Brandon the Game Dev

Last year, Everdell by Starling Games raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter. It has remained a popular board game since, regularly topping out the Board Game Geek Hotness and showing up multiple times as a giveaway prize in Pangea contests. With that in mind, we owe to ourselves to spend a little time studying its success!

Everdell is a worker placement, tableau-building board game. As the name suggests, Everdell has a fantasy setting, and is indeed named for a charming valley within the game’s world. The setting is described as being “beneath the boughs of towering trees, among meandering streams and mossy hollows, a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding.”

As you can imagine, this is right up the alley of many dedicated board gamers. But why exactly is that?

1. Cute fantasy themes go a long way.

I don’t know what exactly it is about fantasy themes, but board gamers love them. Indeed, readers, moviegoers, and TV bingers all love fantastical settings. This can range from cute and furry settings like those in Everdell and Root to complex worlds like Lord of the Rings or even gritty fantasy epics like Game of Thrones.

Let’s be honest. Life is freaking hard. Sometimes it’s so hard that you don’t even want to face it head-on. Thus, fantasy settings give us a harmless way of unplugging from all the things that stress us out. Science fiction, another perennial favorite of board gamers, is basically fantasy with a thin veneer of science applied. If you don’t believe this, harken back to classic novels like Frank Hebert’s Dune. The shared lineage between science fiction and fantasy is on full display there.

This isn’t necessarily a lesson explicit to Everdell, but the unique history of Starling Games makes it a relevant one. A quick look at the Starling Games About Page states that “Starling Games was launched…in 2018.” In other words, Everdell put a brand new company on the map. That’s a testament to just how much fantasy themes connect to people. That kind of rapid connection to an idea only comes as a direct result of an emotional need being met.

2. Worker placement is popular for a reason.

Like many games, Everdell uses worker placement. In the case of Everdell, workers are placed to help players gather resources, draw cards, and take special actions.

Worker placement is also known as action drafting. This is relevant because it means that players are competing for the permission to perform certain actions in the pursuit of certain goals.

Worker placement is a very simple concept with really profound implications. You can play based on just your needs or with the intention to block your opponents from meeting theirs. There is a reason this mechanic is present in many BGG Top 100 Games such as Viticulture, Caverna, A Feast for Odin, and Agricola.

Sometime around 2018, I did a major poll asking people what their favorite themes and mechanics were. I can’t find the link to it, but the upshot is that fantasy themes and worker placement mechanics blew everything else out of the water. Everdell is popular in part because the creators identified what gamers liked and simply gave it to them!

3. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel if your game provides enough variety.

Maybe I’ll get some heat for this, but I’ll just go ahead and say it. Everdell doesn’t really do anything new. It’s another worker placement fantasy board game with good components.

This is not an insult.

There’s an old concept in business called “second but better.” Indeed, the most innovative ideas often fail or turn out mediocre at first, so your best experiences with games (or otherwise), often come from masterful creators on well-worn territory.

A commenter on Board Game Geek, jamesjacob, said it better than I possibly could here, so I’ll just quote him.

Don’t let the charming artwork fool you. This is an impressive game that combines tableau-style engine building with classic worker placement mechanics. On the surface, the rules seem pretty ‘I’ve-seen-this-100-times-before’, but the inter-connectedness of the cards makes for engaging decisions and pulling off combos is very satisfying. 

4. 3-D components are a gimmick, but they helped the game draw attention.

On the Board Game Geek ratings page for Everdell, I noticed a few particularly grumpy gamers complained that the fancy 3-D tree included with Everdell does nothing. Fair enough – Everdell could be played without the tree. But I think these gamers are missing the point.

It’s no secret that the board game market is oversaturated and noisy as can be. Anything that can break through the sheer deluge of sameness that defines board game Facebook groups and Twitter feeds is valuable. And indeed, I think it’s necessary if you want to have a shot at making good money on an individual game.

I’ve stated many times before that gimmicks cannot substitute for actual quality gameplay. At the same time, I think gimmicks are necessary to making people look for long enough to absorb the deeper, better qualities of games. The same is true even for books and movies that come out these days. That’s why books have clicky titles and that’s why movie trailers show scenes out of context. They fight for your attention so that enough people stick around to see the real artistry.

Final Thoughts

Everdell is an excellent example of a well-made game perfectly tailored for its audience. It’s a fantasy worker placement board game in a hobby industry full of people who love that kind of experience. It isn’t particularly innovative, but it’s well-crafted, so it doesn’t have to be. And it has just the right amount of gimmickry to make you pay attention.

Not bad for a civilization of woodland creatures!

Twilight Imperium is among the greatest board games of all time according to BoardGameGeek. Within that notoriously hard-to-please community, it holds a staggering 8.7/10 rating.

It’s also got an absurdly high complexity rating of 4.2/5 and a play time of 4 to 8 HOURS. Oh, and it costs over $100 on Amazon in the US.

Today, we must ask ourselves how this extremely long, extremely complicated, and extremely expensive game captured the attention and undying affection of the hardcore hobbyist board game community. There are a hundred good answers to that question, but today, I’ll give you four based on my own experiences with Twilight Imperium.

But first, let’s talk about what exactly Twilight Imperium is. I’ll borrow the description from its Board Game Geek page since I think it says it best:

Twilight Imperium is a game of galactic conquest in which three to six players take on the role of one of seventeen factions vying for galactic domination through military might, political maneuvering, and economic bargaining. Every faction offers a completely different play experience, from the wormhole-hopping Ghosts of Creuss to the Emirates of Hacan, masters of trade and economics. These seventeen races are offered many paths to victory, but only one may sit upon the throne of Mecatol Rex as the new masters of the galaxy.

No, dear reader, I did not copy and paste a whole passage from Frank Herbert’s Dune just then. Twilight Imperium is that rich and complex in premise alone. I won’t even attempt to get into the grittiness of the rules, because this is going to be 1,000-word article, not 10,000. Nevertheless, there are great lessons we can learn from this game with even a casual analysis.

1. For very long games, you want very high-quality components.

Board gaming is a very tactile experience. Components are a large part of why people choose to play board games in person in the year 2019. Video games are extraordinary these days, as are options for playing board games online.

All that is to say, if you’re going to get people to sit down for 4 to 8 hours to play a single board game, you have to bring great components. And, Twilight Imperium…oh, there are no words…

There are very, very few board games that have this many tactile parts. There is a wide variety of shapes and colors, making the game have a table presence that is nearly unrivaled. Look at the photo above – it looks like something that can be played for eight hours at a time.

If your ambition is to make a heavy, lengthy game, you have to deliver on the physical experience. Twilight Imperium is a perfect example of how to do that.

2. Nothing inspires awe like sheer scope.

If you’re going for light fun, your game needs to be less than an hour. For something more complex, but still approachable, you need to keep it to three hours max.

But what if your ambition is to make a massive game? You can’t just rely on fun or challenge. No, you have to make people feel a sense of awe. That is the only emotion strong enough to keep people sitting up in chairs for 4-8 hours at a time.

Everything in a game must build toward that sense of awe. In Twilight Imperium, think about the experience you have as you get ready to play:

• You lift the heavy box and take out all the pieces.
• Good grief, there are a lot of pieces.
• You painstakingly set the whole thing up.
• The rulebook is really big.
• The run-time is long.
• The story is told on a galactic scale and covers SEVENTEEN different types of characters.

All of this repeats the message “buckle up, this is going to be a wild ride!”

3. Twilight Imperium is an example of how to succeed at complete immersion.

Twilight Imperium doesn’t just promise a wild ride, though. It succeeds. Check out the Board Game Geek reviews. You will see, over and over again, words like “immersive” and “epic.” Time flies by when you’re playing this game.

This largely ties into sheer scope and the awe factor. However, the awe you inspire early in your design has to maintain players’ interest throughout the whole game. The only reliable way to succeed in a task so big is to play-test specifically around immersion. It has to be the benchmark by which your design, should you decide to make something as heavy as this game, is measured.

4. No two games should be the same.

So many of the great games that I find inspiring from a game design perspective share this quality. You can call it replayability or variance. No matter what, whether you’re playing Terraforming Mars, Twilight Struggle, or Twilight Imperium, tough-to-learn games must have this quality.

When designing a heavy, complex game, bear in mind your players’ reason for playing in the first place. Why choose the heavy game over several lighter ones? The heavy game bears a great burden – it has to provide opportunities for creative gameplay so that the game stays fresh over its entire runtime. This will also have the effect of making it to where no two games feel the same.

Final Thoughts

Twilight Imperium is a fantastic game. It is the prime example of how to make an ultra-heavyweight game that never alienates its players.

From the very start, players need to be wowed by the game. Its physical presence and sense of scale need to reassure gamers before they ever even take the first turn. These qualities are like promises to gamers that it will be worth their time.

I strongly encourage you to play Twilight Imperium yourself so that you can experience what makes it so immersive. Even if you only have the opportunity to play once, you will be able to appreciate just how many different ways the game can unfold.

Leder Games really nailed it when they came out with their board game Root in 2018. It’s broken into and remained within the Board Game Geek top 50. Indeed, on the Pangea Games Facebook group where we regularly give away free board games, Root has by far the most popular prize we’ve ever given away (all three times we’ve done it)!

Clearly, they’re doing something right here 🙂

So what exactly is Root? In short, Root is a wargame wrapped in a theme about adorable animals. Marquise de Cat rules the woodlands with an iron paw, forcing the woodland creatures to team up and fight back. This both sets the stage for some really clever asymmetric strategic play and realistically portrays the diabolical scheming of cats.

Many games have come and gone on Kickstarter. It takes a lot to truly stand out and be remembered, and the vast majority have been forgotten. Yet Root stands apart because it’s been a sensation for months on end.

The gameplay has a lot to do with it. Let’s talk about what makes Root special and what you can learn from it.

1. Bringing grit to a wide audience? Wrap it in a cute theme!

Wargames have a tough reputation. It’s no surprise either, they’re hard and they’re hard on purpose. This is fantastic if your sole purpose in board gaming is an intellectual challenge. This is not fantastic, however, if you are trying to get a bunch of friends to play a board game with you.

Presentation matters more than most aspiring board gamers want to admit. If you want a complex game to be approachable to a wide variety of gamers, you have to take a few steps to smooth the rough edges. As an example, Root wisely keeps the games to 60 – 90 minutes.

Root is complex. There is no getting around that fact. However, the cute theme, the character names, the little cat meeples…all of it works for the common purpose of keeping first-timers engaged. There are people who would get into wargames if the right one came along. The sort of wargame that didn’t involve the American Revolution or a byzantine science fiction universe of warring factions with unpronounceable names. Root, in large part because of its theme, is that game.

2. Increase your game’s shelf life by having different victory conditions.

So often, games rely on common objectives. All players must attempt to maximize their victory points to win. Or perhaps they must be the first to complete some task. The point is, in many games, people are trying to do the same thing.

To drive this point home, here is an excerpt directly from the rule book:

The invading Marquise de Cat wishes to exploit the Woodland, using its vast resources to fuel her economic and military machine. She scores by constructing buildings in the Woodland.

The proud Eyrie Dynasties wish to reclaim the glory of their once-great aristocracy and retake the Woodland from the Marquise. They score each turn by building and protecting roosts in the Woodland.

The upstart Woodland Alliance wish to unite the creatures of the forest and rise up against their oppressors. They score by spreading sympathy for their cause across the Woodland.

The wily Vagabond wishes to gain fame-or infamy-in the midst of this brewing conflict. He scores by completing quests for the creatures of the Woodland and by aiding and harming the other factions.

Not only are they reinforcing the theme early on in the rule book, but each faction also has a different objective. This is pretty self-explanatory, but worth mentioning simply because I don’t think enough board games do this.

3. Highly asymmetrical design is underrated.

Different objectives is one way to add intrigue to a board game. Asymmetrical design takes it up to 11!

Asymmetry in board games basically means different players have different abilities. Variable player powers are frequently used to great effect to add light asymmetry to board games. Yet Root takes this to its logical extreme.

In Root, every faction has vastly different abilities. Along with their different objectives, the most effective strategies are wildly different. You can read about that in-depth in this great article on Sprites and Dice.

Seem like it wouldn’t work? Seem like a monster to balance? These are valid concerns, but consider the following reviews on Board Game Geek:

• “Totally asymmetric but surprisingly balanced” – Patmol, 10/10
• “Excellent design, asymmetric factions. Really enjoyed.” – sedlak87, 9/10
• “Still, while there are a lot of four-player, asymmetrical games out there, I think this is the best.” – Salo sila, 9/10

As you scroll, you notice people write reviews in a way that implies the balanced nature of the asymmetrical design is surprising. To me, this sounds like a lot of people are craving asymmetry, but they don’t see it implemented well very often. For that reason, I think asymmetry is underrated in board gaming.

4. Give players the thrill of discovery.

When you have a game that engages players with a theme early on, they’re encouraged to learn for a longer period of time. With asymmetry in the design and unique objectives, gamers will find every game to play differently. Little nuances come out over time.

What does this result in? A thrill of discovery! Not just of unique plays and maneuvers, though that is important on its own. I think Root leads players to realize that they like game styles that they wouldn’t normally play, namely wargames.

There are tons of great games. I’ve name-checked too many to count on this blog. But how many great games help players realize they like an entire genre of games they had not previously considered?

Final Thoughts

Root is a sensation among board gamers for good reason. By playing it and studying it, we can learn more about effectively implementing asymmetrical game design. It’s also great at teaching us how to use theme to introduce gamers to much grittier games than they would normally play. Not bad for a game about woodland creatures!