Creating a Sense of Place in a Board Game

What makes a board game have a good or poor sense of place? 

There are two areas which contribute to the sense of place: In-game utility, and graphic presentation. 

First, let's cover the factors involved in in-game utility.

Location density:

• A map spreads out possible actions, and contributes to the pacing of the game.
  
  
• On a map there will be a mix of places where stuff happens and places you move along to get to other places. Sometimes the function of a place will be mixed, or vary depending on the game state and the player goals.
  
  
• If things are too close together, it can feel rushed and cartoony, not as much of a real space.
  
  
• If things are too far apart, it can feel tedious -- empty space is not memorable or defining.
   
• I like a mix, a lot of evenly spaced out locations and one further away that people can try to journey to sometimes.
  

Abstraction level:

• The more abstract your map is, the less it seems like a place.
  
  
• So a map with three places to go seems more like action selection than being in a world.
  
  
• I might break those three places down into twenty and increase the player movement allowance so that the time to reach each place is about the same, yet the feel of movement and place is increased.
  

Location uniqueness:

• If you have to go to specific places to do specific things, it feels more unique. If you can do everything everywhere, why even have a map? (Outer Rim market)
  
  
• If things to do in different places are only slightly different it is also too generic to help create a real sense of place.
  

Relevance (aka no dead areas):

• All the spots on your map or place should have reasons and possible actions which make players consider going there sometimes. This makes it feel relevant.
  
  
• When something is relevant, people pay more attention to it, and can recognize and navigate by it.
  
  
• Having spots that you could go to but never do is a badly designed place, and takes away from the sense of place by seeming "irrelevant". 

And a few other stragglers:

• Having dynamic reasons to go places makes it more like a real place. Like a quest goal that moves around the map or something similar.
  
  
• The sense of exploration and discovery helps a place seem more real. So if the map is big enough that you go looking for a place and are rewarded with finding it, it helps.
  
  
• Also, hidden tiles which get revealed help with this feeling. 
  

 

Now let's cover factors related to the presentation and graphic UI. 

• Bad ones are circles and lines overlaid on a nice drawing. (Defenders of the Realm, Clank, Tyrants of the Underdark) 
• If it looks more like chart than a place, then it doesn't help. (Clank) 
• Are you in a place, or on it, aka sitting on the drawing on a board? 
• Grids of squares feel much more like charts than a place.

The ability to navigate by landmarks is a hallmark of human real-world movement. To recreate that in a game, there needs to be enough uniqueness in the utility and look of a place to do it. 

Good examples of "place" in board games:

Xia - You are IN the map drawing, not walking above it. Lots of variety and interaction within and between each tile. 

Runebound 2nd edition - Always feels like wandering around a world.

  

Firefly - So unique of a movement grid. Uneven spaces. A lot of places to go. You definitely feel IN the space. In this one, even the spaces you never go to add to the feeling of a vast space area.

 

Small World - The spaces matter, where you go is dynamic because what the other players choose to do changes your actions and placement.

So-so examples of "place" in a board game: 

Clank - Too many dead/not often at all visited sections of the map make it seem dead. The map looks like a movement chart overlaid onto a picture. The icons on the paths seem too icony. They could have blended them in more. 

 

Defenders of the Realm - Each space is a circled image. Not very visually unique. Hard to find the locations. Just a movement chart overlaid on a map.

Star Wars Outer Rim - Since you can buy stuff from anywhere, going to specific sectors is more limited. You can set the board up in a random fashion, but it almost doesn't matter, since there is not too much specificity in each zone that stands out. I like the curved space board, but moving around on it seemed slightly arbitrary. The most engaging part was bounty hunting, because you had a clue about where the character you were hunting was located. The encounter cards could have helped, but they were not memorable - and the creators kind of knew this, since they put "reminders" on the back near the planet name which said things like "reputation altered", "find gear", etc. I think that the market being so dominant and available from anywhere overshadowed movement and encounters. The look of it, however, is great. I really want to fly ships around in that world, when I look at it.

 

So to sum up, to make it seem more like a place instead of an action selection mechanism:
- Don't have too few locations.
- Make it look more realistic instead of like a movement flowchart.
- Make it dynamic, aka have the reasons to go places shift around as the game progresses.
- Don't have 'dead-zones' places a player never or rarely goes. 

 

Do you need a sense of place? 

As a side note, not all games need a sense of place. How do you decide if that is something you want in your game? 

It is not better or worse to have a sense of place in a game, or to have no sense of place in a game. It only matters in relation to your goals for the game, and how you want it to feel. Yatzhee certainly does not need a sense of place. An adventure game, on the other hand relies on a good sense of place. And there are many in-between styles.