Design Diary: Using Every Part of the Meeple

Hi new Patrons! This is a design diary, a series of articles I write (mostly-weekly) to provide insight into what I'm currently grappling with. They tend to be focused on Seven-Part Pact, but they may branch out as my interests continue to percolate.

So I’m normally a Tabletop RPG designer, but I’ve been doing forays into board games lately as part of my work on the ongoing sprawling wizard project currently called Seven-Part Pact. In that game, each Wizard has an asymmetric board game which represents their personal Domain, and in order to diversify and properly design these board games, I’ve been studying a lot myself! There’s one quality I’ve grown to really appreciate in board game design, which I’m sure someone somewhere has written about, but which I’m going to give the cutesy name “using every part of the Meeple.”

When a board game uses every part of the Meeple, it means the design team is intimately familiar with the physical qualities of the board game components, and are using the properties of those components to communicate information that would otherwise be quite cumbersome to communicate. The same token in different zones can communicate drastically different pieces of information. A rotated token, or a token on its side, or a die being used as a token, all have different physical functions and can be used to further this.

I’ve been playing a lot of ARCS, which is a game that makes use of every part of the Meeple quite well. An Agent is a small figure I can place on a Court Card to represent the favor I’ve earned with that card. If someone else seizes that card, they take my Agents as captives, moving them to the captive zone in front of them. But I can also give you one of my Agents to place on your character card to represent owing you a favor. You also place an Agent over a resource type when you’ve provoked outrage against that resource’s civilians, as they have to permanently be on call to deal with it. There are also certain cards that can seize Agents to represent certain in-game events. I can also easily imagine mechanics in which Agents end up on various planets, in the trophy zone, in resource spaces, and so on. The game understands how its different zones can be used to communicate different pieces of information and uses its game pieces to do so.

What does this mean for Seven Part Pact? One of the biggest factors with such a sprawling game is the difficulty of conserving pieces and information across so many games and with so many different possible mechanical events. A Wizard's week of time can be placed almost anywhere in the game, and each different location communicates to the rest of the players exactly what its function is. I'm currently experimenting with adding mechanical complexity to the Faustian's board game without adding any new game pieces through the use of face-up cards representing accomplices working to stop the Devil. The Mariner board game currently has an excess of little parts — perhaps I can conserve parts but preserve information by using the location of these parts to communicate different pieces of information. For instance, a "trade" Meeple on a Route can represent a shipping route, but on an Isle it can represent a market, and in a sea it can represent a fishery.

It’s a useful tool for game designers: do you need a special counter just to indicate this one mechanic, or can you use the same marker in different places, or flip the marker over? How much information can you encode onto the physical play materials, and how can they be arranged to produce new meaning? 

It’s been an interesting process to learn new board games and grow to appreciate the efficiency of design (or the lack thereof). I’ve been tinkering off and on with a villain school card game (Nemesis University, which I first wrote up as a pitch here) which I hope to share to the Patreon soon. I’ve had some very wild (and good) life events in the past 6 months, which have had a huge impact on how I go about making games, and I can’t wait to share the good news with all of you.