Why Design Thematically?

TLDR:

  • There has been a polarised view between some reviewers as to whether story enhances abstract games or not (based on reviews of Assembly).
  • We wanted theme through the use of story telling to be engaging and part of the experience of playing Assembly.
  • We followed this through in Sensor Ghosts which gave us design constraints creating new design challenges.
  • Stories aids memory, therefore linking stories to rules will hopefully assist with the remembering of rules.
  • What do you think? Does story add, detract or have no effect on games for you?

Theme and story is very important to Stu and I. In our opinion, it makesa game and so it was something that was very important for us to get right in all of our games. It is also something that often gets mentioned by reviewers when discussing Assembly, albeit with a somewhat polarised view, for example:

The first thing that reeled me in was a combination of the theme and how it was expressed in the rules. There was a witty humor laced throughout those rules and it made me want to try this game.– Cardboard Clash

The premise strikes me as a little convolutedfor what amounts to an essentially abstract puzzle game, but, beneath the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme, the core game is stimulating, satisfying and very replayable.”  – Boards Eye View

Whatever your opinion, this blog post is about why it is important to us to design thematically and the unexpected positive influence it had on our design process.

Note: If you’re not familiar with Assembly or Sensor Ghosts, I highly recommend you watch this 3 minute video giving an overview before reading this blog to give you more context.

Assembly

You are on an orbital platform that assembles spaceships. All was going well until a deadly virus struck and wiped out the entire staff, except you. The computer has quarantined the station, is venting the atmosphere and has now also brought in re-enforcements. She’ll do anything to stop you from leaving, including changing the rules. To survive you must escape.

When we set out designing Assembly, the original premise was based on my experience as a project manager where I managed projects developing new hi-tech products. 

As you can imagine, what we call in the trade, “scope creep” was a common issue that we had to combat. For those of you not yet inducted into the realms of project management, scope creep is when the requirements change during the project, generally with the requirements increasing beyond what was originally planned. 

Scope creep has a direct impact on both schedule (more things take longer to do) and cost (more time = more money). In order to try and prevent the delayed project delivery and higher costs, what often happens is something is added in and something else is taken out.

In Assembly this is simulated by the ‘Scramble’ each time you go through the deck, i.e. you pick up all the Blueprint cards that have not been locked (i.e. anything that has not yet been finished), they are shuffled and then laid out again representing the changing project requirements.

As interesting as this is to me, we felt that probably to most people this is a very dry subject and was unlikely to make many people want to buy Assembly. Our options were to either:

  1. Just make it an abstract puzzle with rules, pretty art and no significant theme.
  2. Tie everything within the game to a strong theme to provide a thematic abstract game.

As you probably already know we went with option 2 but why? This is where we need to talk more about our inspiration.

Inspiration

There are two key games that really inspired us during the design process of Assembly. They are Sylvionby Shadi Torbey and Dungeon Petzby Vlaada Chvátil. 

Sylvion has beautiful thematic art, is designed for 1-2 players, has multiple game modes and comes in a small box. This is everything we loved in a game in one package. The overall experience and longevity of gameplay with the multiple mini expansions really inspired us to make Assembly what it is (e.g. Malfunctions, multiple roles, Glitches). However, although Sylvion had theme it did not have much story. 

On the other hand, Dungeon Petz, a game with very quirky art that needs very little story has stories for everything. We loved discovering about each of the ‘petz’ in the games with Fluffy being a firm favourite and it really took our gaming experience when playing from good to great. In fact it is one of only a handful of competitive games in our collection.


Fluffy from Dungeon Petz: We don’t need to know anything about her but it enhances the overall gaming experience if we feel we know her.

So, this brings us to why bother with the effort of story when a game doesn’t need it? Or further, why bother creating lotsof story in a game when you can just get away with a little intro to set the scene?

For us this has two-fold implications, firstly Stu and I enjoy a game much more when there is story. We have in fact got rid of games with perfectly reasonable gameplay as there simply was a complete lack of story (I’m looking at you Start Trek: Expeditions!). We love flavour text on cards, it gives us a reason for doing our actions rather than just going through the motions. It gives us purposewhich ultimately increases our enjoyment of the games we play.

This may not give everyone enjoyment, but it’s quite easy to not read something, it’s much harder to make up something. For us, theme andstory are a must.

Sensor Ghosts

You have escaped both the virus ridden space station and the clutches of the station’s computer. You must now make your way back to Earth through the asteroid belt but something seems to be messing with your sensors. The computer has somehow got on board and is now trying to thwart your escape and to make matters worse, Earth is refusing to let you land: the only way to persuade themis if you collect a virus sample en-route which can assist with the creation of a vaccine.

Moving on to Sensor Ghosts, we went into designing this game with the mentality of ‘designing within the story confines’ from the start. 

Several Assembly backers asked if there would be a sequel and after a little pondering we thought this would be a great idea. Sensor Ghosts therefore started within a very strict thematic confine: it must follow the Assembly storyline and be set afterwards as well as having all the other design principles we already discussed (i.e. multiple play options). 

This gave us the idea of the journey back to Earth and we couldn’t get rid of the ‘lovely’ computer from Assembly who you’d fought so hard to escape from. Additionally, just moving around a grid is not as exciting as it could be, so we also decided to bring through the virus that wiped everyone out in Assembly. For anyone who has won a game of Assembly, you’ll perhaps have realised that the computer isn’t crazed at all, she is in fact just doing her job and trying to protect Earth and you are in fact the crazed one. However, your survival instinct is so great you still insist on going back to Earth (who aren’t best pleased!) – why should they take the risk and let you land? And that’s why we brought the collection of the virus sample over into Sensor Ghosts.

Sensor Ghosts started out as a very basic move and grid manipulation game, but it didn’t provide sufficient challenge so an unrevealed grid mechanic was added in which fitted nicely with the computer hacking your sensors. However, we all know that space is not static but is constantly moving which resulted in the ‘Re-Scan’ and the ability to flip cards multiple times, each time you do this you essentially increase your confidence that you know what is in that space sector as with space always moving and dodgy sensors you would rarely know exactly what was there unless you looked. 

And then came movement. The core of the game is about moving through a grid (which might be considered pretty dull if not managed correctly) and it also meant that one of the main things needed were movement cards. To make this more interesting, we included the mechanisms that to turn the ship, you had to burn extra fuel. This not only added an extra layer of strategy but also works with physics (yes Stu and I are physicists); if you are going forward you have inertia, therefore if you want to turn you are going to have to provide extra thrust to go in a different direction, thus why it costs 2 Fly cards (twice the amount of fuel spent) to change direction. 

But what other reasons are there for designing thematically?

Many years ago when I was undertaking my graduate training we had a talk on presentations and leadership and I was referred to a book called Squirrel Inc., a book that discusses how storying telling makes messages more compelling. It focuses on how to use this in leadership situations but for me, the key takeaway is that what people remember when listening to a talk or reading a book is how they feltwhen they did it. 


How can story telling enhance your game?

Additionally, think about how you remember things. Is it easier to remember a list of seemingly random things or a story that someone told you? For most people, if you weave something into a story they are much more likely to rememberit.  

Rules are essentially a list of things that need to be remembered and the thing Stu and I struggle with most is remembering rules (particularly as we have so many games and so little time!). I often just go with what thematically feels right as I hate having to look up multiple rules mid-game; we can play it right next time!

So, by intertwining story into our rules, we have hopefully made them not only more fun to read but also more memorable, for example:

  • You are deploying a room module onto the assembly line rather than drawing and placing a token onto a card.
  • You are searching for a virus sample so that Earth lets you land rather than picking up and delivering a token to the finish line.

Our aim is that by linking every aspect of the mechanisms to theme we are making our games easier to learn, rules easier to remember and most importantly (to us) gives you a sense of purpose when playing. 

In was our hope that incorporating story throughout the rules would also enhance the experience, taking “essentially an abstract puzzle game” to be a vivid struggle against a crazed computer. A theme that’s often seen in many sci-fi movies such as 2001, and given that Stu and I grew up on sci-fi it was an obvious choice for us.

However, this linking of theme had a good but unexpected consequence: it gave us boundaries when designing. It kept the design streamlined as we couldn’t just add a random mechanic in that made no thematic sense. 

Every time we changed or added something we asked ourselves “is this thematic?”. If the answer was no, the idea was ditched. If it was a really good idea, we would look to see if the theme could somehow be made to accommodate it but if it couldn’t then no matter how great the idea was it was parked as it would take away from the simplicity of the core of the game. 

This is how Assembly and Sensor Ghosts came to be what you see today: We took our original concepts, came up with a theme and refined within these thematic confines to produce a thematic abstract puzzle game; thematic and abstract are two words that are not normally seen in the same sentence – do you feel there is a place for thematic abstract games? Can you name any others?

Lastly, let us know which side of the fence you sit on – are you with Cardboard Clash who feels the theme adds to the gameplay or with Boards Eye View who feel it’s superfluous? Let us know!

If you’re interested in trying out Assembly and Sensor Ghosts, they are both currently live on Kickstarterso please do check out our project.

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Oliver Kinne
4 years ago

Thank you for a great article. I think theme is very important in games. I appreciate abstract games can work well, but a theme that is well integrated with the rules and mechanisms makes gameplay feel a lot more natural and makes the game much easier to learn. My favourite example is always Clans of Caledonia where it is very clear what you’re trying to do, because the theme works so well – while in Terra Mystica the theme really confused me and made the game harder for me to learn and play. So yes, theme is important in my view.

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