I’m currently reading Game Development Essentials: Gameplay Mechanics and there’s a section that breaks out the game design process into four starting points: story-driven, art-driven, gameplay-driven, and technology-driven.

Of course, the authors are referring to video game designs, but video games owe a lot to paper games design-wise, and many video game designers use paper game prototypes to test their game mechanics before they program them and test them digitally.

I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at modern board games using the same game design goals as a basis for discussion.

Story-Driven Design

I started with a rather difficult one regarding board games. If I was including other hobby games, then roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons obviously fit the bill pretty well (no snarky “3.x is a board game!” comments from the grognards). There is one company that seems to put out a lot of board games that include story elements during gameplay, and that’s Fantasy Flight Games.

Starting with their first game, Twilight Imperium, it was clear that story mattered. The tagline “Pax Magnifica Bellum Gloriosum” is right there in the game’s logo, and those four Latin words imply an awful lot of setting and story before you even open the box. After they squeezed every last dime out of the d20 boom, they reinvented themselves as publishers of big box, big ticket board games…and here was that story again.

Runebound is a fantasy adventure game that uses decks of cards to tell a different story each time you play the game. It’s so engaging that many people find solo play just as satisfying, if not more so, than playing with a group. Some of the expansion decks represent new stories that can be played using the game.

There’s also their products based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels of George R.R. Martin, including a board game, a long-running collectible card game, and a book of art. The folks making games at Fantasy Flight clearly care about story.

Another recent hit game that relies on story is Betrayal at House on the Hill, by Avalon Hill (Hasbro). Part of their ultimately doomed line of Euro-style games (including the underrated Vegas Showdown, available to play online at Gleemax Games), the game tells the story of a group of movie-inspired archetypal victims exploring a house that will ultimately haunt them to death. The story aspect is really played up by a scenario book that features dozens of ways to end the game. Each is its own story and has its own play mechanics, making this game one of the most replayable ever straight out of the box.

Art-Driven Design

The first company that comes to mind when I think about art-driven games is Days of Wonder. As much as Eurogames changed the look and feel of board games once they were imported across the pond, Days of Wonder reset the bar for board game production design with their visually stunning packaging and game components. When I was a kid, I recognized that the reason I wanted to play Mousetrap instead of Sorry on occasion was the physical bits associated with the former.

Now, the same can be said for deciding to play Cleopatra (pictured) rather than El Grande. Sometimes I just want a more visually interesting game. From the Ticket to Ride series to Shadows over Camelot to Battlelore, Days of Wonder never fails to grab your imagination when you open up a box and sort through the pieces.

Of course, you might be thinking about games that use art in their components…and no, I’m not talking about Concentration. A couple of Reiner Knizia games come immediately to mind.

First, is Modern Art, a clever, simple, and fun bidding game that often acts as filler between larger games at conventions and board gamer meetups. It’s not my favorite of the Knizia auction trilogy (that would be Ra), but it’s a decent little game that features art on the cards (even though the art is fake ). For a bidding game that features real art and artists, try to find a copy of the old Parker Bros. game, Masterpiece.

The other Knizia game, which happens to be my favorite quick 2-player game, is Lost Cities. This game features five colors, or “expeditions,” each of which has 12 cards. Each expedition is illustrated by an evocative painting, which is then divided up among the 12 cards so that if you put them together in a certain order they show the painting. If you’ve got smaller children that can’t quite play games, you can still put Lost Cities in their hands and let them assemble the paintings…gotta hook ‘em young!

Gameplay-Driven Design

There is almost too much to say about this subject in relation to modern board games. The explosion of Eurogames over the past decade is well chronicled over at Boardgamegeek, so I’m not even going to try. For the most part, these games all strive to be driven by gameplay, or mechanics. Whether it’s a new take on an old mechanic (like the infinite variations on auctions out there), or coming up with something unique (for my money, Wolfgang Kramer is the best innovator in games), games imported by Rio Grande or Z-Man Games tend to offer fancy new ways to move widgets around a board.

Even though I love Kramer, the undisputed king of gameplay-driven design is Reiner Knizia. Many of his games are almost pure mathematics, and I’ve heard stories that Reiner sometimes sends games to publishers as nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet, and leaves the theme and components to the publisher to figure out. Take a look at some of his games that have been rethemed (Kingdoms was a farmer’s market game, King’s Gate was a Lord of the Rings game) and you can really see the math at work. Heck, even the aforementioned Lost Cities is easily translatable into a huge variety of themes. One fan-themed creation I saw over at the Geek turned the game into a learning game about vegetables.

Technology-Driven Design

What a strange category this is, and one I’d not be likely to ever venture into myself. Technology-based designs aren’t worried about the shape and composition of the widgets involved, rather they’re made to showcase a particular technology.

One example I’ve seen played at conventions in the past few years is Khet: the Laser Game, also known as Deflexion. It’s a chess-like game in which you move pieces around, some of which have mirrors on them, and attempt to shoot your opponent’s pharaoh with a laser that you must fire after moving. It’s an interesting game, and a fun way to intersect technology with board games.

I have this impression that technology-driven design is much more important in the kids market than it is for more sophisticated games. Think about Fireball Island, Mousetrap, and Lucky Loop…all less sophisticated games that utilize technology.

Of course, no report on technology-based board game designs would be complete with a brief homage to one of my favorite board games as a kid, Dark Tower. As I’m looking over the Dark Tower entry at Boardgamegeek, I can’t help but notice that the game’s design is uncredited. I find it amazing that no one has unearthed the name of the game’s designer after all these years. Perhaps one of you, my loyal readers, would like to solve this mystery?

Well, that’s it for the article, feel free to jump in the comments and tell me about your favorite games that fit into one of these four categories, or if there’s something glaring you think I failed to mention.