Why would you ever see a play? Movies are more affordable, have higher budgets, can be seen anywhere, and let you eat snacks in the theater. 

Most arguments for the productivity of seeing Our Town over Die Hard are based on intangibles – that visual metaphor is more possible in theatre, that you’re experiencing the magic with real actors in real time, that certain abstractions of time and character are available. How accurate this is, and how much weight it carries, depends on the individual, but these are the most common arguments. 

The competition between board games and video games has a similar dynamic. Video games are more portable than board games, and (depending on your buying habits) easier to purchase cheaply. They have animation and sound design, and the computer behind the game allows for complex calculations and radical mechanics that humans can’t do by hand. I’ve certainly heard arguments, with some validity to them, that any scoring-track based game would be better accomplished on a tablet. So in this, too, we must turn to intangibles*.

One of the most common intangible arguments for the benefit of board games over video games is that they create a more social atmosphere than sitting in front of a TV. I’ve found that to be true myself, but I didn’t want to state a claim without exploring why. In this article, I will detail a few reasons why I believe board games are often more social than video games.

*For a designer, board games have many concrete advantages. For example, it is much cheaper to produce a board game, and you don’t have to know how to code, animate, or compose music. But this is about players.

I Demand Your Attention!

The first reason is more a quirk of design than something inherent to the two media: The vast majority of multiplayer video games are played in real time, while the vast majority of board games are turn-based or otherwise broken up by pauses.

In a real-time game, your attention is inevitably drawn to the game instead of the people playing it. You can’t afford to not think about the game for too long, so while there may be some conversation, much of your mental effort goes to winning the game. 

When astonishing moments happen in a real-time game, you don’t get a chance to celebrate it. If you’re playing, say, Street Fighter, and you parry your opponent’s entire Chun-Li super, the game is still going aftewards unless that cool moove instantly ended the match. Not even “ended the game”; unless you can take a break to appreciate what a good move you just did, Street Fighter’s merciless announcer will make you go on to round 2.

Pace of Play

This theory doesn’t fully hold up under scrutiny, because there are board games in real time (Magic Maze) and turn-based multiplayer video games (Pokémon). The underlying mechanism that makes video games less accomodating to social interaction is a bit subtler: The pace of a tabletop game is determined by the group as a whole, while the pace of a video game is determined by the program.

As an example, let’s take the game Quiplash, an impress-the-judge game played on phones. Quiplash is a very well-constructed game, and its questions are more consistently funny than any other of the numerous party games I’ve tried. However, the results of these funny questions don’t necessarily generate as much impact from the players as they could, because even if an answer is so funny the whole room is laughing for a minute straight, the game skips merrily onward to the next question, cutting off the reaction that the previous one might have deserved.

When an exciting or funny moment happens in a game where progress is determined manually, the players can stop for as long as they want until they mutually feel it’s time to move on. When progress is determined by a computer arbiter, it can diminish a moment of excitement that might have been developing for most of the game. 

Communication

For the third reason, we can look at the exception that proves the rule: Video games that are successful in engendering communication among a group of players. The best example is the infamous co-op game Overcooked. In Overcooked, players are chefs attempting to fill a rapid series of food orders by chopping ingredients, assembling meals, and washing dishes; levels include gimmicks such as cooking on two moving trucks, in a haunted castle, or in the hot lava level that is legally obligated to appear in every video game.

The secret of Overcooked’s success as a social game is that it is impossible to win without in-person communication. Orders fill up fast enough that the only way to keep up is for players to work together to expedite the cooking, serving, and dishwashing process, and the only way for everyone to coordinate effectively enough is to talk. 

Normally, the demands of video games outweigh the ability of players to talk to each other, but because role division is such a critical part of Overcooked, the rapid pace of play actually encourages the players to interact. And this is the main difference between it and many other games, even party games: Talking to other people is part of the flow of play, whereas in many other cases it’s a distraction from winning.

In board games, interacting with other players is a distraction, but unless they’re deep in thought and you interrupted them, distractions are forgiveable. It’s mostly when arbitrated by a computer that taking your mind off the game for even a short period of time can lead to big problems.

Conclusion

Despite the ubiquity of digital games, board games have experienced a renaissance over the last decade, growing significantly both in number of hobbyists and in the number of quality games. There must be a reason for this, even if that reason is an intangible, and this post was my way of trying to puzzle out reasons people choose to manually adjust VP totals instead of letting the Nintendo box do it for them.

Since the 1940s, the humble guardrail has protected drivers all over the world from themselves and each other. This critical piece of highway infrastructure helps prevent deadly head-on crashes, and comes in a variety of styles depending on the needs of your transport system. For the rest of this article, I will go into detail on the history and uses of guardrails.

Just kidding. But did you know that games have guardrails too, and they’re just as important? Only instead of preventing you from dying in a fiery car crash, they prevent you from being frustrated for 90 minutes.

The Perils of Leonardo da Vinci’s Advertising Budget

The game that inspired me to write this article, ironically, is one that has a significant lack of guardrails: The Princes of Florence.

Princes of Florence is an auction game with some tile-laying elements. Players bid on various buildings, landscape features, and clowns to get better work from the artists in their colony, which they can then sell for more money. What’s significant about the game, however, is that when you sell a work, you can choose any ratio of victory points and cash that you want, and that this is by far the most common way to get VP.

So although this means there are a lot of ways to play the game, it’s also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. If you don’t grant yourself enough money after selling a work, you won’t be able to catch up with the other players or the slowly increasing point minimum for works. If you aren’t VP-greedy enough, you will never be able to catch up to your opponent. The fact that this game was made in 2000, when games were significantly less user-friendly, is apparent in the lack of mechanics that constrain players’ choices in favor of dangerous liberty.

The Goal of Guardrails

A game’s “guardrails” are its mechanics that allow players to remain in the game with the ability to take meaningful actions until the end. What this actually means depends on the type of game.

An example of a game with good guardrails: In Concordia, a slow start can price you out from building trading houses. Fortunately, the Prefect card (which allows you to get any good available on the board) and Mercator card (which lets you exchange money for goods and vice versa) mean you’re never in a position where it’s impossible for you to participate in the game’s economy. Concordia especially demonstrates the nuance of a good guardrail mechanic, because the Prefect card rewards players who built all over the board while allowing someone who needs two cloth to get back into the game their out.

Strategy games construct their guardrails in many different ways. Here’s just a few of them:

• Tzolk’in: You need corn (currency) to place workers. If you don’t have enough corn on your turn, you can lose VP to beg for enough corn to continue. This normally accrues a penalty, but if you’ve gotten into such a bad situation that you can literally take no moves without begging for corn, the gods (and designer) take pity on you and you can get the corn for free.
• Galaxy Trucker: The “Ship Insurance” mechanic caps the amount of credits you lose at the end of a round for your ship’s components getting blown up.
• Ra: You always have four opportunities to win auctions each round. Having no high-numbered Sun tiles means you’re less likely to win large pots, not that you can’t belly up to the table.

Some very common guardrails are making actions more valuable in later rounds (Modern Art) and keeping rounds entirely separate so that an early mistake isn’t a disaster (Libertalia and the aforementioned Galaxy Trucker). 

Designing Guardrails

Guardrails have a lot in common with catchup mechanics, but the big difference is that a guardrail doesn’t care if you can’t win the game anymore: In the games mentioned above, you can easily put yourself in a situation where victory is wildly unlikely. A guardrail mostly cares that you can’t play the game anymore. In a sense, it’s more about preventing pseudo-player elimination.

If your game has any kind of economy, try to notice in playtests when players get locked into non-action. Is there a situation where a player has no equity that can be turned into resources somehow? In that case, consider adding an emergency action (like discarding cards for money in Terraforming Mars) that can allow someone to claw their way back into empire-building.

If you’re building a combat game, can someone never fight back against a vastly superior opponent, but at the same time be able to keep playing the game in a futile struggle? You may consider making the game more gentle, so this player still has a chance, or more brutal, so the game’s over more quickly. As a case study, Nexus Ops’ guardrail is that the method of gaining victory points is through individual achievements instead of board dominance, so whether you’ve conquered the board is only sometimes relevant to whether you’re able to win.

Essentially, assume your players will make the worst decisions available to them and see what situation that gets them in. Can they still laugh and have fun, or is it a frustrating grind? Try to skew your game more towards the former.

Conclusion

 This article was mostly written as a historical examination, as guardrails are so common in modern board games it’s the exceptions (Food Chain Magnate, for example) that are notable. However, situations involving guardrails or lack thereof appear frequently in early builds, and recognizing when you need to create a floor for how badly a player can do is an important step in the development process. If this article helps make those situations more visible, it’s a success.