Brandon the Game Dev

Sagrada is one of my recent favorite board games. It is fundamentally a pretty simple game, but it has a lot of really endearing qualities. First and foremost, it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at. The dice are bright and pretty, as are the puzzle boards on which you build stained glass arrangements of dice. It’s ultimately a puzzle game, but a very attractive one with some subtle elements that arise from it being a nearly perfect information game where players draw from the same draft pool. It is also a smashing success of a game – so let’s talk about why that is.

First, let’s do a quick rundown of how Sagrada works. Your objective is to score the most victory points. You do so by placing colorful dice on a 5 x 4 grid in such a way that you meet conditions spelled out on one or more public objectives and/or your private objective. You also make sure to fill in as many spaces as possible on your board and keep as many “favor tokens” as possible by the end of the game.

There are ninety dice in the game, of which there are five different colors. Each player will roll a certain amount of dice (2 for each player plus 1). Then you snake draft around the table and everybody picks one die to place on their board. Certain spaces on your board can only hold certain colors, certain spaces can only hold certain numbers, and some spaces have no restrictions. No matter what: no two dice with the same color or number can be adjacent to one another on the board.

Got all that? Good – because that’s basically Sagrada. There are few other elements, but that’s the gist.

1. Looks matter.

You can’t talk about Sagrada without gushing about the colors. In fact, this warrants another photo…

The bright, colorful dice, the gorgeous card backs, and the stained glass cardboard player boards are all incredibly photogenic. This game came out in 2017 and the creators knew that in order to succeed on social media, it had to make people stop and click. And boy did it! There was a while on Instagram where you couldn’t go 10 pictures on a board gamer’s Instagram feed without running into this game.

The key takeaway is that you need to be mindful of how your game looks and feels. This is not just because of the experience that gamers will have when they play it on the table. Gaming goes deeper than that. A lot of gamers – and people at large – experience things by sharing them through photos with their friends. Once you realize people are doing this, you can make games that are perfect for that kind of behavior, like Sagrada.

2. Combine chance with choice like Sagrada.

There is an old running gag in the board game industry about board gamers hating dice. Sagrada has 90 of them. Yet Sagrada doesn’t use dice like “roll a 6 and this happens.” No, they use dice as pieces with variable states. For example, in a four-player game of Sagrada, you start with a draft pool of 9, of which each player will eventually receive 2. The active player will always have one or more choices of dice to choose from and then an additional choice of “where do I put this on my board?” to make.

The point I’m making is that you can incorporate chance. Chance elements are valuable in game design because they keep games from being “solved” in the same way that chess – a perfect information, zero luck game – ultimately was. Yet adding an element of chance haphazardly can make the game feel like it’s playing you instead of the other way around. For that reason, you always want to make sure that gamers can make meaningful choices based on the chance events that occur.

3. Make your restrictions easy to remember.

In Sagrada, you can’t have two dice with the same number or color adjacent to one another. Easy to remember, right? While this creates a very real struggle that informs your decisions throughout the game, it’s not gimmicky and you’re not likely to forget it. This is an underrated strength of Sagrada. There are a number of ways this could have been implemented poorly. Take note, aspiring game designers!

4. Make passing a rarity.

The restrictions above will every once in a while cause you to cede your turn entirely. This is arguably one of the worst feelings that a game can give you. Losing your turn, or having to cede your turn because you can make no legal moves, generally feels awful. Yet this becomes a very real risk when you have easy-to-remember restrictions that apply to a lot of situations.

Sagrada has an easy way around this that greatly minimizes the amount of turns that you will have to pass. It comes from tool cards which allow you to take certain actions after you place favor tokens on them. Most of the time, you’re better off simply placing a die on your board and holding on to your favor tokens until the end of the game for extra victory points. However, when you’re truly stuck, the tool cards let you continue to influence the game in interesting and engaging ways. I like that aspect of Sagrada a lot.

If you truly must create a game where passing is an occasional necessity, it may be worth adding an extra mechanic that allows players to continue to take actions. Typically, you want to implement the fewest mechanics possible to decrease rule overhead. However, allowing players to continue to play and stay engaged is a good reason to make an exception to this heuristic. Learn from Sagrada in this sense.

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I enjoy Sagrada a lot and I find it to be an excellent example of a modern board game. In a world where Scythe and Gloomhaven remain topical for years after their initial release, Sagrada is a remarkable example of what it takes to make gateway games that stay appealing over time.

Can you hear that coughing? It’s time to talk about Pandemic – one of the greatest games ever made. Pandemic is an evergreen game with a multitude of variants and legacy games. It’s also the first cooperative game for a lot of gamers. Despite being more than ten years old now, this new classic can still teach us a lot.

Just for clarity: I’m covering the original Pandemic, not the legacy version.

A long time ago on this blog, I wrote Pandemic: Getting People to Work Together. In it, I talk about why I love Pandemic for introducing me to hobby games and why I find its take on cooperative gameplay particularly effective. From that article, allow me to repost a simple explanation of how the game works:

There are four diseases, each represented by a different color cube – red, yellow, blue, and black. The objective is to cure all the diseases by collecting five cards that correspond to each color and discarding the cards at a CDC research station.

Here are the three main obstacles to success:

1. These diseases slowly add up in different regions. When more than 3 cubes of one color end up on one city, there’s an outbreak, and you have to put a disease cube on each connected city (infecting up to SIX others). If you hit 8 outbreaks, you lose. Outbreaks can cause chain outbreaks, too, so if you get one, you’re likely to get two or three or four at the same time.
2. If you run out of cards to draw, you lose. This is basically a time limit.
3. If you run out of disease cubes, you lose because your disease is too far spread (or the makers of the game were cheap, we’ll never know which).

1. Pick a theme that creates natural tension.

For many gamers, myself included, the best themes for board games are ones that create a lot of tension. Naturally, the theme you choose should correspond to the weight of the game and the audience you’re hoping to draw. That is to say, you have to be mindful of product-market fit. Twilight Struggle focused on the Cold War. Through the Ages makes you bear the load of an entire civilization.

Pandemic forces you to reckon with an existential threat likely to annihilate humanity in our interconnected era – no big deal. Of all the eschatological events that could destroy humanity, an actual pandemic ranks pretty high, after a nuclear war and climate change. The former is a cliched subject in apocalyptic games, the latter being pretty difficult to make a game about (an inconvenient truth, I know).

The point is: the name of the game, the theme, and the behaviors implied by each action you take in the game ratchet up the tension even without diseases rapidly taking over cities. You’re sweating the moment you get this game out of the box. If you’re a fledgling designer and you want to make your players nervous, this is how you do it.

2. A well-designed co-op game like Pandemic stands out among the crowd.

You know what I’ve noticed? There is a relative dearth of good cooperative games out there in the board gaming world. At the time of writing this article, about 6% of board games listed on board game have cooperative play. From the get-go, that gives Pandemic a unique niche to fit into.

If you’re looking to design a new game and you’d like to make an immediate impression, consider making a cooperative game. In my anecdotal experiences, a new co-op game almost always gets a “ooh, it’s a co-op!” reaction and it’s a lot easier to compete with 6% of games than it is to compete with 94% of games. I credit Pandemic here for bringing cooperative play into vogue.

3. Force players to balance tactics and strategy.

Everything I’ve mentioned before is superficial, but nevertheless very important to the lasting appeal of Pandemic. Getting into the gameplay of Pandemic itself, you notice that the game creates all kinds of interesting decision points at every turn. How you respond to an outbreak in South America or a near shortage of red cubes will determine how the rest of your game will go, and indeed, what you will get punished for.

Oh, and you will get punished. Pandemic forces you to balance tactics and strategy. If you are constantly running around and fighting disease, especially if that entails direct or charter flights, it will be much harder to reach a research station and find a cure to each disease. Yet working to cure diseases means you spend less time preventing outbreaks from overrunning regions and ending your game prematurely. To some extent, you can divvy up responsibility among different players, but you will still ultimately need to stay close enough to pass resources in order to play effectively.

Forcing players to manage short-term crises while working toward long-term goals is a great way to make a game engaging. Pandemic displays this well.

4. Use a manageable element of chance.

Pandemic is, in some ways, a chance-driven game. The cities which are infected at first are chosen randomly, but after a while, you know which cities are likely to come up – you just don’t know when. That means you’ve got to make choices about when to, say, provide aid to a 3-cube near-disaster in Osaka and when to let it slide for just one more turn. A truly proficient player can even calculate the probability of certain outcomes, but they can never know for certain what is going to happen next. Twilight Struggle, one of my eternal favorite games, also has this quality, but Pandemic has it in a way that’s much easier to intuitively understand.

When creating games with chance, you want to be careful in implementing it. When players are completely blindsided by chance, it can make the game disengaging and frustrating. You need to give them interesting choices before the chance event and after the chance event, as well as a sense of the range of potential outcomes.

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Pandemic is a complex delight. Its tension and cooperative nature set the stage before you ever start playing. The interesting decision points around balancing short-term and long-term needs and the manageable chance-driven events are worth study by all aspiring game designers. Learn from Pandemic and you’ll make a game people never get sick of 🙂

Santorini is a fantastic board game that came out about two years ago. In its heart, it’s an abstract strategy game that could have come from antiquity. It has been given the modern board game polish, though, with adorably cutesy art of Greek gods, and an incredibly photogenic set of stackable plastic components.

Santorini is so straightforward that I can explain the entirety of the basic rules to you here. The goal of the game is to stand on a tower that is three blocks high. Start by placing your two pieces anywhere on the board. On each turn, you move one space orthogonally or diagonally. You may move on the same level, step up one level, or step down any number of levels. Then you place one building piece diagonally or orthogonally. You place a base on an empty square, turn one-story towers into two-story towers, turn two-story towers into three-story towers, and put domes on three-story towers.

That’s it. No, really. There are god cards that give you variable player powers, but you don’t even need them to appreciate the game. The rules could not possibly be simpler, and yet the strategy of the game gets pretty heady.

There are lots of reasons I love, love, love this game. For the purposes of this article, though, we’ll be discussing four lessons for board game designers to take away from it.

1. Physical game presence counts for a lot.

Santorini would be just as playable on a flat, unadorned 5 x 5 board with flat wooden pieces to signify towers. You could use two black pawns and two white pawns for player pieces. The rules of the game would not be affected in the slightest, and it wouldn’t even make it more complicated to play.

What I’m getting at is that the stylish white towers of Santorini that stand upon the floating cardboard island are purely aesthetic. There is no need for them from a gameplay standpoint, but they add a lot of value to the game as a product nonetheless. For better or worse, people judge games based on how they look and how they feel from a tactile standpoint. That means if you can turn a simple abstract strategy into a 3D and lush experience, you’ll make the game so much better for gamers.

The takeaway for game designers here is to think carefully about the user experience. The physical presence of your game will make or break it for many people.

2. Make complexity come from interactions, not rules.

As I said before, Santorini can be an extremely heady game. My fiancee has said that it’s like chess on a tic-tac-toe board – meant as a compliment! Yet the game’s rules are even simpler than chess, which has variable player powers for each individual piece – pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, king, and queen.

Santorini is as simple as Go to explain, but like Go, it is very difficult to master. The game can unfold in innumerable different ways and the appropriate tactics for each situation are always changing. None of the complexity comes from a misunderstanding of rules. It comes from the game’s interactions, which raise questions like:

• “How do I best prevent my piece from being trapped by 2-story towers?”
• “How do I best position myself to put domes on promising 3-story towers before my opponent can stand on them?”
• “Should I build toward the center or toward the side?”

Questions like the above are the ones you want players asking about your game.

3. Create a light mode to make the first game easier.

Remember how I mentioned that you don’t really need the god cards to appreciate the game? As it turns out, the god cards are, in fact, purely optional. The addition of variable player powers is not needed to play the game, though it does add spice if you’ve got a few games under your belt already. As such, the first game of Santorini you play probably won’t involve the god cards – and that’s good! It allows you to learn the fundamentals of the game without having to deal with the more advanced concepts.

For game designers, the lesson to take away is to create a “light mode” for first time gameplay. Learning a board game from the rulebook remains one of the necessary evils of the hobby. Learning the rules – one way or another – is probably the most inaccessible part of board gaming. Creating a light version allows players to learn for the first time without contending with the full complexity of the game.

4. Marry abstraction to a simple theme for the best of both worlds.

The greatest trick that Santorini ever pulled was making an abstract strategy game feel thematic. It is through the great use of components, cutesy art, and especially the overall physical experience of the game that this is possible. While the abstract game in and of itself could certainly hold its own in tight-knit gaming circles, it wouldn’t place the game on the shelves of Target or Wal-Mart. To stand out in the noisy world, your game needs to look attractive and make a great first impression.

A good game is not enough. Your good game needs to be beautiful and feel special in order to be purchased. Santorini does this through a variety of different methods, and we should take note. If you are a board game designer, or perhaps more appropriately, a developer or publisher, you need to think about the game as a product and the experience as a selling point. Santorini is a textbook example of this being done par excellence.

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Judicious use of different thematic elements have given the abstract Santorini the sheen it needs to appeal to gamers when shopping at the store. What’s more, the complexity of the game grows as gamers learn more, meaning the learning curve is perfectly adjusted to each player’s skillset. These qualities have put Santorini among the patheon of great games, and we can learn from them so that our own designs may one day last to antiquity.