A warm welcome to all our readers.

We at Vilayat hope to bring you content on a variety of subjects applicable to game design, organized in a series of posts. The theme for this particular series is Object Oriented design in board games.

We have a particular vision in mind for this series, however the scope is likely to constantly evolve. We expect to update these posts over time with new content and examples, based on our own experiences or as a result of feedback from readers. Reading between the lines, this is another way to say that we may not be completely sure of what we are talking about yet, but hope to figure it out eventually.

Our goals for this series are the following:

1.       Motivate the thought of object-oriented design in board games, by outlining current practices in design and exploring cases where current board games might already be leveraging such design (descriptive content)

2.       Help foster concise and efficient design methods that are motivated by object-oriented design (prescriptive content)

What’s the motivation behind this series?

It started with a desire for a more optimal method to go about doing pointless things. Surely there was a better way to make mass updates to cards than individually working on each one? Well actually it turns out there is, you could check out Component Studio for an intuitive way to go about creating board game components, or something like Nandeck if you’re comfortable with a bit of coding.

More recently however, this itch to design in a more organized fashion cropped up while working on the development of the digital version for Flee Fi Fo From in Unity. The team spent several weeks on just the logical architecture of the game, before beginning with a single line of code. Questions that arose during this process and subsequent design decisions actually ended up having a positive feedback effect on the underlying board game design, making the final version more streamlined and elegant. This made us realize that although board game ideation is a wonderful freeform creative process, it could perhaps use some degree of organization at later stages of design and development.  

Why Now?

The pandemic year saw a fair amount of board gaming happening in the digital domain. Platforms such as Board Game Arena, Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator were popular even before the pandemic, however their existence and popularity now feel a lot more prevalent in board game circles. Just as other industries discovered ways to optimize their outdated working models via the digital domain, I believe that the board game industry may well have fundamentally changed in its attitude to digital adaptations of board games. In addition to browser based (BGA) and physics sandbox platforms (TTS, Tabletopia), there is also a small yet potential high growth segment of standalone digital adaptations of board games on native game engines such as Unity, for example Scythe Digital, Root, or the recently released Tainted Grail: Conquest among others. 

These developments are of particular interest to us, as we at Vilayat expect to simultaneously pursue digital adaptations of tabletop games that we develop. With this in mind, we will often provide examples of object-oriented design in the digital domain to illustrate how it can influence or be influenced by the physical domain.

What if I’m not interested in digitization?

We expect a fair number of our readers to be in this bucket, where tabletop games are alluring particularly because they are not digital. I would argue that an object-oriented design approach still provides advantages even in the physical domain. For example, are your rules complex out of habit or out of necessity, and is there a way to make them more intuitive? Do you really need that extra token in your game to track just that one extra thing, or could you maybe double down with an existing component? I hope to cover these and more in future posts in this series.

Finally, in case of any trepidation that some of you may seem to have against coding, we want to clarify that we don’t plan to have much of that in this series, instead focusing more on logical and intuitive depiction of concepts. We also hope to illustrate that you are probably already unknowingly using several of these concepts in your designs. Thus, if there’s a single takeaway you could take from this series, it’s that as proud ex-consultants, we will be telling you what you already know.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for further updates!