The Next Era of Board Games: Part 2

The rise of progressive board games.

Posted on 2/18/2017 by Tim Rice

On October 8, 2015, Z-MAN Games released Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, and it quickly took the hobby gaming world by storm. Despite significant controversy, it only took about three months for it to reach the coveted #1 position on BoardGameGeek’s ranked list (an honor that only a handful of other games have ever held).

The reason some gamers are unhappy with this development is because Pandemic Legacy, unlike most other board games, is only meant to be played a limited number of times. It actually encourages players to destroy its components at certain points during the game (gasp!).

Despite this, the game has done phenomenally well, and it isn’t hard to see why. Pandemic Legacy prioritizes something that board games don’t usually attempt: telling a great story.

This idea that a board game can have a narrative structure and its mechanics can change throughout subsequent plays is becoming popularized, and it’s a major innovation that I think is going to contribute to a significant shift in the hobby within the next few years. Clearly a lot of gamers are excited about this new direction, and the recent successes of Pandemic Legacy, T.I.M.E. Stories, and Mice and Mystics have proven that there’s a market for it.

Today I want to explore the possibilities and dream about what these future games might look like.

Note: this article is the continuation of one of my previous articles where I make some predictions about where the board game industry is heading. The link to the first part is below.

Progressive Games

For the purposes of this article, I’m defining a progressive game as any game which requires more than one play for players to complete the entire experience. Usually this means that rules/mechanics will change from one play to the next, and they will often have overarching "epic" narratives that require multiple plays to conclude, but they doesn’t necessarily have to.

Progression in tabletop games isn’t really that new of a concept if you consider that RPGs have been doing it since their beginning. There’s also a whole genre of "campaign games" that usually take multiple gaming sessions to complete (Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Mechs vs. Minions, Gloomhaven, etc.). These types of games are great, but their audience is limited to those that are willing to invest a lot of time and energy.

I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more progressive mechanics in lighter games as well. Designers are starting to realize that adding narratives to their game can really set it apart and make it unique, and that it doesn’t necessarily have to function the exact same way each time it’s played.

Importance of Progression

The board game "formula" hasn’t changed all that much over the years. Typically there’s an instruction manual that describes how the game functions, and those rules never change. That system works fine, but it’s restrictive in the sense that only one game experience is possible.

Catan is a good example. The game certainly has a good amount of variety; it never plays out the same way twice because of the randomization of the board, numbers, and dice. But the things that players can actually do in the game (trade resources, build settlements, flip the table because your so-called “friend” rolled a seven and you have to discard all your sheep) never change no matter how many times you play.

Pandemic Legacy, on the other hand, starts off with a pretty simple rule set and gradually builds up additional mechanics bit by bit. By the time the campaign is over, the game is significantly different than it was at the beginning. That’s the fundamental element that these progressive games are tapping into, and there’s a ton of potential there.

Think about how the video game industry has evolved. Early video games didn’t emphasize story at all, and that’s about where we’re at with board games. Today though, video game developers often put an enormous amount of effort into their games’ story modes, and that’s where the board game industry could be heading as well.

People inherently love stories, and adding them to the board game world introduces a slew of new possibilities. What will be interesting is seeing how designers find new ways to tell their stories. The potential for immersive yet accessible story-driven games is definitely there, and I think it’ll be one of the things that defines the next generation of games.

Bigger Budgets

The board game industry has seen some impressive growth recently, and if this trend continues, publishers are going to have more money to invest. Could more money mean bigger development budgets?

Interestingly, the majority of modern games are still designed by only one or two people. It’s great that this industry still allows independent designers to thrive, but there’s only so much that can be accomplished by one person.

Compare this to the video game industry again. As the video game industry has grown, we’ve seen enormous game studios emerge who employ teams of writers, artists, and developers who all work on the same game. Could this be where the board game industry is heading as well?

We already have some publishers who work with teams of developers (Fantasy Flight Games comes to mind), but what could companies accomplish if their teams were as large as the video game industry’s teams? Food for thought, at least. I’d love to see a big budget story-driven game produced by a huge team of writers, artists, and designers, and I think we will before long.

Conclusion

Overall, it is an amazing time to be playing board games. It seems like there’s a new groundbreaking and innovative game coming out every month, and I don’t think this wave is going to slow down anytime soon.

Perhaps if I’m still writing in ten years I’ll revisit these predictions and laugh about how wrong I was. February 18, 2027. Make sure to mark your calendars.

Thanks for reading!

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