Flavor and Board Games

Anyone can design a fair game. I'll make one now: "We each roll a normal, six-sided die and whoever rolls the highest wins. In the event of a tie, we reroll." The challenge of game design is not to make balanced games, but to make fun ones.

Fun is extremely complicated, though. You've got to incorporate challenge, satisfaction, progress, unpredictability, and dozens of other variables which various people can respond to very differently. One of the factors that people often forget, however, is "flavor" - the aesthetic choices of name and identity that give reason to a game's mechanics.

Mechanically, Go strikes me as a much better game than Chess. Chess isrepetitive and quickly becomes more about memorizing move sequences than original strategizing, whereas Go is organic and plays out very differently each time. Go has more strategic depth and more big-picture creativity in its gameplay. Yet Chess fascinated me for years (including a solid amount of tournament play) and Go never managed to maintain my interest long enough to fully learn the rules.

I eventually figured out that it was the iconography of chess that made the difference: The mere fact that the pieces were identified as soldiers, knights, and royalty makes the game more interesting. You can bemoan that someone has killed your queen, or grin as you slowly force their king into a corner. The flavor may be cursory, but it gives you an emotional identification with the game that Go lacks. I've heard vague explanations of supply lines and armies, but Go never felt like anything other than stones on a board.

A lot of very poorly designed board games have become classics solely on the basis of their flavor. Clue is a silly little game of guess-and-check, but throw in a murder with a variety of suspects and weapons and you've got an interesting narrative. Monopoly is so flawed that no one plays by the official rules (does anyone actually bid for property?) but has stuck in our cultural consciousness because it's about buying property and paying rent. And Risk is an agonizing game that brutally punishes any attempt at action, but it's about taking over the world!

I don't think any of these games would have caught on if they were just about collecting unlabeled "points" or generic "spaces." Something worth thinking about.

Edit: By complete coincidence, I appear to have criticized Monopoly on its 75th Anniversary. Happy Birthday!