Game Design #3: Little’s Theme

It can be difficult to predict what others will find interesting, and to what degree someone will engage with a topic or theme. The same is true for board games. Whether hardcore euro style games, abstract puzzle games or roleplaying games, everyone resonates more or less with different themes. So what theme should you choose to best serve your project?

I’m currently grappling with this conundrum with one of my games, codenamed Little. It’s a tile laying game, and at its core is fairly abstract which means that the theme (at least for now) is only a lens through which to engage with the underlying mechanisms. The idea for the game was inspired by the four classical elements, and has served the development of the mechanisms well, but in its current state the theme feels, well… Boring.

Cute, but no Sugar

Boring is perhaps unfair. The theme has served its purpose, but sections of the theme were shed in the development of the game, which means that the theme now is in a very basic form, with some aspects that made the theme more interesting stripped out to make the mechanics function better. So now I’m left with a choice to make. How to theme the game in such a way as to explain the mechanics that are there, whilst providing opportunity for expanding upon those core mechanics in a way that feels fun and that connects the theme and the mechanisms together with elegance.

I tend to believe that a game feels more complete if the idea and the mechanisms are born and develop together, in fact I’ve written a blog post on exactly that. Now I find myself in a situation not listed in that blog, where the theme is fine but that I feel as a designer doesn’t match the potential that the mechanisms offer.

The game “Lanterns” started out as an abstract game, with the final theme only settled on after the designers hooked up with the publishers, so far as I understand. So there is absolutely precedent for delaying or switching up thematics at the very last minute. So how am I to choose what imagery to use with my game, Little?

Looks Are Everything

Cuteness is all the rage these days. For good reason. People love escapism, and people love cute things. Both of which board games offer in millions of raw tonnage every year. It’s by no means the only aesthetic movement in the tabletop industry but it is a big one. In deciding on a theme, essentially I’ll be deciding on a target audience. Yes, what I want the game to represent matters, however I’m also aiming to make this my main source of income and so to ignore the aesthetic desires of the community would be foolish. What are the aesthetic desires of the community? Well, look at the games that have been most successful over the recent years.

It’s a mix, to be sure. Some games get artificially large amounts of airtime on social media for the small number of units in circulation, and some games barely get any coverage despite having massive sales. It’s difficult to pick apart the reality of how popular certain ideas are, and to see general trends as opposed to fads that will come and go. I’m a fairly risk averse person, so in deciding upon a theme for my game I will tend towards the ten year trends when looking at games rather than banking upon an idea that might blow up for one season.

You might be very different. There are plenty of examples of games that did well by riding on the specific cultural memetic of that year. Some people might still find those games entertaining, but I would argue that in general the desire to play those games come and go with the time that they were made in. For a small game that might shift a ton of units in a small time, this might be a super valid choice.

For me though, my aim for Little is for it to be a game that people come back to time and again, as a medium length game that could serve as a warm up game for a longer night, or as a go-to game when there isn’t time for a longer game. And through this logic, I have already narrowed down my target audience.

Cheap Seats or Royal Box?

In my time as a composer, the idea of appealing to certain demographics comes up a lot. Music is one of the key ways in which an audience will determine their reaction to a scene, and music comes with its own set of internal inferences. The term ‘cheap seats’ isn’t meant to be derogatory, more a short hand for having mass appeal. Think pop music, inoffensive, easily understood. Then of course on the other end of the spectrum there’s luxury but a much smaller appeal. These audiences can want quite different things from the same product, and certainly have different expectations.

Sometimes it’s possible to play to both audiences and keep everyone happy. Sometimes it isn’t. Hitting that middle ground between both can also lead to concessions being made that lessen the impact when compared against being bold and risking alienating certain sections of your audience.

With Little, the target audience will be people who have already played games. Those people will likely already own quite a few games that I will be directly competing against for time on the table. Those people will likely have a decent amount of spare income to purchase games, but might be discerning with that income as they know some games only make it to the table a few times a year, if that. Those people will have stylistic preferences that affect how drawn to a game they are, but they likely also have qualitative preferences that are prioritised above style.

People like quality, and they like getting quality for what appears to be a low price. And here’s where I get my first real clue about how to theme Little. The components of the game are simple; square tiles, rectangular boards and some tokens. It’s likely to stay that way. I need to find a theme where those components can have the appearance of relative luxury without compromising the cost of the project. That’s a good constraint, though it doesn’t necessarily help with what style to land on. The range of themes isn’t massively reduced by saying it has to hit a middle ground of luxuriousness.

Bring it Back

In deciding to create a board game design and eventually publishing company, I did give myself some key mission statements. These statements will help guide my decision making time and time again, and at this point it’s good to remind myself of why I settled on them in the first place. Making sure my concepts don’t contain colonialist ideas is paramount, as is a sense of responsibility and stewardship to the environment. Not all of my games need to be strictly about saving the planet or representing under-represented cultures, however Little is likely to be the first game I attempt to crowdfund, and so shouldn’t it represent the ethos of my company?

With this in mind, the constraints for the theme become ever more focused. Now I can begin to look for themes that hit on elements of de-colonialism or even anti-colonialism, but that also speak to stewardship and responsibility towards the natural world. Further considerations will be relatability and desirability, which create the overall impression of if you want to play the game or not.

I’m not there yet, but I will no doubt write again when a theme and final name has been chosen. Until then, if you have battled with selecting themes for your projects, how have you structured your decision making processes?

As always, thanks for reading!

Benjie x