Plenty has already been written about integration of theme and mechanics. Here's my ten pence worth...
First time deisgners often have lots of questions about the relationship between game theme and game mechanics. Here are some typical (and real) examples:
How do I 'glue' my mechanics together to make sure the machine of the game works?
Should I start with theme and then develop mechanics, or the other way round?
I have a theme in mind, where do I start turning that into mechanics for a game?
How do I calculate 'how many of X resource should buy you Y resource'?
How do I let go of mechanics that I know don't work?
What combination of mechanics work well together?
Now, I don't have answers to all these and answers will vary to some extent from game to game. However, by sharing my experience of blending mechanics for Undergrowth: A Tunnel Crawling Quest, some of these questions can be addressed.
First off let's explore what we mean by board game mechanics. The mechanics of your game are the gameplay mechanisms which enable players to 'do' things in order to achieve the game's objectives. In other words, they are the how of your board game. They also link the different parts of your game e.g. board, cards, meeples, components, player boards etc. Typical examples of mechanics include:
Worker placement
Deck-building
Bag-building
Tableau-building
Card drafting
Point-to-point movement
Area control
Take that!
Push your luck
Auction
Set collection
Action selection
Catch-up
Combat
This list really doesn't scratch the surface of possible game mechanics, but these are some of the more common ones. I would refer to these as 'main' mechanics because often games are designed around one or two of these. There are also what you might call sub-mechanics in many games. These are not the key mechanisms which drive the game, but they add variation or interest to the main mechanics. For example, in Undergrowth the main mechanics are action selection, tableau-building, and point-to-point movement. There are also elements of worker placement, resource management, combat and push your luck, but whilst you will be doing one or more of the main mechanics on every turn, you may only engage in combat or push your luck from time to time.
An important question for designers is how will I choose the mechanics for my game? The answer is, that there isn't a set answer (this goes for most questions about mechanics, so don't be surprised if you read this again!) Before choosing mechanics it is helpful to know your broad game objectives. What exactly are players aiming to do? Knowing the answer to this question both thematically and 'mechanically' can be really useful from the outset, especially if theme is important in your game. For example, in Undergrowth the thematic aim is to become the most successful, wealthiest treasure-hunting gang in the woodland. The mechanical aim (or, the way you achieve the thematic aim) is to build the best gang (your card tableau) and get the most treasures. For Undergrowth, the broad thematic aim came to me first and this steered me towards the mechanics. Since I knew I wanted players to assemble a gang of treasure hunters, the logical mechanic was a tableau of character cards. I could have chosen a deck-builder mechanic, in which players draw a handful of cards each turn from their ever-growing deck, but I prefered the idea of slowly building a tableau so that once played, every card was relevant and useful throughout the game.
This was a classic example of theme driving mechanics, but it sometimes happens the other way around. For example, a designer might set out to create a worker placement
game, then consider which theme, activity, time period or context might be well suited to sending workers to locations to perform actions or collect resources. Whichever way round you begin (mechanics driving theme or vice versa) it is likely that at some point they will influence one another. As the theme developed for Undergrowth, some of the submechanics emerged. For example, once I had begun protoyping the main board it occurred to me that it should be more perilous the deeper players travelled into the tunnels. This introduced the sub-mechanics of push your luck and combat. Push your luck because by the end of the game you want all your tunnellers out of the tunnels and none stuck, and combat because the deepest tunnels are where the nasty Weasels lurk. These two mechanics developed because of the theme. An example of the opposite effect (mechanics driving theme) is the Renown Track. Once the main mechanics had been developed and play-tested it was obvious players needed another objective, something else to work towards which would add another layer of decision making and game effects. Having realised this, I began thinking about other things that might be relevant or useful to a gang leader. The idea of building your local reputation, or Renown, was one option and after some fiddling and trialing, it stuck. This mechanism also tesselated nicely with some other existing mechanisms, such as a player's hand size limit. Previously, hand size was fixed at 7 cards throughout the game, but when the thematic concept of 'Renown' entered the game, it made sense thematically to say that a player's hand size grows as their Renown grows. The idea being that as your gang becomes more famous in the woodland, more local Dwellers want to join you. So, this was an example of a mechanic driving a theme which drove a change to an existing mechanic.
Undegrowth Renown track
So, to answer questions two and three above, sometimes theme comes first and sometimes mechanics and sometimes both of these occur in the same design process. Some designers will lean more to one way than the other. It is likely that your own board game playing habits will influence this. If theme is important to you when buying and playing games then it seems likely that theme will be be influential in your designs. If you're all about the mechanics, you may find that these drive your thematic decisions. If you're like me, you're somewhere in between, theme and mechanics might feed off each other back and forth. Of course, in many very well designed Euro games the theme is almost irrelevant. Hansa Teutonica is a good example of this. The theme is trading between cities in medieval Germany, mechanically it is one of the tightest, most well-balanced Euro games I have played, but once you're playing you don't feel like you're trading in Germany at all. This doesn't matter one bit because the enjoyment of the game lies 100% with the excellent mechanics and the theme is just an overlay. I suspect the same game would be just as enjoyable to most players if the theme was intergalactic trade. If you're feeling stuck about this, my advice is to try out both strategies and see what comes.
Question one above, about gluing mechanics together is a really good question. As I described above, the mechanics of Undergrowth tesselate with one another, meaning that activating one mechanism will activate or influence another. Let's dive into this further.
An example of what I mean by mechanics tesselating is the connection between the point-to-point movement and the tableau building in Undergrowth. These two mechanisms influence one another quite a lot. As a player moves through the tunnels and collects treasure (point-to-point movement) they can use those treasures to hire new gang members (playing cards into their tableau). As a player's tableau grows, the skills and actions of the characters in the gang boost a player's movement and other useful tunnelling capabilities. So, moving helps you grow your gang and growing your gang helps your movement. This has the effect of 'gluing' the mechanics because achieving one helps you achieve the other, and vice versa. This is illustrated in the two images below. If your aim is to have well-glued mechanics (and this is by no means necessary for every game), one question to ask yourself is can I describe one mechanic in my game without also having to describe others? If the answer is 'no' then you probably have some well-glued systems.
Dweller character cards in your tableau (gang) boost your tunnelling capabilities....
....whilst tunnelling and collecting treasures enables you to hire Dwellers into your gang.
Thinking about how mechanics blend together is also a good starting point for considering question six above. There are no established, or advisable, pairings of mechanics (that I know of at least) so this will depend on a range of things particular to your game. A useful principle which might help guide your thinking though, is combining mechanics which are not too similar. Whilst your mechanics will hopefully complement one another, they are intended to do different things in gameplay. For example, I would avoid combining tableau-building and deck-building because putting these together could cause confusion (though as I write this I remember that Vladimír Suchý's Underwater Cities does this quite well). Another example of an odd pairing might be worker placement and area control. Now, I'm not saying their aren't games or gameplay circumstances in which these two could work together, but assuming that you're using your meeples (your little people or characters) as workers to place to get resources, you would probably struggle to also be spreading them out across the board to claim territory. (I know I'm going to get comments pointing out that Jamie Stonemaier's Scythe does this, and yes it kind of does, but the worker placement element of Scythe is definitley a sub-mechanic to the game and the movement constraints mean that it's not really worker placement in the true sense of the mechanic.)
Experimentation is key when combining mechanics. It is essential to road test them in actual game conditions, this is where playtesting comes in. You will only really know if, or how, game mechanics work by seeing how they operate when players use them in a real game scenario, for the purpose of attempting to win the game, not just the purpose of testing the mechanics. In Undergrowth, the only way I really confirmed that the combination of tableau building and point-to-point movement were well suited was through seeing them in action together. This also taught me all the ways these two mechanisms needed tweaking to make them work better. For example, if the character cards were going to enhance a players movement, then the character card abilities needed to be of genuine use. Some of my early ideas for card benefits seemed like good ideas in theory, but playtesting revealed that players just never wanted them in their tableaus. This prompted me to ask why and adapt the less useful ones. Getting the scale and type of character card benefits right also prompted me to think hard about the hire cost of these cards.
A Dweller such as the Miner, which enables a player to start in any level 1 burrow and ignore tunnel sections mustn't be too cheap, players have to earn it. Equally, if it's too costly players wouldn't be able to afford this Dweller until much later in the game when the impact of the benefit will have less time to play out. The cost determines how much treasure a player needs in order to recruit the card into his or her gang and therefore how effective their tunnelling must be. If the cost outweighs the benefit, players will ignore this card. You can get close to getting these details correct with good planning, but only play testing will really tell you if they're fit for purpose.
The Miner
This last point is closely related to (though not exactly the same as) question four above. Calibrating resource values and exchange rates or assessing cost/benefits is an essential aspect of many tabletop games, in form or another. Whether it is resource management, combat damage/strength ratios, card cost/benefit or reckoning about how difficult it should be for a player to obtain/achieve something vs the benefits of doing so, such calculations are the stuff of board game design. So, this is a good question.
The answer is that you get these caculations right for your game by:
knowing your game inside out
making your best educated guess
testing it out yourself, then...
playtesting with others (over and over)
tweaking as required
This question touches upon the broader, and universally relevant concept of balancing freedom and constraint, or opportunities and boundaries, in board games. If you think about it, your favourite games set rules or limits, then give you ways to get around them. Or, they offer you benefits, but make sure they aren't too easy to obtain. Often a game will dangle a benefit in front of you, but not let you have it until you've achieved certain things. These boundaried benefits are at the heart of good mechanics because when you get them right they encourage players to strategise and be tactical, which is exactly what you want. These balances between opportunities and constraints are sometimes referred to as 'enabling constraints', because although they place limits on what players can do at different times in a game, they actually unlock the decisions and dilemmas which bring the enjoyment and satisfaction of playing.
One example of an enabling constraint in Undergrowth are the flooded tunnels which can only be entered if you have activated the Diver's Helmet tool or by having The Diver in your gang.
The flooded tunnels contain River Pearls which only exist in these burrows. River Pearls are wild, so can activate a wide range of actions or capabilities. To get them, you must be able to access these tunnel sections.
Flooded tunnels and white River Pear discs
Players have three ways of getting around this constraint. 1. The Diver's Helmet Tool,
which can be activated on the player board. 2. The Diver's Helmet Tool card, or 3. Having the Diver in your gang. Which of these options a player chooses depends partly on luck and partly on tactics.
Diver's Helmet tool card, The Diver Dweller card and player board provide three ways of getting the same benefit.
Let's finish by summarising a few key points...
Knowing your broad thematic and game-play objectives is really helpful when deciding on mechanics.
Thematic aspects can lead you towards appropriate mechanics and vice versa.
Existing mechanics can also lead you to complementary additional or sub-mechanics.
Theme and mechanics can feed off and influence each other.
Integrating mechanics successfully (or gluing them) is a question of trial and improvement. If you can't really describe one mechanic without describing others, you're probably getting there.
Making your game mechanics work for you depends on balancing opportunities and constraints. Constraints which demand strategy, planning and tactics from players are the essence of a successful strategy game.
Well, that's all for this post folks. I hope there have been some useful nuggets in there. Please comment or ask questions below and I'll do my best to respond.
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