Brandon the Game Dev

Azul has taken the board game world by storm. Like Sagrada, it’s a gorgeous and approachable puzzle game with emergent complexity that becomes ever more apparent with more plays. It has received accolades far and wide, impressively breaking into the Board Game Geek Top 50 and securing a spot as one of five 2018 Mensa Select winners. It’s also, somehow, always trending on social media and Board Game Geek. Clearly, Plan B Games is doing something right, so let’s talk about that!

In Azul, 2 to 4 players will collect tiles and tile their 5×5 grid in a way that allows them to get the most points. Once a player completes an entire row on their board, the game concludes. Players take turns drawing from factory tiles in the middle. Like in Sagrada, you usually are looking out for your own interests, but you are also given the opportunity to block others when doing this.

After drawing tiles, you have to place all of them on your board. Since there are restrictions on how you do that, any waste goes to the “floor”, which will earn you negative victory points. The way that you place tiles determines how many points you earn. The exact way this is scored is more complex than we need to go into for the sake of discussion here.

Long story short, it’s abstract tile placement par excellence.

1. Creating a great tactile experience like Azul is so important.

Clack! That’s the satisfying sound that the Starburst-colored Azul tiles make when they hit the table. They’re weighty and made of nice plastic, making people envious when just looking at them online.

Board gamers love the physical experience of games. That is, after all, one of the things that makes board games a good alternative to video games. While independent board game publishers often have a tough time affording the nicest materials, we can all learn a few lessons from the way Azul handled its physical presence.

Notice how the boards you place your tiles on are relatively spartan. You don’t touch these so often, so they don’t have to be the nicest materials. The one part that truly matters – the tiles which you touch frequently through the course of the game – have physical weight and smoothness to them. Azul shows us, in practice, how to optimize physical game experience around manufacturing costs.

2. You don’t need incredible art to make a gorgeous game.

Art is one of the key selling points of modern hobby board games. This little chestnut has been upheld as one of the key success factors in modern board game Kickstarter campaigns, including on this very blog. Yet Azul is remarkable because it doesn’t have much art. Sure, it has cover art, but that’s about it. All the rest is graphic design.

Saying that Azul is dependent upon graphic design might sound like I’m splitting hairs, but hear me out. Graphic design, unlike art, is specifically focused on conveying a specific message to a specific audience. Graphic design is art’s utilitarian cousin. The tiles and boards in Azul feel gorgeous and distinct, but they are really just simple – if pretty – geometric patterns.

With hardly any art, Azul has been photographed and shared more than just about any other game I’ve ever seen. It feels like I’ve seen more photos of Azul than I have of, say, Gloomhaven. People love sharp, contrasting colors that catch their attention. They love even more that you can look at them for longer and see lines and curves, curlicues, and ornamentation. The combination of bright colors drawing people in to stay and look at baroque levels of detail is perfectly in tune with the Instagram age.

This is truly remarkable. Art is one of the biggest costs associated with board gaming, and Azul shows a viable way to cut that cost without compromising experience.

3. Get the chores done quickly – simple rules, fast set-up, fast gameplay.

Azul is not a complicated game. Like other modern abstract strategy games along the lines of Santorini, Sagrada, and Photosynthesis, it’s easy to explain. On top of that, I think Azul has still another edge. It’s just a little faster to set up than any of the others I mentioned, especially Photosynthesis. For a game so defined by its components – its tactile experience – Azul takes remarkably little time to set up.

In my opinion, the 2 or 3 minutes less it takes to set up Azul as opposed to other games of a similar weight is part of what keeps getting this game on the table. Every single barrier you introduce that makes starting a game harder makes it a little less attractive. Azul comes with about the smallest possible amount of “chores.” In fact, the only modern hobby board game of a similar strategic level I can think of at this moment that has less set up than Azul is Onitama.

4. Let the complexity gradually become more apparent.

Azul isn’t simply pretty and learnable. The game is a good deal more complex than it initially lets on. This is the “emergent complexity” which I’d mentioned in the opening paragraph. Yes, the tile placement allows for players to minmax on a micro scale early on. You don’t pay attention to others much when you first play Azul, and that’s fine, because you’re learning the basics of the game.

Once you get the basic strategy of Azul down, though, you realize that there are subtle elements of “take that” that went unnoticed initially. You realize you can force players to pick tiles they can’t use. On top of that, you realize that you can force other players to place tiles in the negative point section at the bottom of their board. Your actions affect others.

Granted, it’s not like your actions can screw others over every single time so as to rob them of the ability to make meaningful choices. Instead, the game hits this perfect happy medium of “you happening to the game” and “the game happening to you” once all players understand how their actions affect others.

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Azul is a great board game with a fantastic physical presence. No longer does the premium tactile experience of board gaming have to be limited to games with minis. Azul takes that experience and brings it to a gateway game with real, lasting strategic weight.

For those of you who are fans of Azul, what else can we learn from this game to become better designers?

Ticket to Ride came out in 2004. Along with games like Catan and Pandemic, Ticket to Ride helped turn board gaming into the juggernaut of a hobby that we know and love today. It’s for good reason, too. It’s an elegant game that can be learned very quickly. It scales well at low and high player counts. On top of that, the experience for beginners and the experience for advanced players are different enough to keep the game engaging even as you learn more about it. For these reasons and more, we’re going to dive into Ticket to Ride and talk about what new board game designers can learn from this 15-year-old game.

Ticket to Ride is all about connecting railways across North America. The longer your routes, the more points you get on the board. You also get points from meeting the conditions on Destination Tickets, which connect distant cities and for making the longest continuous route. It’s very straightforward, but you’re constantly balancing different decisions, which keeps it fresh and engaging.

1. Scale well to different player counts.

Ticket to Ride can be played just as easily by two as it can by five players. Most games have a pretty defined sweet spot – Ticket to Ride being four players – but often fall apart at low player counts or high player counts. Ticket to Ride simply doesn’t. The framework is simple enough to apply to different player counts without substantially changing rules. This is really valuable because a lot of classic games that came before it had kludgy solutions to try to make low and high player counts work. For games that did this, these “solutions” damaged the overall fun of the game.

2. Create with expansions in mind.

At the time Ticket to Ride was created, expansions and alternate versions were not a particularly large part of the nascent board game community. Granted, games like Trivial Pursuit already had a billion editions, but Ticket to Ride wasn’t like Trivial Pursuit. It was a hobby game.

Because the framework behind Ticket to Ride is so simple, it became very easy to make alternate versions. That’s why we have Ticket to Ride: Europe, Ticket to Ride: Germany, Ticket to Ride: New York, Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails, Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, and more. There are also expansions both formal and fan-made because the system is so straightforward. Change the cities, change the routes, draw some new lines, swap out Destination Cards. Voila! brand new game with a new strategy based on the quirks of the map.

For better or worse, variations and expansions are part of the board game landscape today. If you’re looking to start your own intellectual property that will last far beyond a single game release, Ticket to Ride is an excellent model to look at for inspiration.

3. Allow for different levels of strategy.

When you first play Ticket to Ride, it seems simple. All you have to do is connect railways to score points. Meanwhile, cutthroat super-competitors are blocking each others’ railway connections, packing their hands for surprise assaults on the map, and trying to hide their moves so their competition won’t catch on. There are scores of articles on Ticket to Ride strategy, which is incredible when you consider that the game has a complexity rating of 1.87 / 5 on Board Game Geek. Clearly, there is more to it than meets the eye on the first play.

As a game designer, this is one of the ultimate objectives of creating a board game. You want a game that works on multiple different levels and stays fresh for a long time. In order to get to that point, you need complexity to come from the interactions between elements of the game instead of the rules. Then you also need to play-test a ton just to make sure that different strategic options are viable. You always want there to be more than one path to victory.

4. Force players to make difficult decisions.

Naive new players don’t often feel the burn of Ticket to Ride decision making, but veterans sure do. Alan R. Moon, the creator of Ticket to Ride, put it this way: “the tension comes from being forced to balance greed – adding more cards to your hand, and fear – losing a critical route to a competitor.” There is no strategy that is always right. While you will be making strategic moves on a grand scale throughout the game, you will constantly have to switch up your tactics based on what the board looks like. If your competitors are moving slowly, you have more leniency to be greedy. If your competitors are moving quickly, you have to constantly sweat the risk of getting your rail connections poached.

Furthermore, there is the question of where you want your victory points to come from. You can connect cities for points, establish routes for points, but also get points for making the longest route. You’ll need to mix and match, to be sure, but one of these will ultimately wind up being the linchpin in your strategy. You want to be able to pursue goals, but build yourself an out in case you have to switch quickly when you find your opponent is pursuing the same goal! It gets very heady, very quickly.

As a board game designer, you want people to feel like their choices matter. Ticket to Ride is excellent at doing this, mostly because the decisions are difficult ones with real consequences. Games need stakes to be satisfying. You need, at least sometimes, to make people feel like opening a door closes another.

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Ticket to Ride has become successful and stayed relevant for many of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s outlasted thousands of other games. By seeking insight from the game, we can become better designers capable of creating evergreen masterpieces 🙂

I recently had the pleasure of playing Terraforming Mars for the first time. I am pleased to say that it is an absolutely fantastic game that’s worth purchasing. There are some really good qualities as well as some really annoying ones, and we’re going to discuss both. I consider this to really valuable for learning game design simply because there is so much going on.

Terraforming Mars is a game where each player acts as a corporation trying to, well, terraform Mars. Each of you will do your part to cover the surface in cities, greenery, and water while raising the oxygen level and temperature of the planet. As time passes, Mars will become ever more hospitable and you will receive points based on your contribution to society.

It’s a resource management game, in essence. You’re dealing with money, steel, titanium, plants, energy, and heat. Beyond the simply trackable resources, you’re also affecting the board through tile placement and determining your destiny through hand management. There are also variable player powers, and… You get the point. There’s a lot going on here.

A quick disclaimer before we go any farther. Terraforming Mars is a great game. It has some incredibly likable qualities to it that I believe will help it endure. However, you need to be very careful about imitating it. It’s a complex game, the rules are not particularly well-presented, and the pieces are fiddly. It makes some basic mistakes when it comes to accessibility that you shouldn’t repeat. Yet even with these problems, I still want to play it again today. That’s how good the underlying engine is!

1. If you go heavy like Terraforming Mars, create variety.

Most people I know would call Terraforming Mars a heavy game. There are a lot of rules. It takes hours to learn, and you won’t understand it on your first game. There are so many resources to manage as well as other decisions that you need to make.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it can destroy a game if you’re not careful. Weighty games need to bring something special to the table, and Terraforming Mars does. One of the ways Terraforming Mars keeps the game fresh is by an absolutely massive deck of project cards. To be specific, it’s 208 and there are no repeats. Each one has a different impact on the game. Combine this with other situational factors and you have a game which never resolves in the same way twice.

This is so critical. Terraforming Mars is not fast and it’s not cheap. For gamers as consumers to feel like there is real value in the game, this level of variety is very useful!

2. Use theme as a hook.

Terraforming Mars feels academic in its complexity when you learn it for the first time. This is one of the weakest qualities of the game. In fact, if the designers were not careful, it could have made the game a dud. Yet the sci-fi theme and the grand scale of terraforming an entire planet is very appealing to gamers. For that reason, the theme is a sufficient hook to keep gamers engaged even while being beaten down by the rules, the exceptions, and the complex logic of the game.

Look, if your theme can’t keep people engaged for long enough to learn the game, you won’t go very far. The game will be played by a select few and are later forgotten. Terraforming Mars, whether intentionally or on purpose, nailed theme and thus captured lightning in a bottle.

3. Use graphic design to convey weight.

Between the hex spaces, the enormous amount of components, and the complex tracking system, Terraforming Mars looks complex. You can also see this reflected in the iconography of the game as well. The game exudes complexity and intellectualism.

“So it comes across as complex? How is that a good thing, Brandon?” It ultimately comes down to product-market fit. If Terraforming Mars looked lighter than it was, people would be blindsided by the complexity of the game and they would ragequit. Likewise, if the game looked more complicated, people wouldn’t want to try it. Terraforming Mars hits a sweet spot right between looking too easy and looking too complicated. It attracts just the right crowd and that has helped it to succeed in the marketplace.

4. Create opportunities for creative play.

This is the most important lesson from Terraforming Mars. Everything I have said before has been a lesson in how Terraforming Mars pre-emptively addresses its weaknesses as a product or as a game. That’s because Terraforming Mars needs to keep people engaged for long enough to really see the game for what it is. People need to make the decision to buy it, learn it, and muddle through it before they ever see the full extent of this game’s creative play.

And my, is this game creative. There is so much variety in the project deck, the variable player powers add a lot, and even the board can play out in a number of different ways – almost feeling like an abstract strategy sub-game in and of itself. You could play this game 100 times and never reach the conclusion. I could play an isolationist game where I contribute little to enviornment and don’t hurt others. I could work almost entirely on the enviornment, speed up the game, and gain glory doing so. Still, I could play zero-sum and try to injure my opponents to get ahead. There are so many options!

For heavy board gamers, the ability to express their creativity, escape their day-to-day worries, and receive intellectual stimulation are very important. This is what compels heavy board gamers to play heavy board games. Terraforming Mars does all of this because the game is creative and can be played a lot of different ways. All the frustrating aspects of it disappear once this simple truth comes to light.

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Terraforming Mars is an engaging game that uses its looks to scare off casuals, its theme and variety to hook the skeptical, and its creative gameplay to engage gamers for years to come. Anybody want to play a game? 🙂