work. While some players and designers believe that the alpha player problem is a group-composition problem or a problem of unshared assumptions rather than a design problem, some design choices will make a game more vulner- able to alpha player takeovers. In particular, when all players share the same information and the game state is not too complex, alpha player behavior becomes likelier. At the other end of the spectrum are games which cannot be taken over by an alpha player. Magic Maze and others of its type make player commu- nication a game mechanism, such that players can’t freely share information or advise one another on how to play. The Mind takes this to an extreme by forbidding players from having any kind of communication about which cards they hold. These types of communication limitations (UNC-06) may be presented like any other rule, but they do not actually create a bright line of which conduct is and is not permitted. Rather, these games can be played somewhat differently by each group, with the precise contours of allowable communication varying by tacit or overt agreement. This approach is deeply polarizing, and some players will utterly reject these kinds of games or cast doubt on whether they are games at all. That said, these communication restrictions have the potential to create incredible experiences that connect participants to one another on an almost mystical level. Communication limitations are only one approach to preventing players from achieving consensus-based play. Space Cadets, Space Alert, and FUSE introduce a real-time element that forces players to make independent deci- sions because there is no time for players to collaborate. Other games attempt to strongly connect players to their roles, provide them with hidden informa- tion, or make operating their roles especially complicated. Mechs vs. Minions and Spirit Island both make it challenging for players to decipher each oth- er’s powers and possibilities. Sentinels of the Multiverse attempts something similar by providing each player with a unique preconstructed deck. Escape room games from T.I.M.E Stories to the Exit and Unlock series sometimes bar players from sharing information too specifically as well. The variety of challenges and puzzles these games offer, and even the various roles that players can take in the solving effort, all help ensure that every player finds a satisfying way to participate in the game. Another notable trend in cooperative game design is the conversion of one-vs.-many, “overlord”-style games into co-ops with the assistance of an app. Mansions of Madness: Second Edition and Star Wars: Imperial Assault  STR-02 Cooperative Games 7 both introduced apps that allow the games to be played cooperatively. More generally, games are being released with cooperative and solo modes along- side competitive modes of play. Sometimes, as has been the case with Orleans and Oh My Goods!, cooperative modes have been introduced in expansions to competitive games. The ongoing design exploration of cooperative games and their possibili- ties is one of the most exciting and fruitful trends in tabletop gaming today. Designers are encouraged to experiment with this popular and adaptable game structure. Sample Games Arkham Horror (Krank, Launius, Petersen, and Willis, 1987) Exit: The Game (Brand and Brand, 2016) FUSE (Klenko, 2015) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) Lord of the Rings (Knizia, 2000) Magic Maze (Lapp, 2017) Mansions of Madness (Koneisczka, 2011) Mechs vs. Minions (Cantrell, Ernst, Librande, Saraswat, and Tiras, 2016) Mice and Mystics (Hawthorne, 2012) The Mind (Warsch, 2018) Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015) Oh My Goods! (Pfister, 2015) Orleans (Stockhausen, 2014) Pandemic (Leacock, 2008), and the complete line of Pandemic games Sentinels of the Multiverse (Badell, Bender, and Rebottaro, 2011) Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases (Edwards, Goldberg, and Grady, 1981) Space Alert (Chvátil, 2008) Space Cadets (Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2012) Spirit Island (Reuss, 2017) Star Wars: Imperial Assault (Kemppainen, Konieczka, and Ying, 2014) T.I.M.E Stories (Chassenet and Rozoy, 2015) Unlock! series (Various, 2017) 8 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-03 Team-Based Games Description In team-based games, teams of players compete with one another to obtain victory. There are a variety of possible team structures, including symmetri- cal teams like 2v2 and 3v3, multiple sides like 2v2v2, and even One vs. All. Discussion Team-based play is an ancient human pastime and is prevalent in sports, classic card games, and war games. Thematic board games that model some conflict often have to deal with a bilateral narrative, whether in the conflict of good vs. evil like in War of the Ring, the eponymous conflict of Axis & Allies, or the entirely fabricated battle between villagers and their lycanthropic tor- mentors in Werewolf. Team games allow designers to faithfully recreate these two-sided conflicts while making space for more players at the table. Most team games assign players to one team or another at the outset and allow collaboration and communication among partners. In some cases, partners may share territory and resources or even move each other’s pieces around the board. Early editions of Axis & Allies, for example, featured Commander-in-Chief rules to model the historical reality of coordinating attacks by multinational armies.  STR-03 Team-Based Games 9 Assigning players to teams in secret is a common trope in social deduction and betrayal-style games. In Werewolf, the werewolves know one another, but the villagers are left to deduce who is a fellow human and who might devour them in the night. In Battlestar Galactica, neither humans nor Cylons are revealed to one another, leading to intense suspicion and paranoia. Battlestar Galactica features a further twist: team assignments are not static, and a player might start the game as a human, only to become a Cylon in a mid-game loyalty phase that can potentially reassign players from the human to the Cylon side. Some games support partnering at the meta-game level. In Risk, Diplomacy, and many other games, the rules specify that alliances can be formed and broken freely. There are even games that further encode these alliances into the rules. Dune provides for different end-game conditions for alliances with different numbers of factions, includes a specific phase when alliances may be formed, and has rules governing the conduct of allies (e.g., they may not attack each other). Eclipse establishes economic advantages for allying with other players, while limiting the number of these allegiances and enforc- ing in-game penalties on betrayers. There is a great deal of fluidity between games that allow for coordination in play and those that have explicit mecha- nisms to support that coordination. Another common approach to team-based games is to assign players dif- ferent roles in the game. This goes well beyond the distinct player abilities common to many co-op games. Party games from Celebrity to Taboo to Codenames feature one player in a clue-giving role, with one or more team- mates in a guessing role. This structure is especially suitable for party games because of the concurrent play of the guessers and the ability for the game structure to support large numbers of players at any one time. It also allows players to easily enter and exit from a game without negatively impacting the overall play experience for other players. It is not just party games that embrace role separation, though. Space Cadets: Dice Duel and Captain Sonar both have players crewing a ship as engineers, radar operators, captains, and weapons specialists. Each player plays a mini-game to model their function within the ship, and the broader game is the sum of these coordinated parts. Sometimes, these roles can be fixed for the whole game, sometimes, players will rotate through the roles every round, and sometimes, the game itself will force players to change roles. This last approach can be thematically interesting and appealing to experienced players but can be especially challenging for new players, who can easily be disoriented when forced to change roles. It also makes teaching 10 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design these games much more difficult, since, in theory, every player needs to know every mini-game before the play can begin. Designers need to take this into account, perhaps by reserving role-changing cards and other triggers for advanced play only. Somewhat less common are team games with more than two teams com- peting at once. Skirmish games like Star Wars: X-Wing can allow for these types of modes, but there are even more unusual examples. Cyclades with the Titans expansion enables a 2v2v2 mode, and Ticket to Ride: Asia also supports 2v2v2 play. Team modes are fairly common in otherwise non-team games, and some team modes are attempts to enable a 1v1 game to scale to a higher player count. The aforementioned Axis & Allies and War of the Ring have team modes, but players may simply choose to play using the 1v1 rules and have teammates collaborate in decision-making instead of using the formal rules for team play. Two other game genres feature partnerships. Card games, especially those in the trick-taking family, are one. The other partnership genre is dexterity games. Flick ’em Up has explicit partnership rules, and many flicking games like PitchCar and Caveman Curling are amenable to alter- nating play. Another very popular game structure is One vs. All. This structure is especially suitable for hidden-movement hunting games, in which one player attempts to escape from a group of hunters, like Scotland Yard, Specter Ops, and Hunt for the Ring. It’s also common in overlord-style games where one player controls the “bad guys” and the other players each control an indi- vidual hero. Conan, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, and Level 7 [Omega Protocol] all feature this style of play. Fantasy Flight Games has converted many of its overlord games into cooperative games by introducing an app to control the overlord player. What distinguishes One vs. All most sharply from other team games is the asymmetric nature of the factions. In hunting games, each player typically controls only one character, but the characters tend to have very distinct abilities, and the victory conditions for the two sides are differ- ent too. In overlord games, the overlord usually controls a whole host of minions that they can deploy, whereas the other players control only one  STR-03 Team-Based Games 11 character. These games can be difficult to teach and learn because players need to learn how both factions work in order to play the game effectively. While the genre remains very popular, that challenge continues to bedevil designers and players. Sample Games Axis & Allies (Harris, Jr., 1981) Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (Konieczka, 2008) Captain Sonar (Fraga and Lemonier, 2016) Caveman Curling (Quodbach, 2010) Celebrity (Unknown) Codenames (Chvátil, 2015) Conan (Henry, Bauza, Bernard, Cathala, Croc, Maublanc, and Pouchain, 2016) Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) (Clark, Konieczka, Sadler, and Wilson, 2012) Diplomacy (Calhamer, 1959) Dune (Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979) Eclipse (Tahkokallio, 2011) Flick ’em Up (Beaujannot and Monpertuis, 2015) Hunt for the Ring (Maggi, Mari, and Nepitello, 2017) Level 7 [Omega Protocol] (Schoonover, 2013) Mansions of Madness: Second Edition (Valens, 2016) PitchCar (du Poël, 1995) Risk (Lamorisse and Levin, 1959) Scotland Yard (Burggraf, Garrels, Hoermann, Ifland, Scheerer, and Schlegel, 1983) Space Cadets: Dice Duel (Engelstein and Engelstein, 2013) Specter Ops (Matsuuchi, 2015) Star Wars: Imperial Assault (Kemppainen, Konieczka, and Ying, 2014) Taboo (Hersch, 1989) War of the Ring (Second Edition) (Di Meglio, Maggi, and Nepitello, 2012) 12 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-04 Solo Games Description A solo game is a game or game mode intended for play by a single player. Discussion Solo games can stretch the definition of what a game is, but solo games have been around for some time. Patience, or Solitaire card games, war games, interactive fiction (e.g., Choose Your Own Adventure® books), crossword puzzles, paper-and-pencil games, word searches, and many more single- player, game-like pursuits are very popular and have been there for years. What is new is the explosion of demand, and supply, for solo board games, whether as standalone games or as game modes in multiplayer games. Rather than quibbling over the definition, we choose to embrace the varieties and possibilities of solo gaming. Solo games are closely related to cooperative games in the sense that the player plays against the game system itself, rather than a sentient opponent. Solo games can be considered as a special case of co-op games in which there is only one player—and thus, no alpha player problem. While most co-ops can be, and are, played solo, communications-based co-op games like The Mind typically can’t be played solo at all. Cooperative Limited Card Games (a genre, i.e., a blend of collectible card games and deck-building games) are very popular among solo players, and the dungeon-crawl-style rogue-like game seems especially amenable to solo play. Players can usually brew their own unofficial solo game from these games or from many non-communication- based co-ops by playing more than one position in a co-op game, for example. The modern solo design pushes beyond that basic approach to solo play. We can classify a few kinds of solo games: goal-based, record-based, and  STR-04 Solo Games 13 AI-based. In goal-based games, players try to achieve some goal, usually a Victory Point (VP) total, within a certain number of turns, or a certain amount of time. This type of design is most similar to multiplayer coop- erative games. These games might have an AI opponent of sorts, but typi- cally the opponent is an asymmetric villain of some kind, or even an entirely abstract process, like a spreading fire in Flash Point: Fire Rescue. The AI is not an automated version of a human player who competes as another human player might. Record-based games are those whose goal is to beat your previous high score. While this may seem like a mundane and dull victory condition, some games have developed large solitaire followings, complete with ladders and statistics that transform the game from a solo game to a community-based meta-competition. Ganz schön clever is one example of this type of game and community competition. Some goal-based games can also work as record- based games, as long as some scoring metric can be captured that adequately measures game performance. Super Skill Pinball uses this method to great effect, as the pinball metaphor naturally lends itself to players competing for the high score. AI-based games attempt to recreate the multiplayer experience by intro- ducing an automated player or players. Typically, this means some basic algo- rithm governs the moves of the AI player. These systems can be challenging to design and usually depend on decision flowcharts, as well as dice, cards, or other randomizers to create uncertainty about the AI player’s choices. However, other approaches to AI opponents are also possible, as shown by Morten Monrad Pedersen’s Automa system. Pedersen’s Automa system is more a philosophy and approach than an official system, and he and many other designers have used its principles to create Automas for games as varied as Scythe, Anachrony, Baseball Highlights 2045, and Between Two Cities. The key principles are that the solo game should feel as much as possible like the multiplayer game and that AIs should be representational, rather than procedural. The AI doesn’t observe the rules and doesn’t play the game as a player might. Rather, the AI focuses on the impact that an opponent has on the player’s plans and emulates those—a kind of Potemkin player. In Pedersen’s words, the AI is only the shell of a human player, and while the humans in a game of Viticulture have vineyards and grow grapes, the Automa players do not; they just give the impression that they do. In practice, Automas will claim action spaces, draft cards, block routes, and otherwise interfere with human players, but they will not collect resources, build buildings, or score victory points. 14 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design Another method for determining the behavior of an AI opponent is to have the player be the opponent as well. In this approach, the player wins or loses based on the fate of their primary faction, but they also play for the other factions in the game. At certain points in the game, the player may be required to change factions, typically switching from controlling their origi- nal faction to controlling the weakest of the other factions. Knowing that changes of faction control are part of the game gives the player incentive to keep all the factions relatively close, while putting their currently controlled faction in a position to grab victory. The Peloponnesian War is one of the earli- est examples of this genre of solo play. Solo games are enjoyed by a large, active, and growing community that continues to homebrew solo versions of multiplayer games, host contests, and challenges and enjoy an unexpected comradery despite the solitary nature of their pastime. Increasingly, including a solo mode is a desirable feature for published multiplayer games, and the success of a number of solo-only games, like Friday and Hostage Negotiator, has established that there is a mar- ket even for the loneliest of player counts. Sample Games Ambush (Butterfield and Smith, 1983) Anachrony (Amann, Peter, and Turczi, 2017) Arkham Horror: The Card Game (French and Newman, 2016) B-17: Queen of the Skies (Frank and Shelley, 1981) Baseball Highlights: 2045 (Fitzgerald, 2015) Between Two Cities (O’Malley, Pedersen, and Rosset, 2015) Flash Point: Fire Rescue (Lanzig, 2011) Friday (Friese, 2011) Ganz schön clever (Warsch, 2018) Hostage Negotiator (Porfirio, 2015) Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (French, 2011) Mage Knight Board Game (Chvátil, 2011) One Deck Dungeon (Cieslik, 2016) Onirim (Torbey, 2010) Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (Trzewiczek, 2012) Scythe (Stegmaier, 2016) Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016) The Peloponnesian War (Herman, 1991)  STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games 15 STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Description A game which ends with either no winners or the players winning as a group but a single player being recognized as the individual winner as well. Discussion Semi-cooperative games are like cooperative games because players can all lose together to the game itself. However, if the players manage to overcome the game, one of the players will be crowned the individual victor, or a kind of most valuable player, based on some in-game achievement. A group’s enjoyment of this style of the game depends on all members having the same answer to the question of whether a group win, coupled with an individual loss, is superior to a total group loss. If players are split on this question, those for whom an individual loss is as bad as a group loss will not seek optimal cooperative plays and may even sabotage the group while trying to secure a winning individual position. Players who prefer to win as a group, even if they lose as individuals, will be incensed by this conduct, and unhappiness will follow for everyone. There’s a strong connection between semi-cooperative games and role- playing games (RPGs). RPGs typically feature a similar dynamic: all players want to follow the main plot narrative and defeat the big bad, but each player has individual motivations that may sometimes work at cross-purposes, and in any case, each player is motivated to secure the greatest in-game rewards in terms of wealth, experience points, glory, etc. These competing motiva- tions can help weave a complex and gripping narrative. In tabletop games, 16 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design a semi-cooperative structure can create memorable moments of last-second betrayal and competitive jockeying for position. Semi-cooperative games are fascinating as a design study because of how players engage with them. Many groups will play semi-cooperatives as co-ops, ignoring the individual win conditions or treating them as a means for recognizing a great performance by some players, rather than as a win condition to be claimed. Others will embrace the notion of an individual win and engage in brinksmanship in almost total violation of the cooperative element of the game. Despite the broad range of pos- sible play styles, each group typically has a very narrow idea of the “right way” to play the game. In other words, it’s unlikely that the same group would play Arkham Horror as a total co-op one night and then as a semi- co-op another night. Actually, you might be hard-pressed to find anyone who plays Arkham Horror with any care for the individual win condition. The game holds little attraction for players looking for that experience. Crafting a semi-co-op that is satisfying to play and that manages to incen- tivize both the individual and cooperative aspects of the game is like try- ing to land a jet plane in a phone booth. Another route a designer can consider is introducing cooperative ele- ments into a competitive game without creating a cooperative loss condi- tion. Games like Kingsburg and Survive: Escape from Atlantis achieve this in different ways. In Kingsburg, all players must face a common foe at the end of each year. In Survive, players can share common resources like lifeboats to escape the ocean’s dangers. These cooperative opportunities can enrich the game and create internal drama without confusing players as to their incentives or causing distress over what type of game players they thought they sat down to. Note that this structure is not applicable to games where players some- times cooperate and sometimes compete but where one player ultimately wins. The “everyone loses” condition is a necessary component of semi-coop- erative games under our definition. Games that feature both cooperation and competition but only a single winner are not structurally distinct from competitive games (STR-01), though they often have explicit Negotiation mechanisms (ECO-18).  STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games 17 Sample Games Archipelago (Boelinger, 2012) Arkham Horror (Krank, Launius, Petersen, and Willis, 1987) Castle Panic (De Witt, 2009) CO2 (Lacerda, 2012) Defenders of the Realm (Launius, 2010) Kingsburg (Chiarvesio and Iennaco, 2007) Legendary Encounters family of deck-building games (Cichoski and Mandel, 2014) The Omega Virus (Gray, 1992) Republic of Rome (Berthold, Greenwood, and Haines, 1990) Survive: Escape from Atlantis (Courtland-Smith, 1982) 18 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-06 Single-Loser Games Description A game with three or more players in which players are not assigned to static teams and which ends with only one loser. Discussion Games with one loser flip the script by incentivizing players not to perform better than everyone else, but better than at least one other person. Like the old saw about not needing to outrun a ravenous bear, these games emphasize impeding other players more than advancing yourself. Old Maid is a well- known classic card with this structure. Alcatraz: The Scapegoat is a modern game in which all players, but one, escape prison. Alcatraz can end with all players losing, if they fail to break out of prison in time, which makes it a bit of a hybrid with a cooperative game. Stacking games often feature a single-loser structure, because many of them end when a player knocks over the shared structure. Jenga and Rhino Hero are examples of this dynamic, though Rhino Hero does offer some rules for determining who the winner is among the surviving players. In practice though, groups often ignore this final scoring or even scoring of any kind.  STR-06 Single-Loser Games 19 Single-loser structures are not very common in modern games, perhaps because they encourage sharply confrontational “take-that” play in which players can directly impede or harm one another. These structures can also be susceptible to a bash-the-loser pattern, in which the player who falls behind becomes the most attractive target to all other players and has no chance to recover their position. This structure represents an innovation horizon for designers to explore. Sample Games Alcatraz: The Scapegoat (Cywicki, Cywicki, and Hanusz, 2011) Aye, Dark Overlord (Bonifacio, Crosa, Enrico, Ferlito, and Uren, 2005) Cockroach Poker (Zeimet, 2004) Jenga (Scott, 1983) Pairs (Ernest, Glumpler, and Peterson, 2014) Rhino Hero (Frisco and Strumph, 2011) 20 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-07 Traitor Games Description A traitor game can be seen as a kind of team game or as a cooperative game with a betrayal mechanism. The traitors typically win by triggering a failure condition for the players, though an affirmative win condition can also exist. For our purposes, a traitor game is characterized by traitors that begin the game with hidden identities. Discussion Traitor games sit at the overlap in the Venn diagram of social deduction games, team games, and cooperative games. The cooperative game engine sets the overall parameters for how players interact in the game, and those choices provide information that players can use and manipulate to deduce, accuse, and mislead. The team element provides coordination options for both sides, both out loud and in secret. These designs must add a layer of obfuscation to preserve uncertainty and mystery. Thus, in Dead of Winter, the cards contributed by players to meet the current crisis are shuffled prior to being revealed to hide which player contributed which card. In designing traitor games, it’s important to consider how the game plays at different stages of knowing the traitor’s identity. The tension and suspense of not knowing who is on which side is great fuel for the beginning of the game, but once the traitor has been sussed out, is the game still fun? Does the traitor still  STR-07 Traitor Games 21 have meaningful and interesting choices? Is catching the traitor a victory condi- tion itself? Betrayal at House on the Hill is a traitor game with many story mod- ules, each with its own mechanisms, that designers can treat it as a case study on this exact issue. Betrayal does not quite fit our definition of traitor game, in that the traitor is not determined at the start of the game. The initial part of the game, prior to the haunt that assigns the traitor role to one player, could perhaps be seen as an extensive gamified setup phase. In any case, the lessons from Betrayal’s story modes apply to games that fall more firmly within our definition. Another challenge facing traitor games is learnability. Like in team or One vs. All games, players have to learn how all the sides work to play properly. In traitor games with hidden identities, players can’t readily ask questions or consult the rules without giving away their loyalties. Good player-aids and reference material need to be the areas of focus. These games also usually require that the traitor player knows the game well, to maximize the poten- tial of their position. This emphasizes the need for an easily learned game. Good player-aids can go a long way too, especially when the player-aids for both factions help explain how the opposite faction plays too. Sample Games Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (Konieczka, 2008) Betrayal at House on the Hill (Daviau, Glassco, McQuilian, Selinker, and Woodruff, 2004) Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game (Gilmour and Vega, 2014) Saboteur (Moyersoen, 2004) Shadows over Camelot (Cathala and Laget, 2005) Werewolf (Davidoff and Plotkin, 1986) 22 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games Description This is a game system that can be applied to a variety of different maps, start- ing resources and positions, and even different win and loss conditions. These variable conditions can be assembled into a broader narrative or campaign, or they can be entirely disconnected from one another. Discussion The roots of scenario-based games are in storytelling, history, war games, and RPGs. The idea is that a rich experience can be woven out of multiple episodes, planned out to be experienced sequentially. In war games like Advanced Squad Leader, the same core system, together with substantial supplements, enables players to model an enormous variety of possible conflicts. As players gain mastery, they can attempt more chal- lenging and complex scenarios. At the other end of the spectrum, a war- themed game like Memoir ’44 gives players the opportunity to play the many battles and confrontations that made up the D-Day invasion with an intui- tive ruleset that can be taught in ten minutes.  STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games 23 Scenario structures are popular in dungeon crawler games. Swap in a new dungeon map, a new boss monster, maybe some new mission types, and play- ers can enjoy new challenges without learning new rules. Scenarios can also be completely detached from any narrative and simply allow players to face off against one another in a skirmish mode that provides some basic rules for force construction. Scenarios are also prevalent in cooperative settings, both for offering different levels of difficulty and for creating variety. A “campaign” structure differs from the scenario in that the output from one scenario feeds into the next. Campaigns can have a specific set of sce- narios that players go through in order or a tree-like structure where winning or losing a scenario determines which scenario is played next, or other struc- tures. Typically, the impact of the past scenario on the next scenario is on the resources that players or enemy characters have access to (such as surviving units, character levels, or abilities). However, these are not the only options. In Oath, each game has different deck compositions, kingdom locations, and even victory conditions based on the prior game. Recently, there has been an explosion in the types of games offering a sce- nario or campaign structure. Catan expansions going back as far as Seafarers of Catan have offered scenario play, but the hits like The 7th Continent, Mechs vs. Minions, Near and Far, and the card-based dungeon crawlers like Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Gloomhaven have rocketed in popular- ity. It’s also impossible not to mention T.I.M.E Stories and the various escape room game series like Exit: The Game, Unlock!, and Deckscape. Though each box is a self-contained experience, the play system is largely similar from box to box, and outside of the packaging and business model, these games are scenario-based in structure. One might even consider Age of Steam maps, Power Grid expansions, Ticket to Ride standalone variants from Europe to New York, Pandemic: Iberia and Cthulhu, and the Mystery Rummy series as follow-on scenarios, sold separately. Sample Games The 7th Continent (Roudy and Sautter, 2017) Advanced Squad Leader (Greenwood, 1985) Age of Steam (Wallace, 2002) Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game (Gilmour and Vega, 2014) Deckscape (Chiachierra and Sorrentino, 2017) Exit: The Game (Brand and Brand, 2016) 24 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design Mechs vs. Minions (Cantrell, Ernst, Librande, Saraswat, and Tiras, 2016) Memoir ’44 (Borg, 2004) Near and Far (Laukat, 2017) Oath (Wehrle, 2021) Pandemic game system (Leacock, 2008) Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (Selinker, Brown, O’Connor, Peterson, and Weidling, 2013) T.I.M.E Stories (Chassenet and Rozoy, 2015) Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004) Unlock! series (Various, 2017)  STR-09 Score-and-Reset Games 25 STR-09 Score-and-Reset Games Description This is a game in which players play until reaching a stopping condition, then record scores, reset the game, and play one or more additional rounds. The game concludes after some number of rounds, and the cumulative score is calculated to determine a winner. Discussion Score-and-reset is a very common game structure that is well represented among classic games from Bridge to Backgammon, and in modern games like Red7, Ravenous River, and Incan Gold. Card games are especially amenable to this structure, which matches well with playing out a hand of cards, shuffling and redealing. Games with a strong turn-order advantage can take advantage of a score-and-reset struc- ture by having players take turns in the lead position and using cumulative scoring to measure who played best over a series of rounds. Stacking games like Rhino Hero use score-and-reset because once the shared structure is toppled, there’s a need to collect up the cards and pieces anyway, and this represents a natural end point. Whether players do in fact record wins and losses or points is to some extent a matter of the dynamics of 26 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design the game group itself. By contrast, dexterity games like KLASK and BONK reset after each goal, but scoring is rigorously tracked. Score-and-reset structures can be somewhat informal. Players might play a series of games of Hive and declare a victor after one player reaches some total number of victories. There’s not a sharp line between score-and-reset and round structure in general. Amun-Re features two ages, in which gameplay is identical, but the board itself does not fully reset. Pyramids built in the first age persist in the second age and influence the valuation of territories. In Blue Lagoon, the board is reset between the first and second half of the game, with the exception of the huts players lay out in the first half. However, the rules of placement change profoundly—where players were free to lay explorers on any sea space in the first half; in the second half, they must begin laying explorers adjacent to their huts. Sample Games Amun-Re (Knizia, 2003) Blue Lagoon (Knizia, 2018) BONK (Harvey, 2017) Hive (Yianni, 2001) Incan Gold (Faidutti and Moon, 2005) KLASK (Bertelsen, 2014) Ravenous River (Shalev, 2016) Red7 (Chudyk and Cieslik, 2014) Rhino Hero (Frisco and Strumph, 2011)  STR-10 Legacy Games 27 STR-10 Legacy Games Description A legacy game is a multisession game in which permanent and irreversible changes to the game state carry over from session to session. Discussion The first legacy game, Rob Daviau’s Risk Legacy, came from the unlikeliest of places: Hasbro. Daviau, by his telling, half-shepherded, half-snuck the audacious design past the gatekeepers at the company and emerged with a genre-defining hit. Famously, the game was sealed with a sticker that had to be broken to open the box, and which warned ominously, “What Is Done Cannot Be Undone.” This irreversible permanent change is what legacy games are all about (Illustration 1.2). Legacy games are difficult to playtest, require generating quite a lot of content, and are tricky to produce and price properly. Curmudgeons will rightly point out that RPGs and campaign games are essentially legacy games, except that you don’t have to destroy your game as you play. Yet that permanent destruction, the tearing of a card or writing on a board, generates a visceral response that those other games don’t. Breaking this taboo and permanently altering a game can be a stressful and cathartic experience at the same time. 28 Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design Illustration 1.2 The exterior seal in Risk Legacy. This helps place the player in the proper headspace for the game. Legacy games aren’t simply about destroying components and defacing boards. Another element common to these games is unlocks: gated content that can only be opened and accessed after some condition is met. We’ll refrain from specific examples so as not to spoil these experiences for the uninitiated! Unlocks differ fundamentally from gated content in non-legacy games (see “Gating and Unlocking,” ACT-15) in that unlocks usually occur at game-end, their impacts will only be felt in the next session, and these unlocks are typically not simply buffs and de-buffs to existing statistics, but rather, entire new mechanisms, characters, factions, maps, etc. These unlocks can also radically change the narrative or move the camera and offer players new perspectives and surprises. Like campaign games, legacy games require a substantial commitment to complete, and they typically call for the same group to come together ten or more times. Pandemic Legacy can theoretically take 24 sessions to complete! Publishers, and thus designers, can feel trapped between offering a novel and essentially unrepeatable experience, on the one hand, while still provid- ing sufficient re-playability to players, despite the consumable nature of the game. Most legacy games do allow players to keep playing the game even after the campaign is concluded, but anecdotally, it seems that few players do so. It appears that the market is expanding to allow for a broader range of possible games such that at the right price point, even a single-play game like the Exit series can be a hit. Games like the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle  STR-10 Legacy Games 29 deck-building game have used unlocks, but not destructibility, and are fully resettable. Gloomhaven takes a similar approach with reusable stickers to pro- vide changes that are campaign-permanent but otherwise reversible. Fabled Fruit is even more easily reset, requiring nothing more than reordering a deck of cards. However, it is difficult to distinguish it structurally from, say, a deck-building game in which any given play session may include a com- pletely different subset of cards. Legacy games are a still-emerging category and definition. Elements we’ve identified may not exist in every game, and new elements may yet emerge, especially as legacy games and digital apps converge. Concerns about reus- ability and the environment do appear to have shifted designers away from requiring the destruction of components. In Zombie Teenz Evolution, a 2021 nominee for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award, gameplay elements are mostl