5 Writing Lessons I’ve Learned From Board Games

Or, my biggest pet peeves from the PAX Unplugged convention.

I went to a board game convention (PAX Unplugged) last weekend for my birthday! I had a lot of fun, and I played many, many board games.

Normally, when I play one game at a time, or maybe even a couple in one night, I don’t think about the quality too much; the games are what they are, warts and all. But after three days of nonstop playing, I’ve discovered I have a lot of feelings about the writing!

More often than not, if I disliked a game at PAX, it was because of either how the rulebook was written (instructional text is a neglected art) or how the narrative was integrated into the gameplay itself. So, what were the games I gave up on halfway through the rulebook doing wrong, and what were the ones that had me excited to play again doing right?

While I’m no expert in board game design, and there are all sorts of other elements (like the cost of different materials, for instance) I can’t speak to, this is a writing newsletter—so let’s talk writing!

What can writers of all stripes learn from board game creators?

1. Content should influence form

There are only so many types of board games, from worker placement to deck builders to war games, and most games are a variation on one of these types with some sort of theme tacked on for flavor. After a while, they start feeling formulaic, like when you get a dozen different ones about developing various cities around the world, for instance, or multiple where the theme is “You are Charles Darwin.”

In an ideal world, though, the “story” of the game isn’t just a cute little blurb you read about on the back of the box and then immediately forget as you dive into playing. It should fundamentally affect the structure and mechanics of the game.

A great example of this I came across at PAX Unplugged was called Good Dog, Bad Zombie. Zombies aren’t uncommon in board games, and they have their own recognizable style: slow-moving enemies that gather in ever larger quantities until they overwhelm you with sheer numbers, typically.

This game took the genre forward, however, by imagining a truly dog-specific version of gameplay. The goal is to find the remaining humans in the city and rescue them before the zombies get to them. Players take on the role of specific dogs who have different strengths, from herding to guarding, and even “licking yourself” has a specific purpose (drawing more cards to play).

Does this all sound totally ridiculous? Yes. But never did I forget I was playing a dog who was fighting zombies.

Biblios, on the other hand, which is ostensibly about building out the library of a medieval monastery and competing to acquire the best books, could have been about acquiring the most of any kind of resource at all. While the gameplay itself was pretty smooth and intuitive, if I’m playing a library game, I want to feel like I’m in a library.

Across any genre of writing, you should be thinking about the form and structure you’re using, and if it makes sense for your overall narrative. Is your novel in first person or limited third or omniscient third, and why? How does that affect sentence structure, chapter length, and the order of events you tell? How can you keep your reader from forgetting about what makes your piece of writing unique?

2. Lean in to your genre

Speaking of zombies and historical settings, these themes aren’t only for creating unique play styles—they’re for fun! Particularly for a sci-fi/fantasy or generally silly game, players pick it up because they like the idea of it, so embrace those tropes and make it joyful.

Here’s another dog-themed example (since it’s me, after all): Knights of the Hound Table, a deck-building card game in which two players draft armies of canine warriors to battle it out for the glory of their house. Every card has a dog, a name, a unique themed skill, and crucially personality, letting players connect with their team even as they try to crush their opponent.

On the other hand, Vivarium, which is supposed to be about late nineteenth century explorers discovering new species, doesn’t give any information about the creatures beyond a single illustration, making the game far more about collecting than discovery.

Imagine if Vivarium provided details about the species that you the explorer might have observed when you select the card, or even gave you the option to make up a name and guess the etymology of the creature (knowing that, like many historical explorers, you would expect to be completely wrong in your assumptions). How much more depth would this have added?

Embracing genre doesn’t mean leaning into cliches. It means giving the reader what they came for in a delightful but unexpected way.

Writing a game isn’t just about the flashy stuff, either. It’s also about practical things like a rulebook that’s easy to use.

3. Content hierarchy is critical

Instructional text can be challenging in the best of times, since you have to imagine the point of view of someone who has zero knowledge of something you’re intimately familiar with. For a board game, you also need to determine the right sequence to describe rules, set-up and strategy, as well as create a useful text for both first-time players who’ll read them from start to finish and returners who most likely are going to skim.

In UX, we call this content hierarchy, the order you explain things. A good rulebook gets you started quickly, only uses commonly known terms or those already defined in the rulebook and generally gets you excited rather than feeling overwhelmed.

A bad one makes you give up and pack the game back up before you’ve made it halfway through the rules because you can’t follow anything they’re saying (Sorry, Aegean Sea).

4. Don’t let humor get in the way

Look, people don’t buy board games to read the rulebooks. With instructional text, generally shorter is better.

That’s not to say all humor in instructions (or any other functional text) is bad. But for every joke you add, remind yourself that you’re preventing the user from getting to what they actually set out to do, which in this case is play a board game.

I own a game called Unsettled that includes a lot of reading text since it’s a narrative experience of discovering a new planet and encountering various challenges described in words. And without fail, I will end up shouting “Get to the fucking point already!” at some point during the scenario, because guys, you’re really not as funny as you think you are.

This is my personal pet peeve as I’m not a big comedy person in general, and I suspect people have different levels of tolerance for this kind of thing. I also find texts written by multiple authors are especially prone to this joking overload, when I can almost feel them going back and forth with each other saying “Look how clever we are” (the novel Good Omens bothers me in the exact same way).

That being said…

5. Your writing’s not for everyone and that’s fine

One of my favorite parts of the convention was getting to see the massive variety of board games out there, from classics like Monopoly and Scrabble to light-hearted party games to days-long mega strategy sessions that mirror the experience of an entire world war, real or fictional. And that’s not even getting into “family” games—writing anything designed for children that the adults who have to experience it along with them can also enjoy is a mammoth task in any medium.

I personally prefer games that involve both strategy and a significant element of chance. The more I have to be responsible for everything that happens, or for tracking and predicting another player’s behavior, the more stressed out I get. My husband (who attended the convention with me) tends to prefer strategic games and is more likely to get upset at a random event that destroys his whole plan.

Neither of these approaches is inherently better than the other, and it’s a clear example of why you can’t make everyone happy with your writing. The best thing you can do is keep a clear eye on who your audience is and how to make them happy, whether that’s dog-themed narrative board games or, you know, something not specifically designed for me.

Or we could all just write about dogs all the time. That works too.

Eliza says I should buy more dog-themed board games because she likes eating the pieces.