A Data Driven Review of Board Game Design and Interactions of Their Mechanics

Abstract

Board games have often been recognised as a tool to model complex concepts in abstract environments for entertainment, education, and research in fields such as military and artificial intelligence. With more board games being designed and published, it is timely to draw attention towards board game design strategies and mechanics which capture the attributes that drive game play. The game design and the mechanics used define the structure, functionality and play experience of these games. Towards this end, this paper presents a data driven review of board game mechanics and play-related attributes, their interactions and relationships. The analysis expects to draw insights into how board games can be utilised across diverse domains as a tool to understand and explore complex concepts through abstract models. The investigations focus on identifying the trends and patterns of board games being published and their individual mechanics over time. Moreover, the correlation between mechanics and play-related attributes such as game complexity, rating and duration are explored. The interactions and similarities between individual mechanics based on co-occurrence, mutual information and clustering based approaches are also illustrated. The results show that the level of complexity and engagement of a game is not a simple function of the set of mechanics used, but rather the interactions that exist between mechanics, and the nature of their specific implementation are the critical factors in determining play experience of a board game.

Your Move: An Open Access Dataset of Over 1500 Board Gamer’s Demographics, Preferences and Motivations

“…There seems to be a distortion towards heavier games when users classify them. Complex games have a high correlation with higher BoardGameGeek ranks (Samarasinghe et al, 2021). These games tend to have durations above 60 minutes, some reaching 3 hours plus.…”

The Effects of a Soundtrack on Board Game Player Experience

“…Board gaming is a popular hobby with increasingly complex titles and a vast cultural surrounding of players, digital practices and organised live events [6, 9,45]. The designing and publishing of new board game titles has seen rapid growth in the past forty years [50], even surpassing video games in successful Kickstarter funding by 211 million USD in 2020 [26].…”

“…In 2014, the Analog Game Studies Journal was established, with the goal of "providing a periodically published platform for the critical analysis, discussion of design, and documentation of analog games" [53], whilst in 2017 Game Studiesthe international journal of computer game research-widened its submissions to non-digital games in an announcement titled "Just Games" [1]. Board games have been examined as media [8,10], and as complex systems [22] with a diverse variety of mechanics game designers can utilise [50] in creating novel, interesting experiences for players.…”

Data Analysis of Board Games’ Fashion Trends and Relationships between Their Successes and Attributes

“…Meanwhile, some researchers have explored particular attributes of board games. Samarasinghe D, Barlow M, et al have discovered interactions of their mechanics with data driven methodology [5]. However, most researchers focus on attributes of a larger range of games rather than typical type of board games, like Dietrich T and his team who analyzed gaming attribute preference in marketing programmes [6].…”