Video Games tutorials applied to Board Games

As I work on both video games and board games, I often think about the differences between the two and what lessons can be applied to both. Today, I want to talk about tutorials and onboarding—something where video games clearly have an enormous advantage over board games. Is there a way to apply some of the things commonly found in video games to improve the first-time user experience of a board game?

The video game advantage

There are many things video games do that can be applied to board games, for example, adding new things and rules as the game progresses. I see many board games trying this approach, with a different set of rules for the first game or a rulebook that walks you through a more guided experience. Today, though, I want to reflect on the structural advantages of video games instead of simply focusing on common practices. What are the sources behind the advantage video games have in tutorials? Well, video games have better onboarding for a variety of reasons, but I think all of them can pretty much be ascribed to:

1. The game reacts to your actions, providing immediate feedback

2. The game is automated, everything is automatically executed by a program

By playing the game, with only a handful of key information, players create an accurate mental model of the game rules, without having to actually read them and understand them, like they would have to in a board game. 

These things cannot be fully transported into a board game, aside from board games that incorporate a technological component of any kind (like a companion app). On the other hand, maybe we can try to capture the spirit behind these ideas, to find a way to apply them in the systems of our board games.

Reactions and feedback

If I’m playing a video game, I have a way of visualizing all the reactions to my inputs. If I pull the right trigger, my character shoots. If my bullets hit an enemy, it will deal damage. Enough damage, and the enemy is defeated.In a board game, you have the “attack action.” You throw the attack dice, but then you have to interpret the results of your roll. This means you have to know the meaning of the dice, the icons, and any necessary rules before attacking. In the video game, you just need to know how to shoot and learn everything else afterward.But board games can also react to your actions. How? Well, actually, board games react to your actions all the time. Cards with different backs are turned face down to go into a different state; spaces are covered to represent that they are occupied. Legacy games use stickers to add or remove rules. When you spend a resource and physically move it from your pool to the common reserve, you immediately visualize what’s happening. These things are so obvious we don’t even think about them. But it’s precisely for this reason that I talk about them today: I want us to reflect on all these obvious ways a board game teaches its rules without explaining them so that we can employ them even more. Of course all these things still require players to learn some rules, but they can greatly reduce the cognitive load or the quantity of rules. Instead of having the rule “at the beginning of your turn you gain 1 gold for each building you control” you may have all buildings on a gold tracker and when players build one, they reveal the space “+1 gold” on their personal tracker.

In Terra Mystica, creating buildings uncovers new production spaces

This makes more immediate the consequence of their action and speeds up the learning process. This technique is employed a lot, but you can get more creative. For example, in a board game I’m working on, I have players modify their cards with a marker. Now, I worked a lot on how to communicate this mechanic in the clearest way possible.

When players see a checkbox like that, I only have to tell them that, with the marker, they can check a box or circle a number. It’s the card itself that reacts to this manipulation: once a box is checked, it’s clear that the card now has that ability. I also decided to have the base power of the cards printed as if it were circled by a marker, to reinforce the idea that by circling the other number, you would add more power. While these things seem pretty obvious now, they were the result of many iterations and reflections. As always, in game design, the simplest solution is the hardest one to reach.The key takeaway is that board games have many ways to react to help players understand their rules, and the arsenal at our disposal is probably bigger than we imagine.

Automation

All the things that happen in a board game have to be done by someone. And in order to be done by someone, that person has to read all the rules beforehand and explain them. If you are a fan of board games, then that person is probably you. But also, in this case, I think we forget how many things board games automate for us. Take a classic mechanic like the event deck, where every turn you draw and execute an event. The deck is indeed an automation. Yes, you have to manually shuffle it, but the way it’s arranged is not a cognitive burden for players. It’s almost as if the developers had programmed an event system that extracts random events. I like the deck as an example because a deck is so intuitive and clear to us that, when video games employ one, they put in all the effort to show us an image of the deck, an animation for the shuffling, and one for the drawing. Sometimes, we forget that video games make an extra effort to imitate reality, while board games happen in actual reality.

A deck of cards, a turn tracker, a die. Anything can be used as an automation to lighten the number of things players have to learn. Remember, there’s a big difference between memorizing a rule and simply executing the instructions written somewhere.

We can also push this a bit further: some games have rule systems so intuitive that, even if players manually execute all the instructions, they feel almost automated.

Take, for example, the invader deck from Spirit Island.

Each turn, you execute the actions from left to right, then move each card one space to the left, drawing a new one from the deck. This system is designed to be simple and intuitive, making you forget that it’s an actual rule. But I'm sure a lot of work went into it. The order from left to right is intuitive for players used to Western languages. Placing the discard pile on the left and the deck on the right makes it clear that you have to discard the furthest card and draw a new one to explore. It’s almost like a computer program, in the sense that it doesn’t feel like a rule you have to apply so much as something in the game that simply happens.

The takeaway is that we should take advantage of all the things that are more intuitive in the physical world to make as many rules as possible feel like things ingrained in the game itself. The way humans read, gravity, impacts among dice, the order of a deck of cards, an arrow that spins on a piece of cardboard, the height of a pile of gold—there are countless things that we don’t have to learn because they are already established in our minds. If we pay attention, we can simplify the first experience with our game for a lot of people.

Conclusion

That’s all for today. I hope you found something interesting among the things I talked about. Many of the things I mentioned are already done effectively by many board games out there, but after all, the idea with this blog is not to teach anything new, as I don’t have the experience for that. I want to reflect on what is already being done, to apply it intentionally in my work. By doing this, I hope to give you a fresh perspective on games and their design. See you next week for another article!