The Fascinating Map of Board Games（原声文稿）

The oldest record of a board game we know of, Senate dates back to 3 ,500 BC from ancient Egypt, and you can still play it now.

In fact, it's got a rating of 5 .8 out of 10 on Board Game Geek, which is pretty good for a game that's five and a half thousand years old.

Although we're not sure these are the original rules, since there's no actual written record of them. We're just kind of guessing what they might be.

We do know that throughout history tabletop games have served as entertainment, education and a way to bring people together.

And nowadays there's a huge range of different games.

And I've been a fan of board games for most of my life, so I wanted to make a map of board games see if I could capture this vast domain and make sense of it.

Also, I've just released my own board game called Stab it in the Cabin, which is available now. More details on that later in the video.

Weirdly, the name board games is a bit of a misnomer, as they don't always contain boards.

If you go into a board games shop, there'll be loads of games which just contain cards.

So generally, board games can include some combination of a board, cards, dice, playing pieces, but not necessarily any of them, and a lot of games also use a wide range of other components like timers, spinners, or a load of other things.

A general theme of this map is that all of the borders are a bit fuzzy.

But I've tried my best to structure them somehow and will start our journey with the abstract games, which carry the name abstract because they tend to be light on story and theme and focus on defining a set of rules that pit players against each other as they try to outwit each other to achieve a certain goal.

Chess is perhaps the most famous board game and is an example of an elimination game where you're trying to take your opponent's pieces.

Today chess is a pure logical strategy game with no randomness or hidden knowledge but interestingly there are thousands of chess variations people have played throughout history and some of the early versions used dice for a random element.

The game Go is probably the most famous territory control game where you're trying to control as much of the board as possible.

In position games you don't capture your opponent's pieces, you just manoeuvre your pieces until the opponent can't go anymore.

Count and Capture or Mancala games are a family of games where you move glass beads from one pot to another to try and capture as many as you can.

In alignment games like Noughts and Crosses or Connect 4, players are trying to connect a certain number of their pieces or symbols together, and less well known are Connection or Configuration games, which involve trying to connect pieces across a board or configure pieces in certain arrangements.

In the abstract games I'm also putting pencil and paper games, like dots and boxes, which got me and my friends through many tedious lectures.

But paper and pencil games are very versatile.

Another example is the word game Hangman, so these aren't restricted just to abstract games.

Similarly, Yartsy is an example of an abstract roll and write game, which involves rolling dice and checking the results off a list.

But there are now lots of themed role and right games where you use the results of the Dysator, generate parts of a house you're building or doing a dungeon crawl, which this takes them outside of the abstract realm.

In fact, categorising games is really difficult and I think the reason for this is because they reflect human creativity.

Like in the other maps I've made of different areas of science, there's a baked in structure that you get from the nature of reality, like genetics for the map of plants.

But with board games, a big part of what's fun about different games is their novelty.

So what I found with this map is that the structure are not the games themselves, but the common elements of game design which crop up in many different kinds of games.

So any specific game is some combination of these different game design elements and so these design elements is what we're going to focus on in this map.

A good example of a design element comes from cross and circle games where you try and be the first to get your piece or pieces around a board and home again.

An example is Pechisi, a traditional Indian game dating from the 16th century which was then modified in Victorian England into the game Ludo.

Interestingly, Snakes and Ladder also did you know Monopoly originally came from another game called the Landlord's Game which was designed to show the evils of capitalism, and tarot cards were originally used for gaming, not divination which they're known for now.

But I'm getting sidetracked, the point I want to make is today the concept of moving pieces around a board has been used by so many games, it's kind of the default picture of what a board game is.

But fortunately this picture is wearing out because since the mid 90s people have invented and modified loads of new design elements which we'll look at in the next section which I've called optimization games.

A common theme between many modern games is that they make the players compete with each other to solve some kind of optimization problem where you're often trying to get the most victory points or maximize some other win condition.

One example is worker placement made famous by Carcassonne where you have a limited number of worker pieces which can place to control territory or do jobs but they're stuck on the board and you can only get them back when they've completed their goal so you need to optimise where you place your workers for the maximum points.

Similar to this is resource management made famous by Settlers of Catan where you gain resources over time and you can spend these on building your settlement but also the places you build your settlement then dictates what resources you get and this is a feedback loop you need to optimise for victory.

In tile -based games, the skill is to place tiles in an optimal configuration to fit them together.

Again, Carcassonne is a great example of this, where strategic tile placement is another core element to the game's strategy.

Network and route building was made famous by the game Ticket to Ride, where you try and develop connected routes between destinations.

Turn order claiming is a mechanic in games where there's an advantage to going first, typically in games where you're competing for the selection of moves or resources, so there's a strategy in these games to be the first player in the next turn.

In race games like the Quest for El Dorado, you're competing with other players to get from one place to another as fast as possible using some mechanics.

And in engine builder games, you're trying to build combinations of actions or resources that cascade when you activate them, and you're trying to optimise better combos than the other players.

Similar to engine builder games or deck builder games or drafting games, like Domingue get to the realm of trading or customisable card games like magic or pokemon.

But I'd say these are distinct from board games because as well as the game they have elements of collecting cards and hunting for or trading rare cards so I've put them slightly outside the domain of board games.

And finally there are push -or -luck games like Quacks of Quendlingburg where you have to balance the benefits of forging ahead against the risk of being penalized for pushing too far which is kind of a gambling mechanic.

In fact it's worth mentioning gambling games because the history of board games is intertwined with that of gambling.

Batgammon's a really good example of a game that was designed with gambling in mind but mostly now play just as a board game and also I have to mention poker because that's one of my favorite games but if you've ever been to a casino you know that there's a whole world of gambling games out there which also fall outside of the scope of this map.

Now I want to look at another important aspect of board game design, the interactions between players which is a fun part of many games.

This can come in the form of trading like in Settlers' Gatan where you can exchange resources with other players and are free to hag all over the exchange rate.

Then there are games where players have to try and outbid each other in auction games like Power Grid or compete in share buying like in the game Stockpile.

And negotiation like in Diplomacy where a lot of the strategy is in making alliances with other players and strategically breaking these alliances at the right moments.

Then we have storytelling games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which are weighted heavily on the setting rather than strategic rules and play almost like Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Now I can't mention storytelling games without talking about role -playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which I've also put outside the realm of board games because although role -playing games share a lot of similar features to board games, dice, rules and sometimes boards and miniatures.

The core of role -playing games are the imaginative storytelling and improvisation which I think sets them apart from traditional board games.

In fact, there are many other kinds of tabletop games that, although similar to board games, would need their own entire maps.

Miniatures and war games are similar to strategy board games but tend to have much more involved rulesets than board games and are often as much about collecting and painting the miniatures and creating elaborate battlefields as they are about playing the game.

Although you do get miniatures in board games and you also get war game style board games too, so again blurry boundaries, but I wouldn't consider say Warhammer to be a board game.

But you also get war games which instead of having miniatures have more abstract counters and are more like simulation games.

In fact simulation games are an entire land mass to themselves and aren't always about war.

You can make a game to simulate any system but the focus of simulation games is more on the accuracy of the simulation rather than for entertainment.

Back to the board games we also have many sneaky mechanics that play around with hidden information.

For example bluffing games like Skull which reward deceitfulness where where success depends on your ability to strategically lie to your friends.

Or hidden movement games like Scotland Yard, where one player is the criminal secretly moving around the board, and the other players are detectives who have to try and track them down by guessing where they are.

And there are many social deduction or hidden role games like Werewolf where one or more players are secretly trying to sabotage or kill the other players.

Now, I'm a massive fan of these kinds of games.

So much so, I've made my own game in this realm called Stabbing in the Cabin, which is a kind of Cabin in the Woods style slasher film where I've taken the mechanic of a secret murderer, but I've put it on a board so there's also some logical deduction involved as well as the social deduction that you get.

Normally a big part of these games is going on vibes to try and work out who the murderer is.

But because the secret stabber can only stab people in neighbouring rooms you can use logical deduction to figure out who the secret stabber is and because each turn you're all going to be in different rooms.

There's a bit of strategy about which room you choose to go in and also which room you stab in to hide your tracks as much as possible.

Also this takes about 30 to 45 minutes to play so it's a quicker and a bit more casual than other social deduction games where the deception element can get a bit intense for some people.

So if you or someone in your life is into board games or classic B -movie horror films give Stab and a Cabin a look I've put links in the description below and it's designed for five to ten players but you can also play it with three or four players with a slight modification and yeah this is the first game I've released I did all of the artwork.

I did a load of playtesting on it and I tried to make it colourblind friendly with these meeples and also thought about accessibility as well. So I'm incredibly excited to share it with you all.

If you want to get your hands on the map of Borgame's poster, the link's in the description below and you can get it with a bundle with the stabbin' in the cabin as well.

Coming back to the map, let's move on to games that are more casual, things you can pick up and play with the family really quickly.

Trivia games, Games like Trivial Pursuit have a long history, but also may have a bit of a shorter shelf life than other games because the questions have to be rewritten to keep up with the times.

Word games like Codenames or Boggle test the player's creativity with words and language. And memory games like Memory test people's memory.

And then we've got dexterity games like Jenga, where the players need to use their manual dexterity to balance blocks or games where you need to build structures out of odd -shaped blocks.

This group also includes flicking games like Crocanol or Sabutio.

So I think that's a decent overview of the main elements of game design, and any particular game will be some interesting combination of these different elements.

Although I have to say there's many categories and game mechanics that I didn't have time to mention. There's loads.

The website Board Game Geek has, it lists nearly 300 different ones, so I had to pick a subset here, but let me know in the comments if you think I've missed out anything really important.

But I want to round off the video by looking at a big part of modern board games, the setting or the theme of the game.

This is the storyline and the motivation behind why you're playing, game design.

And personally I think the best games are those where the story and the setting give a reason why the rules are a certain way. For example in my game Stabbing the cabin.

The game only works mechanically if there's one teenager per room, but the storyline reason for this is it's a horror film, so everyone always has to split up. That's the first rule of horror films.

So I think little elements like that give rules some character and also make them a bit more intuitive to learn.

So my favourite games tend to be ones where the rules and the setting mesh really well.

Also it's probably worth mentioning the terms Eurogame and Ameritrash, which is how games are sometimes categorised, but I don't think this is a very good way of characterising games, basically because historically it's been a bit judgmental, saying that Eurogames are good games and Ameritrash games are bad.

Basically Eurogames are games which focus on strategy and generally avoid direct conflict between players, things like settlers of Catan or Carcassonne.

These are also known as German -style games, I think because many of the designers are German, although that's not exclusively true.

An Ameritrash or American -style games are games which focus more on theme storyline characters and contain more random elements to them, things like hero quest or risk. And traditionally the term was used as a derogatory term.

The trouble is none of this holds up to much scruceny because nowadays all kinds of games are made all over the world.

Many games combine elements of both sides.

And also, a lot of people love the Ameritrash games. That's how I got into games, because they're fun to play. And also, a huge proportion of them are not American.

Risk is French. Hero Quest and the Games Workshop style board games come from Britain.

And if you go back through games history, the modern Ameritrash games actually trace their lineage back to military simulation games which were invented in Germany around 1800 making the Ameritrash games actually German style games?

Anyway, fortunately the world of board games is moving beyond these simple terms because we've got a much better language now to talk about games these days like the stuff I've been using in this map.

And, I have to say, I love all kinds of games.

I think there's really good versions of all of the different kinds of game design that I've mentioned in this map.

Anyway, in the final part of this map, I want to talk about another very important aspect of games, the different styles of gameplay.

Most board games are two -player games, or multiplayer games, but some, especially the storytelling games, can also be played single -player.

Also, an interesting style of game are cooperative games, like Pandemic, where all of the players are playing together against the game and trying to beat the game.

Also most games are designed to be symmetric, in that all of the players have the same options to begin with, but many games are specifically designed to be asymmetric, which I think is a much harder thing to design, but this introduces an interesting dynamic where the rules and strategy for each player or faction are quite different.

A good example of this is Root, but many hidden role games are asymmetric too because the murder is very difference to the Innocence.

And finally it's worth mentioning campaign or legacy games, which instead of one -off games, legacy games are designed to be played multiple times over many weeks or months, where the result of one game has an impact on the way that future games are played, often with destructible components or stickers that change the game board.

This means each group will play a unique journey through the campaign.

And as you mentioned, this kind of mechanic I think came from role -playing games, which is the default for role -playing games, but has more recently been brought over into traditional board games in a really cool way. And that's my map of board games.

My love letter to all of the good times I've had with friends around the gaming table.

And to all the amazing designers and artists who have spent their time making fun experiences for us to explore and personally it's been really satisfying to contribute one small game to someone's gaming shelf.

There's so many demands on our time these days but anytime I've got some free time to sit down and play a game with friends, I know I'm in a happy place.

Because I've covered so many different topics on this channel, one comment I get fairly often is how do you know so much? Well, most of that's research,