Feeling it - Board Game Components
If you have followed me for a while, you probably know that I like to have metal coins in games, instead of cardboard chits or paper money. Recently, I purchased the wonderful Iron Clays poker chips when I bought the deluxe edition of Brass: Birmingham and I must admit, I really like those as well. In this article, I want to talk about how board game components can change the enjoyment of a game - for better, or worse.
So let's start with money in games. If you haven't tried it yet, I strongly recommend you either try metal coins or poker chips. They're usually not too expensive to buy, especially if they're part of the deluxe version of a game, but they hugely improve the enjoyment of every game. Hearing the rattle of metal coins or the clink of poker chips alone is very satisfying, and the feeling of the cold metal or the smooth chips in your hand adds another level. You subconsciously think a little more carefully about what you spend your money on, because it's no longer just boring cardboard or flimsy paper, but heavy coins that make a sound as you pay them into the bank.
It's pretty much a no-brainer for me every time, but, of course, it's not always worth the extra expense. I do think that many coin sets you can buy separately are just too expensive. So it's only when I buy a game that it's worth it for me. Also, consider using real money in your games. Using pennies of your own currency is usually a good, cheap option. Often you can also buy old Chinese coins really cheaply. That's what a friend did and they really made playing Rising Sun a lot more fun. It added another way of tricking your opponent into thinking you were placing a lot of coins during the war phase, when in fact you were just rattling a bit for effect.
There are other components that do improve the game experience, in my view. Chunky wooden tokens or even custom wooden meeples are often a great addition too. They're very tactile and often add a lot to how the game looks on the table, especially if they come in large quantities. Every time I open the Carcassonne box, the flood of vividly coloured meeples is just wonderful to behold, and the game wouldn't be the same if there were wooden cubes on the map instead of meeples.
Speaking of wooden cubes, they aren't any worse than meeples, of course. They are the quintessential component in cube rail games and they are often great for all sorts of area control or resource management games. They are great on a dual-layer board and it feels wonderful slotting them into the empty spaces to indicate your strength or other status. Again, it's very tactile to hold a bunch of them in your hand, slowly turning them over, while you decide where to place them on the map, for example.
Dice are another great component. The sound they make when you roll them, either by hand or using a dice tower, is very evocative. Some might say they're too noisy, but I do like them. Games that use dice as workers combine the great feeling that you get from holding cubes with the noise of rolling dice. It's a win-win. Colourful dice are even better, as they have such a great visual appeal.
I do think that many games would just not be the same without their components. They would feel a lot less interesting and exciting. I think of Splendor for example, where the poker chips that stand in for the jewels really elevate the game. If these were just cardboard tokens, it would be a much less interesting game. I guess that's why the Steam version does include the clank of the chips, so that players get as close to the feeling of the real poker chips as possible.
I have intentionally left out minis in this article. I do think they look amazing and a game like Rising Sun would be a lot less interesting without them. Plonking a huge dragon onto the board and making the table shake slightly as you do so is an amazing feeling. Painted miniatures can look amazing and painting them is a hobby in itself. However, I also think that we do have a bit too much plastic in our hobby. So even though I can fully understand the fascination with plastic miniatures, I also want to encourage the use of wood and cardboard instead of plastic whenever possible and sensible. I actually think that wooden components are often undervalued, but for me, they have a very important place in my heart, probably because I grew up with them.
So how do you feel about components in board games? Do you also think they can make a game better? Or do you care very little about them? I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.
But I also greatly enjoy components that have been created with thought as to how they function.
Things like recessed player boards. The way the order dials stack in Star Wars Armada. The planning tray of Samurai Swords. The stat slider from Mythic Battles.
Components are a big part of the experience for me.
Wingspan and Petrichor come to mind as extremely aesthetically pleasing component games that did nothing for me at all.
edit: it goes without saying that I have become wealthier too since I was a dirtbag grad student; that might also be driving this.
Two games that stand out in my memory in terms of the components improving the experience: Oath's Kickstarter edition and Parks. Both games are extremely solid games who's appeal would be evident if played on prototype components but the lovely art and meeples in both games elevates the experience through their physical presence.
In addition to the aesthetic benefits of good components, good components can actually enhance gameplay. I've been considering investing in some quality poker chips. There's a reason 18XX gamers replace paper money with chips - making change eats up an inordinate amount of time and using chips can save you 30 minutes per game while also letting you survey the board state clearly.
Of course I'm pretty much a minority, and so, those proxied games and dodgy pnps and things I have don't get pulled off the shelf because for others they aren't as interesting. But for me, eh. I'm often left cold by things that are supposed by others to be amazing.
Some of my favorite games are really cheesy printings. I wouldn’t trade my AH50 copy of Acquire for any of the other ones. Super easy to assess the board, and one of the hotel chains is named Sackson. I value that more than plastic buildings. And it cost me $15 new.
But I’m a cranky old man. I’m even older than Gary.
And yes, in many cases, a cheap aesthetic I actually do find appealing all the same.
It’s not that I consider a game with quality components as inherently better than one without, or that gameplay takes a backseat to art. I love miniatures, but there are loads of games with great miniatures that I won’t touch because they aren’t good games.
For me it is a heightened sense of enjoyment that comes from an activity I love using physical components that are well designed for usability and/or aesthetics.
Like the experience gained with food, certain objects will immediately put me in a happier place. The marbled blue and red action dice from War of the Ring set the mood. The association with friends and fun that those dice trigger in my brain will make any session of that better.
The Big Damn Crate is not only a fantastic way to store, organize and minimize the space needed for Firefly, it also has a look and feel that set it apart and says “this game is special to its owner”.
One of my favorite game components is actually not one that I would ever use in any game. I have a hand carved, stone d6 that is about two thousand years old. Holding that die in my hand connects me to gamers from thousands of years ago. It is a crossroad of my lifelong loves of gaming and history. It’s just a d6, but it’s also an amazing vehicle of love, imagination, traditions and culture, wonderful times with people you adore and frustrating moments of brushes with fate.
n815e wrote: One of my favorite game components is actually not one that I would ever use in any game. I have a hand carved, stone d6 that is about two thousand years old.
I need a photograph of this object, your home address and a description of where you keep it please.
I do love great artwork in games, more-so as I get older, and for the Awaken Realms masterpieces Tainted Grail and Etherfields I have bought sleeves to protect and prolong the life of all those incredible cards.
And I don't have an issue with plastic, we're happy buying it for everything else in our lives so I'm suddenly not going to pick on boardgames as the martyr, and unless the game says all wooden components have come from recycled wood then there is not too much difference (note I am a massive recycler at home, my main rubbish bin goes out very infrequently as a hell of a lot of my waste, including food, ends up in the recycling bins, so it's not out of indifference but just why am I selectively picking on one item).
sornars wrote: I'd argue that the PnP aesthetic can also be a conscious choice with respect to components that impacts enjoyment. For example the folio games published by Nate Hayden/Cave Evil require you to cut out the cards and assemble them which contributes to the whole experience and helps to create an emotional attachment before play has even begun. When you play one of those you know you're playing something boundary pushing even if the choice of components may have been a cost saving measure.
Yeah for sure. I genuinely do like that aesthetic of the home made thing. I rarely do a "good" job, but that just gives it a bit of a punk rock vibe, or something, and I appreciate that. Far from boundary pushing (come on Nate, release the files for Rocky Mountain Man already) I think my favourites I've made though are the Koljeka one I did for which I printed everything on paper and then glued it all on to cereal boxes with craft glue and then cut it up with scissors. I mean, it looks like rubbish, but it kind of suits it. I enlisted the kids to make a track for Heimlich and Co and it's just a piece of printer paper with their dodgy texta drawings on it - they chose what the buildings would be. But bringing it out to play is kind of fun.
The paper money that comes with the game looks like part of the game instead of the poker chips which appear as a bolted-on object intruding in the mix.
Well if you're going to humblebrag your own comfortable financial status, then the rule is Gary Sax now has to buy each of us a new game. I, for one, will be choosing one with a load of blinged-out tactile enhancements!Gary Sax wrote: edit: it goes without saying that I have become wealthier too since I was a dirtbag grad student; that might also be driving this.
I am, to a degree, a fan of games that have something in the box that doesn't serve much of a real purpose. For example, the mountain standee that came in one of the Epic Spell Wars games. It didn't do anything, other than be ridiculous.
Other great components of note: the monuments you assemble in Lords of Hellas, the Rambo knife round tracker in Rambo, and the infection scanner in Nemesis.
Yes ! (I have recently dry-brushed mine, as a non-painter, and they look fantastic as monuments now)hotseatgames wrote: ...
Other great components of note: the monuments you assemble in Lords of Hellas ....
And YES ! This is a brilliant part of the game ... and I saw something similar done in another review of a game, Middara perhaps, where they have a large campaign book and all the secret or 'not to be read at this stage' is in the same colour-mix hidden format and you had to hold a 'scanner' over the text on the page to read it.hotseatgames wrote: ...
and the infection scanner in Nemesis.