Luma World’s approach to learning through play aligns with contemporary educational theories that emphasize active engagement, problem-solving, and hands-on experiences as effective learning methods. Their games are designed to be age-appropriate, culturally relevant, and engaging for children, potentially making them a popular choice for parents and educators seeking to supplement traditional education methods with interactive learning tools.

Ludogogy has had the opportunity to play six of Luma World’s most popular titles, so here is a mammoth-sized review of all six.

Galaxy Raiders

for age 9+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – A space-based game where players are trying to capture new planets and moons, while stopping other players from doing the same.

Teaches: Number operations, mental maths, resource management, long-term planning, reverse engineering and problem solving.

Galaxy Raiders consists of a number of hexagonal ‘planet boards’, marker pegs in four colours, an operation die, which shows all four basic maths operators and wildcard, cards with numbers on, ‘power cards’, which allow you to take actions which influence the game, and player console mats.

One more planet board than the number of players is used, and the winner is the first player to win two planet boards.

Players win a planet board by first ‘capturing’ the moons and then the planet. Each board has four moons and one planet, each with a target number on them.

On their go, a player rolls the die and uses that operator, and two of the number cards on their (openly displayed) player console, to achieve the target number on a moon or a planet (only after all four moons have been captured). They may then place a peg on that number position.

Power cards can be used to ‘Evict’ another player’s peg, ‘Replace’ another player’s peg with their own or to be able to use the ‘Any Number’ wild card in their calculation.

There are several additional rules around placing pegs and using power cards, which are dependent on game state (e.g. you can only replace someone in a planet if you have captured one of its moons), and it is these additional rules that make this more than just a game of mental arithmetic, and into one that requires strategic planning. This provides enough challenge for the older target age group, and will be fun also for adults.

The combination of the requirement for some quite complex thinking skills and a competitive ‘battleground’ will ensure that this game is replayable for some time to come.

The game is pitched at the 9+ age group and is very suitable for children at that age.  The planning and problem solving are the more complex aspects of the game, so it could be also be played in a ‘team’ format with younger children, with the younger child doing the calculations, and maybe an adult or older child taking the strategic planning role.

Overall an excellent game for school or home, to polish up those mental maths skills.

Crafty Puggles

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 4 players – Cute mole-like creatures attempt to be the first to reach hidden treasure by burrowing under the grounds of a stately home. A tile-placement and path-building game.

Teaches: Basic fractions, mental maths, pattern recognition, critical thinking, motor skills, creativity, planning & strategy

Crafty Puggles consists of a treasure game board on which square tiles are laid to create a path to the treasure. The square tiles are split into quadrants which are either mud (passable path) or grass (which block the path),and therefore also represent the fractions ¼, (a quarter mud, three quarters grass), ½ (50/50 mud and grass) and ¾ (a quarter mud, three quarters grass).

Each player also has their own ‘den mat’ where they can ‘bank’ tiles, and grow and use a ‘Puggle Boost’ feature, which allows them to play actions which affect their own or their opponent’s progress.

A fraction die is thrown to indicate which tile a player will take from the fraction. Each player is attempting to navigate from one corner of the board to the centre, and is therefore working within a quarter of the game.

An action die is also rolled and allows the player to; place a tile on an empty space on the game board (to, hopefully, extend your path), rotate a tile, either your own to improve, or your opponent’s to block their progress, move your puggle one step along the ‘Boost’, or move a ‘Hound’ playing piece (a blocker) to any blank space on the board, or to a tile showing the fraction you also threw.

The different mechanics of this game combine to provide a fun, engaging experience for young players, with just the right balance of acting to progress your own position and being able to use ‘take-that’ actions to mess with your opponent’s plans.

Playing this game will definitely flex skills in patterns recognition and in planning and strategy. The possible combinations of the two dice mean that players have to consider carefully from a large number of different play options, what will best move them towards their goal, encouraging critical and creative thinking.

The fractions offered in this game are quite limited, but that is appropriate for the target age group, and is more than made up for by the opportunities for strategic planning.

The fact that there are many combinations of possible actions, e.g. from the dice, and from the five possible options when you activate a Puggle Boost means that there is considerable replayability in this game, and it will keep young players coming back.

The ‘take that’ aspects of the game are a considerable source of fun and interaction, and will also be useful in teaching children how to deal with disappointment at having their plans spoiled.

Overall, I would recommend this game for 5 – 7 year olds, as a fun experience which also reinforces skills in planning to reach a specific goals through pattern matching. As a gateway game, it could be useful to teach the skills that could lead youngsters on to commercial tile-laying games such as Tsuro and Carcassonne.

Tsuro is available on Amazon

Carcassonne is available on Amazon

Guess the Fence

for age 8+, 30mins, 2 players – A game which uses the ‘Battleships’ mechanic of hiding your actions from your opponent, which you then have to deduce. Whoever first guesses correctly the shapes and positions of the fences built by their opponent, wins.

Teaches: Geometry, patterns, data interpretation and planning, imagination and creativity, taking calculated risks, visual reasoning, problem solving, communication, motor skills.

In Guess the Fence, each player has a board, which is hidden from their opponent’s view by a screen. Much like battleships, each player must position a set number of specific shapes on their board, and then attempt to find (by informed guessing) all their opponents shapes first, to win.

The shapes used are one each of: large triangle, square, small triangle and rectangle

In this case, the shapes are constructed from three different lengths of plastic ‘fence’, consisting of a straight length and a ‘vertex’ (a small round hoop). The shapes are built by laying the fences on the board with the vertices corresponding to numbered circles on the board.

There are rules for construction e.g. only two fences can join at a vertex, a fence must start and end at a vertex etc.

Again, like Battleships, a player can mark whether their guess has ‘Hit’ or ‘Miss’ on a wipe clean marking sheet, and use the information gained from that to inform further guesses.

Battleships is available on Amazon

Unlike Battleships, the player can choose to make one of two kinds of guess on a turn. They may call out a numbered vertex. If it is a hit, they mark that in green. If a miss, in red. Or they may choose to guess a whole shape, by calling out all its vertices ‘Do you have a triangle at 3, 4 and 9?’. A hit here will give them 3 points and they can colour the shape in green on the marking board. A miss attracts a -1 score.

The jeopardy created by the possibility of losing points for a wrong shape guess introduces a interesting twist on the standard Battleship game, further emphasising the need to discover and correctly analyse information as well as simply scoring lucky hits.

This is a great game for developing visual reasoning, and data interpretation, including the pretty high order skill of extrapolating general principles from rules and applying them in differing situations. The geometry involved may be a little simple for the target age group but the overall experience provides opportunities for a pretty complex sessions of planning and problem solving, in order to play well..

At first glance, this game does not appear to have as much replayability as, say, Crafty Puggles.  But then I remember how playing Battleships with my dad kept me engrossed for years worth of summer camping holidays. It’s the intense competition that does it. And for the same reason it’s a game which parents can quite happily play with their kids too.

As the communication is deliberately kept to a minimum in a game of hidden information such as this, it is not an obviously ‘social’ game, but it does require clear and concise communication – in itself, a very important skill for youngsters.

Overall, I would recommend this game for parents and children who relish the opportunity to compete directly, and that it is very suitable for developing the spatial and visual reasoning skills of children between 7 and 10 years.

Lord of the Bins

for age 6+, 30mins, 2 – 6 players – Find hidden value in garbage. A game about sorting and recycling rubbish

Teaches about: Different kinds of waste, segregation and sorting, caring for the environment, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption.

Where my wider family comes from in the North of England, there’s a saying. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, meaning that there’s value in what usually gets thrown away. This is the premise behind this game. Junkland, where the game is set, is buried under a stinky heap of garbage, but the Lords of Junkland have realised there’s treasure to be found.

The major components of Lord of the Bins are cards; four different bin cards, eight Trump Trash Cards (yes, I know, I was thinking that too), and 60 trash cards representing different kinds of rubbish. Each trash card is numbered 1 to 9, where 1 is easy to compost or recycle, and 9 is difficult to do so.  Additionally, there are 25 yellow gems, 6 green gems (and a bag to keep them in),a key card token, a table listing all the different trash in the same four categories of the bin cards and a rather fetching raccoon hat.

Players hold hands dealt from a main deck of trash cards and trump trash cards shuffled together and each turn they take one more card from a ’marketplace’ of face-up trash cards. Depending on how many cards they choose to take and the current state of cards in the marketplace, they may also end up placing gems of marketplace cards, of picking up gems along with the cards they take.

Players then either play a single card (place it in its appropriate bin) or play a gem; an action which unlocks powerful strategic actions in the game, such as being able to play extra cards into bins.

Getting rid of cards is an important part of the game, as the winner is the player who has the lowest score when the game ends. A player’s score is the total of the numbers on all the cards still in hand.

The Raccoon hat comes into play as a punishment for being incorrect during a challenge. One player may challenge another if they feel that the first player has incorrectly placed garbage in a bin. The trash table is consulted to discover the truth of the matter, and whichever player was incorrect has to don the racoon hat and imitate a garbage eating animal.

Clearly, a player is likely to do better in this game, if they have a firm grasp on which garbage goes in which bin, and one of the main educational aims of this game is to get youngsters very familiar with these concepts. The raccoon hat provides an amusing way to inject some negative reinforcement into the game and discourage mistakes.

The rules of how cards can be placed into bins will also develop number sequencing skills, as players cannot place a card which does not ‘follow’ from one already placed.

This game has enough different combinations of components and therefore paths through the game, that it will remain replayable for some time, and I imagine that for the target age group of 6+, the raccoon hat itself will provide a sufficient to play this repeatedly even with, and maybe especially with, parents.

The strong narrative element of this game is also appealing to the target age group, with the winner being the victorious ‘Lord’ of Junkland, who has not only become rich, but done their bit to clean up the place they live.

The ‘challenge’ aspect of the game gives opportunities for considerable social interaction and will delight children, as there is always going to be someone who comes out of that looking silly in a raccoon hat.

Overall, as this game can be played by between 2 – 6players, I would recommend it both for home and the classroom for 6 – 10 y-o, where it could be used to support conversations around recycling and even housework responsibilities, and maybe for older end of the age group, around sustainability frameworks such as the SDGs.

Mystic Arts

for age 10+, 30mins, 3 – 4 players. A spell-casting game where players have to mix ingredients in the appropriate amounts and proportions to become the best wizard, or witch,  and win.

Teaches: Measurements, decimals, operations, conversion of units, mental maths, critical thinking, planning & strategy, decision making, focus

The theme of Mystic Arts will be very appealing to children drawn to Harry Potter and similar wizarding themed films and books. The aim of the game is to win by becoming the best potion maker. And as any witch or wizard knows, the key to great potions is accurate weights and measures.

The compact game is mostly card-based, and consists of three kinds. The first is ingredient cards – each ingredient also features a weight or measure (e.g. 1,800 ml of Honey Mead, or 2,300 mm of the Great Horn of the Dwarves). Spell cards endow actions that can affect the game, particularly to help you to win a potion by, for example manipulating a weight or measure. Potion cards come in two varieties, good potions and bad potions. Players must try to collect good potions while avoiding the bad ones.

When a potion is revealed, it will have a weight, a length and a volume. If it is good potion players will want to win it. They do so by selecting (in secret) one ingredient card from their hand which they hope will be CLOSEST to the same measurement unit on the potion card. If it is a bad potion, they will, conversely, choose an ingredient which they hope to be furthest away from the equivalent measurement on the potion card.

Players then reveal their choices, at the same time calling out the difference between their ingredient and the measurement on the potion card.

Spell cards can then be played to influence the outcome. For example a player who wants to win the potion may use a spell which exchanges their card with an opponent’s or changes the magnitude of their ingredient.

Play proceeds like this with the player who is the first to collect two good potions being the winner.

This game is very engaging – even for adults and older children. Due to limited access to very young children, my first playtest was with a 16 y-o, and we did choose to play it several times. The competitiveness and strategic aspects from the combination of using ingredients and spells to achieve your purpose, make it a balanced and fun experience.

The need to do conversion between different magnitudes of units (e.g. kilos and grams), in some cases, and to do rapid mental arithmetic, offer a good level of challenge to players, even those older than the target age. And the potential different combinations of cards that will come out in play, offering different experiences, mean that this game has considerable replayability.

Like all of the games reviewed here, (with the possible exception of Fracto), these games feel far more like commercial games that are intended for fun, rather than educational exercises which just happen to be games.

That is not meant to mean that they are not excellent educational tools – they are. It is rather a reflection of the skill of the designers to make great games, which children will want to play again and again, and which they will not see as ‘different’ from the other games that they play just for fun.

Playing Mystic Arts is a very sociable experience, because of the to-and-fro of trying to beat each other at winning (or losing) a potion, by using spell cards, if your initial ‘bid’ has not been successful. I would recommend for play both in the classroom, and at home, where it very well might become a family favourite.

Fracto

for age 8+, 15mins, 2 – 4 players. A game with 3 different variants, which focus on accuracy, speed and memory respectively. A card game of resource management in the jungle.

Teaches: Identifying fractions, operations with fractions, mental maths, visual reasoning, communication, strategy

Fracto offers three different card games in one compact box, containing 80 fraction cards, with the fractions shown in four different ways, as vulgar fractions (e.g. ⅔), in words (e.g. two thirds), as pictograms (e.g. one lion outlines and two full-colour lions, indicating ⅔) or pie chart or similar diagram.

In the first game WHOLE-IN-1, and in  DECK OF FORTUNE players win by discarding their whole hand. Cards can only be discarded in whole pairs (i.e both cards together add up to a whole 1). There are slight variations in the way the two games are played, so some players might find one more fun than the other.

MEMORY HERO is a variation on the whole pair theme, by incorporating a memory game too. Players have to make whole pairs but also have to remember cards that have been previously turned over in order to make more pairs than their opponents.

The game play of the suggested games is quite simple but appropriate for the 8+ target age, although they could be played with younger players too.

However the real value in these cards, I feel, is that they are a versatile set of components, which teachers, parents, and even children themselves could use to devise their own fraction based games, opening up possibilities, to not just become familiar with different ways of expressing fractions (which all these games do very well), but to explore higher order thinking skills of system design and critical thinking which games design requires.

Quality of Materials

The components of these games are visually appealing, and generally of high quality. The boards, in particular, are  and sturdy and durable. Tiles are likewise. Some playing pieces are made of cardboard, where they could have been more durable if made of wood, and the paper used in manuals can be a bit flimsy (but they are packaged in envelopes for protection). However, this is reflected in the very reasonable price points for these games, and on balance, it is better that the games are more widely accessible than that they are made of luxury materials.

The boxes are well designed. Everything has a place to be packed away neatly and there are smaller boxes to contain game pieces and components.

Many of the game guides also contain a QR code to access extremely well put together and informative video how to play guides

All in all, these games would be a high quality addition to your school or home educational game cupboard.

Check out reviews of other games, books and other game-related stuff.

The post Review – Luma World Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

“I am happy to play with friends”

“I am happy to play with friends.”  This is what a student who didn’t reach out to other friends told me. Someone might think ‘Playing with friends is normal, so why does he/she say “happy”?’. Someone might find it to be very easy to do this, but others might not. A board game is the right tool to fill this gap.

Why board games?

First, the board game is a live education tool. One round of board game play takes between ten minutes and two or three hours. There is a flow during gameplay. In the board game ‘Tiletum’, a player becomes a merchant, contracts to trade in wool and iron, and invests in the establishment of a marketplace and construction of a large-scale cathedral. In the Korean board game ‘Wawagol Excavation Team’ which is about making your own dinosaur by assembling excavated bones, a player becomes a good fossil excavator, perfectly assembles dinosaur bones, and tries to display these. So, one round of these board games is enough to gain an immersive experience of a small sub-section of society within a short time.

Second, board games help players to practice life skills. In the board game ‘Gem Traders’, they practice the skills of bidding at auction and negotiation, when trading gems and money. In the Korean board game ‘Cubo Saurus’, players have to consider the best choices for their card decks, from a large number of alternatives. This makes players adopt strategic approaches. Socialisation occurs naturally when players have to interact when playing together, as they gradually gain knowledge and direct and indirect experience of other players’ thoughts and actions.

Lastly, the board game is a mirror of the player themselves. During board game play, a hidden ‘persona’ can come out. For example, one player may be obsessed with winning, another may benefit from the experience of being in “someone else’s shoes”. In educational settings, this can be utilised by using the ‘recording method’, where scenes of participants’ playing are recorded without editing. All players can be observed, and the player reflects on himself or herself. This can aid personal development. So, board games can contribute to the internal growth of players.

The Power of Boardgames

Some people just play board games so that they can have a fun time. But a board game has a strong hidden power. Board games strengthen communication skills. During play, communication is a necessary factor. In the process of hiding or revealing the player’s thoughts and intentions, various communication skills are learned, such as summarising opinions, effectively delivering clearly and briefly, and recognizing other players’ intentions.

In addition, comprehensive thinking skills can be enhanced. One of the core competencies in the future of education is comprehensive thinking skills. People face momentous choices in life. However, if they only judge and decide using one or two factors, it will be regrettable. The more factors that are considered, the better chance they have to make the best choice.

During board game play, we analyze various factors which affect our choices. Based on this, we can practice comprehensive thinking and decision making. Through this process, the decisive capacity for life can be increased.

Third, people can experience cooperation and competition. The board game ‘Hanabi’ is a cooperative game to attain a common goal, while ‘Splendor’ is a competitive game to attain an individual goal. There is no definite ‘better option’ between cooperation and competition. We can experience both the joy of cooperation and growth through competition when we play. In this way, beautiful growth based on the success and failure of cooperation and competition can be attained.

Takeaways

There are many discussions about future talent development and education in terms of the 4^th industrial revolution. Also, there is much emphasis on required competencies such as creativity, autonomy, and responsibility for the future of society. Playing various types of board game can contribute to increasing the relevant competencies for the future. At school, a board game which is attractive like this can be approached and tried in various ways. Let’s play today!

The post The Power of Boardgames first appeared on Ludogogy.

Engine-building games are reliant on making systems of resources that become more efficient and rewarding as the game carries on. As with any type of system, there is a cost of setting up, which is difficult to reason for when there is an alternative that brings immediate benefits. Let’s take an example of a railway system. In Delhi, the capital city of India, there was a lot of resistance towards building a metro train infrastructure to support the growing traffic and population. Many citizens and opposition parties reasoned that the government should simply focus on improving roads and buses, blind to the environmental and operational benefits of urban trains. Also cited were reasons of initial cost and change of habits required in citizens. More than two decades have passed since these debates were put to rest. The evidence has made a strong case for efficient systems, as trains require significantly less energy and fewer human operators even as the city grows. However, some other cities like Jakarta and Karachi
have suffered from myopic views which have led to disastrous congestions on their roads.

[Make sure to check out The Ludogogy Podcast interview with Elizabeth Hargrave, the creator of Wingspan, soon to be published on the Podcast Page.]

As it stands, most of the games around us are an exercise in planning. Engine-building games are slightly different in the aspect that they reward behaviors that force us out of reactionary ways. Mastering these games requires a farsighted approach. The most approachable example is chess. Chess players often plan their moves and the opponent’s a few turns in advance. Gradually, the placement of pieces starts becoming more meaningful – to the untrained eye, some moves may look random, but the later stages of the game usually justify why the knight was placed centrally, why the bishop was placed on a diagonal without any apparent benefits immediately.

Even though carrying the discipline to build engines seems like a utopian habit, the decisions involved are no cakewalk. There are checks and balances involved in games which ensure that engines make sense, and are not a win-all trick that will get you guaranteed success every time you play. The difference between leading and trailing teams has to be fair enough, a difference that can be recovered in a few critical turns of a game. No resource has to be overpowered, neither should a type of strategy be too penalizing. Let’s discuss some of the experiences from top board games that shed light on the design of engines.

Gizmos

The objective of Gizmos is to build an engine by picking higher cards to add to your pipeline, with the goal of eventually acquiring all the necessary components to achieve victory. This type of engine-building mechanism allows for a lot of experimentation and flexibility in terms of strategy, as there’s less focus on rigidly following a set structure and more opportunities to try out different approaches.

In terms of real-world applications, this style of gameplay can be seen as a metaphor for product management. Just like in Gizmos, product managers must build a pipeline of components that work together in order to bring a product to market. They must experiment with different strategies to determine the most effective approach, and constantly adapt their plan as the market changes. By allowing for a lot of experimentation in a quick time frame, this type of engine-building mechanism can enable managers to try out different strategies and approaches to product development, helping them to find the most efficient and effective way of working.

Additionally, by focusing on strategy rather than structure, this mechanism can encourage managers to be more creative and innovative in their approach to product management.

Gizmos is available on Amazon

Spice Road

Spice Road is a deck-building / tableau-building game where players acquire and trade spices and gems to collect victory points. The engine-building mechanism in “Spice Road” involves constructing a deck of cards that can generate resources and victory points efficiently and consistently. This requires players to carefully select which cards to acquire and when, as well as plan for how to best use their resources to maximize their points.

As a learning game, Spice Road can teach several skills and principles, such as resource  management, planning and execution, and risk management. By playing the game, players can learn how to optimize their resources and make decisions that will lead to success in the long term. Additionally, Spice Road can be used as a tool to teach economic principles, such as supply and
demand, trade, and market dynamics. The game’s mechanics simulate real-world market conditions and can help players understand the consequences of different economic decisions.

Century: Spice Road is available on Amazon

Splendor

Splendor is a board game where players collect and spend gems to purchase and reserve cards representing mines, transportation, and shops, in order to gain victory points. A typical player will usually start by purchasing cards at low cost and reserving cards that will help them acquire gems more efficiently. As they progress, they aim to purchase cards that provide more prestige points and build a well-rounded engine to efficiently acquire and spend gems.

The best players in Splendor focus on building an engine, meaning a set of cards that generate more gems or points with each turn, allowing them to make more powerful moves. This often involves carefully selecting and timing their card purchases and reserves, as well as anticipating their opponents’ moves. The result of these different tactics is that the best players tend to have more efficient and powerful engines, allowing them to outpace their opponents and win more frequently.

Splendor is available on Amazon

Azul

Lastly, Azul is a tile-laying game where players collect tiles of different colors and place them on their player boards in specific patterns to score points. The game is known for its simplicity and elegance, making it a popular choice for families and casual gamers. Players of Azul also use different strategies and engines to maximize their points. For example, some players focus on maximizing points from rows by completing them with the same color tile, while others prefer to collect all tiles of the same color to score big in the end.

The effects of playing Azul according to an engine will depend on the player’s overall strategy and the particular game state. By focusing on the middle column specifically, a player can minimize negative points and restrict their opponents, but they may also miss out on other opportunities to score points by completing rows and columns.

Azul is available on Amazon

Conclusion

We want to conclude this article by paying a special acknowledgement and note of thanks to our guest contributor Aakrit Patel. He is a seasoned meeple himself and moderates games regularly. Aakrit was our source of understanding Azul in particular for this article, as he demonstrated the benefits of playing through the middle column. He also revised some of our observations in the other games, telling us the benefits-versus-costs analyses in some situations.

The post The Power of Compounding in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

It has been more than twenty years since the board game culture, which had been very popular in Europe, was introduced into Korea. Board game culture in Korea has grown year by year, and various board game products have launched with more and more people enjoying them.

The high demand for education in Korea, combined with the rise in board game culture, has meant that diverse educational board games have been developed. However, we have often seen board games with problems in this area, such as being incorrectly structured.

In ‘Gemblo Company’, we consider several key factors when developing educational board games to ensure that they are useful for learners. I introduce these below, along with related examples.

The connection between theme and game method

First, the theme of the game should be education, but the gameplay should also be relevant to education. In other words, the game should look like it has an educational purpose, but if it does not include real and enjoyable gameplay, it’s problematic.

For example, if the theme is environmental protection, but the game method is just simply to collect cards related to environmental protection. It looks like ‘Environmental protection’, but the play experience is just ‘collecting cards’. If an educational board game doesn’t include a connection between theme and game method, this kind of educational board game is not recommended.

This kind of educational board game can be easily seen in Korea (and everywhere else too – Editor). It seems to have educational content, but in many cases, the gameplay or experience is just mimicking famous international games like ‘Halli Galli’ or ‘Monopoly’, etc.

“MY BRAND”

‘MY BRAND’ was developed with a clear objective, to be a personal branding game, rather than relying on typical board game styles. It’s based on the generally known psychological character model, BIG 5 (Big 5 personality traits), and education professionals from various fields participated in its development.

Through this game, players connect their personal branding identities with cards, and these are also connected with other people’s thoughts about them. Players can design and implement their brand identity through the game and its process.

My brand and style and others can be visualised through one hundred emotional brand cards. Also, players analyze the meaning of brand cards from various perspectives, and communicate with each other to increase the mutual understanding in this board game.

After finishing the game, the graph shows each of the characteristic of the players, leading to them obtaining their brand graphs.

The balance between the fun of the game and the system

Second, it is important that there is balance in the game. The educational content and fun of the game need to be balanced. A few educational board games include educational content where the level is almost equivalent to academic papers. This is because educational professionals, with a high level of domain knowledge, have made the games. But without games design expertise also, they can lack the system of the game, which would make them fun to play and successful in the marketplace.

From the opposite perspective, some board games include the fun or system of the game quite well, but there is less educational content, or no participation by education professionals. Simple domain research by game developers is clumsily included in the game, attracting criticism from education professionals.

Therefore, to develop educational board games, top-level education professionals in relevant fields need to review the board game or participate in the development process.

FL!P

FL!P is a communication game that was developed by TLP (TURNING LEARNING POINT)’s educational design research center and edited by the Gemblo Company. Experts in transactional analysis and board game developers co-participated in this development.

Players explain their negative points by indicating the cards, and it can help them find real-life negative traits. After shuffling their negative cards in envelopes, cards can be flipped by opening the envelopes one by one. Cards with negative points are changed into those with positive points, that are related to the negative ones. In this process, players guess who has these positive points once again.

By finding the negative points and connecting them with positive ones, each negative point is naturally disclosed to other players. And by flipping the cards, they develop the thought that each negative point can also become a positive one.

This board game covers the insights that self-selected negative points can be thought of as positive ones, and the type of characters being matched with each other.

Difficulty level being matched with learners

Finally, game difficulty and rules which are not matched with players must not be applied. I have seen an example where a history educational content was developed as a board game for elementary students, but the level of a board game was far beyond the typical competency level for elementary students.

On the other hand, I have also see business simulation board games for adults where the mechanics of party games or family games with comparatively low difficulty were used.

The board game has a long history because it was the first type of game that human beings developed. However, the play itself is not as complex as that seen in computer and mobile games. If developers try to push to make equivalently complex games systems and components, the level of difficulty in play is significantly increased. Therefore, if you want to include educational content, the level of difficulty in the game needs to be structured by considering the level of experience needed for the target players.

I have explained the key considerations in the development of board games and given two real development cases. By simply gathering and playing, players can recognize different personality traits, and together explore positive or negative points, and how negative points can be transformed into positive ones. These are the effects of FL!P, an example of how educational board games can include both fun and learning effects.

If you explore and study board games which meet the criteria mentioned above, you will discover a medium with great potential to present useful information to people and show relevant insights. Educational board games help people directly play, experience, and feel, while connecting people with emotions in a tangible analogue way.

In terms of directly experiencing and trying something together, communicating, interacting, and learning with inspiration, educational board games are an innovative area where we can expect a bright future.

The post Key Factors of Educational Board Game Development first appeared on Ludogogy.

Tabletop games on the other hand, are, or have been, generally social affairs. There are games that are specifically meant for solo play, Patience card games, for example, but finding a one-player game in your local games store requires a little more searching than finding a party game, or a 2-4 player game.

But we can’t always find others to play with, and the pandemic has made that problem more prevalent. This has led to the recent rise in ‘Automa’, both ‘official’ – included with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games when they are published, and ‘unofficial’ fan-built solo play systems.

What is an Automa?

An automa simulates an opponent in a game. You may sometimes hear it referred to AI, but in reality, the ways that different automa work differ a lot. Some may make use of the game’s resources and mechanics (a more AI-ish characteristic), while others simply allocate actions to the ‘opponent’ at a similar rate to which a real opponent would play – less ‘intelligent’.

The term was coined by the man who is arguably the most famous automa designer, Morten Monrad Pedersen, while he was creating a solo game version for Viticulture, Stonemaier Games’ wine-making game. Following that he founded The Automa Factory, which works with other games design companies to create solo game versions of their games.

Viticulture is available on Amazon

The Automa Factory work extensively with Stonemaier Games, and many of the games listed below come from their stable. Their automa are simple to use, and are based on a small deck of cards. In Wingspan, for example, a card is turned over from the deck each time it is the automa’s turn and the action listed on the card (from one of four sections, depending on which round of the game is current), are carried out. End of round scoring is implemented through a ‘base value’ of a resource printed on the automa card, added to the number of action cubes on the current round’s goal tile – removing these cubes may be one of the automa actions that is taken in a round.

There is even a really simple mechanism for varying the Automa’s competiveness, by changing the number of points it is awarded at the end of the game for each face down bird card – and by including the ‘expert’ level automa card ‘Automubon Society’.

Wingspan is available on Amazon

The automa in Wingspan has much reduced capacity for action compared to a real player; does not have a player mat, does not collect food tokens, does not pay for anything, does not benefit from bird powers and collects birds and eggs only for the purposes of game end scoring- a charactieristic known as ‘streamlining’. Nevertheless, given that the winning condition in Wingspan is a final score, it can still win.

Automa as AI and other methods

But the Automa Factory cards is not the only approach to creating automa. If you take Board Game Geek’s geeklist definition of an automa (and why not), it A) stops short of being a full AI simulation, and streamlines out much of the complexity of those, B) should be able to win or lose in much the same way as its human opponent, and C) does not require decision making or intervention on the part of the human player for it to work.

Several games that were submitted to the automa geeklist have been removed by the list owner for failing to meet these criteria. For example, Power Grid: The Robots, lost its place for including a full simulation rather than a streamlined experience of playing an opponent. Imperial Settlers lost out because it changed the experience of ‘losing’, so that it was not the same as losing to a human opponent, and Churchill was excluded because it was not sufficiently automated, and required players to come up with ideas of how to play the opponent.

Perusing the list of games which remain reveal a wealth of different ideas for implementing solo play, and for the sake of completeness I also include some games which might have been excluded, purely because the mechanisms used might be interesting and useful to readers of this article.

Just play – Some games, most likely cooperative games, have no opponent as such, so solo play is simply a case of playing on your own. Terraforming Mars is a good example of this. In the official, included, solo version, it says that you have a ‘neutral opponent’ from whom you can steal resources and so on, but as they do not ‘play’ this is simply a case of taking those resource from the stockpile. In reality, you just play alone, and your only opponent is time – you are limited to 14 generations in which to achieve the triple goal of terraforming. This of course, does not really qualify as an Automa. It is certainly ‘streamlined’ (in that it reduces the need for actually carrying out the game actions), but is in fact so streamlined that is effectively the same as having no opponent at all.

Terraforming Mars is available on Amazon

However, there are some inventive fans of Terraforming who have stepped in to remedy that shortfall.

The cards for a fan-developed ‘AI’ type automa for Terraforming Mars along with the English version of the rules, and the French version too.

Ark Nova – arguably the stand out game of 2021-22 also comes with a built in solo mode, but it attracted a fair bit of criticism from players for being overly rigid, and therefore not replicating the experience of playing against a real opponent. The Geeklist features a couple of fan-built automa including ARNO – which must be one of the most compact automa around at only 5 cards. It uses a simple selection of decisions using dice. Several ARNO bots can be used in a game – to add a 3^rd or 4^th player in a two player game, and they can be played at differing difficulty levels. Unlike many automa, there is quite a high degree of interaction between players and automa, as ARNO can move cards in the display for example.

However, the prize for the most compact automa I have played must go to the fan-built solo play version for Snowdonia, which uses only the materials which come in the box and a six-sided die. This is an example of the randomiser style of automa, and places game resources according to the die roll and the availability of spaces on the board.

Snowdonia is available on Amazon

Designing Automa as a learning practice

The most obvious reason for creating automa would be to be able to play a well-loved game even when there is no opponent(s) available, but the process of creating an automa has value within itself.

The process requires that the automa designer studies, and really deeply, understands the mechanics of the game they are trying to ‘automate’. While the resulting materials which actually implement the automa may appear simple, the work behind them is not. Ironically, the more compact the output, the more hours of work have probably gone into the processes of:

• Streamlining the actions of the ‘opponent’ so that players do not have to ‘play the part’ of the automa
• Ensuring that the use of an automa does not overly restrict or change the experience for the player
• Thorough playtesting to make sure that the behaviour of the automa remains congruent in all likely game situations
• Ensuring that a win state can be reached despite the streamlining
• Ensuring balance in play that replicates the play of human opponents (that it is neither too hard or too easy to beat the AI)

In recent years, games-based learning has moved beyond creating games for learners to play, to offering the experience of games design itself as a valuable learning opportunity. The design of an automa for a particular game is a decidedly non-trivial task, which could provide learning in design thinking, systems thinking and mathematical modelling – as well as any learning related to thematic aspects of the game.

The benefit doesn’t only extend to learners. As a practice for games-based learning practitioners themselves, automa design can be a way to really grok how a game works, maybe with a view to modding for a particular learning outcome, or to explore how to design your own game using similar mechanics.

Games-based Learning and Automa

In practice however, many GBL practitioners do not have the time, to play with creating automa without a specific (commercial) goal in mind, so why might you want to think about creating solo play versions of your existing (learning) games, or indeed, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games that you use in your learning practice.

The pandemic meant that many of us who used tabletop games in face-to-face settings, had to adapt those experiences to online environments. In many cases, and to many people’s surprise, this worked remarkably well. However, in other situations, there was a definite feeling of having ‘lost’ something. In those cases, it might well be better to offer learners the opportunity for a solo (physical) learning game experience, rather than a ‘less good’ online shared experience. Any non-game aspects of the learning (e.g. debriefs, planning and so on), that require people to actually get together, could still be implemented through online meeting rooms etc. It gives the GBL practitioner another option to offer the play, other than simply ‘f2f together’ and ‘online together’.

Asynchronous learning has often been carried out in online settings too. Where games-based learning has been used asynchronously, tabletop gaming has never really been considered. Well-designed automa would open up the market for physical games in asynchronous learning settings, and would also give distance learners the opportunity for learning through interaction with “others”.

The post Playing by Yourself – Tabletop Automa first appeared on Ludogogy.

This article is adapted from a paper by Xavier Wilain (2022) Contrasting Students’ engagement during game based-learning. Paper presented at the Games and Serious Games Syposium, Geneva on 30 June 2022. Proceedings, p14-17. It has been made available to Ludogogy by M. Wilain.

Abstract

This research aims to measure students’ perception of their emotional engagement in game-based learning activities and compare them in regards to two types of games: a synoptic board game, Strategious© which has been created independently by the author and a diagnosis card game which the author adapted for one of the modules he is teaching at the Swiss Hotel Management School of Leysin, Switzerland.

Following a deductive approach within a pragmatic ontology, this is a case study of the Swiss Hotel Management School of Leysin.

Participants filled a questionnaire adapted from the Flow model (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and the PENS framework (Ichaman, 2016), and cross findings were put in relation with Toda’s gamification taxonomy, published in 2019.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is available on Amazon

The quantitative data collected by closed questions on a 1 to 5 Likert scale was analyzed using general proportions and cross-tabulations. The results showed players felt positive emotions as well as negative emotions with a board game. This was also confirmed by the PENS framework showing a better experience with the board game. Therefore, for game-based learning activities, serious board games can be qualified as emotional rollercoasters, whereas diagnosis card games can be qualified as emotional ice-breakers.

It was discovered that there were both generational and geographical variations in the emotional responses to the two games.

Context

This research assessed how participants perceived their emotional engagement during game-based learning activities, focusing on 2 game types. One game was a one-hour board game based on talent management, negotiation and strategic thinking. The second game was a 10-minute diagnosis card game on entrepreneurship, with famous entrepreneurs, their companies, and keywords from the module.

These games have been selected for this research because the author had already included them in one of his modules, called “Entrepreneurship in Events” in the final of the Bachelor of Arts in Hospitality and Events at the Swiss Hotel Management School, and he always wanted to know which type of game students preferred. The research was approved by the DEAN of the Swiss Hotel Management School.

Targeted issue

This research fits within a theoretical framework made from the model of Flow developed by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), which is defining eight emotions people feel when confronted by a task. The optimal emotional state has then been defined as the state of Flow. Jesse Schell (2015) further developed this theory by applying it to game design, saying that in order to keep a player engaged, a good game should constantly adapt the difficulty of the task to the evolving player’s skills. These two authors made a great contribution to the theoretical framework of serious games, but Melker (2015) suggested that more specific comparative researches were still needed to precisely differentiate between types of games. However, even if the theory of Flow developed by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) was thoroughly applied to game design by Schell (2015), it has still never been used to measure players’ emotional engagement when playing a game. Therefore, in the search of an effective measurement, the author decided to associate the theory of Flow with the recognized measurement, called the “PENS framework”, as the “Player Experience Need Satisfaction” applied by Ichaman (2016) and presented here below in figure 1.

Findings and Proposed solution

There is indeed a clear preference for synoptic board games but these findings also confirmed the importance of having a clear purpose and aim to support the integration of such game-based learning activities and diminish the students’ anxiety, relying more specifically on Mitgutsch and Alvaro’s Game System (2012). Moreover, the warning given by Toda et al., (2019) about the need of defining a clear purpose to game-based learning applies more specifically to generation Z students if it concerns a synoptic board game, and more specifically to generation X students if it concerns a diagnosis card game.

In regard to students’ culture, a greater care and purpose is needed for Americans students in case of synoptic board games, and for Middle East students in case of diagnosis card games which can be used as ice-breakers. Finally, such game-based leaning activities have revealed to be more effective with European students, in driving their perception to their emotional engagement.

Relevant innovation

Concerning the tool used to collect relevant data, in the search of an effective measurement, the author decided to associate it with a recognised measurement in the name of the PENS framework, as the “Player Experience Need Satisfaction” applied by Ichaman (2016) and presented below in figure 2.

Concerning the results of this research, the students showed a general preference for synoptic board games such as Strategious© which was included in this research. Board games produce a greater play experience in game-based learning activities (Hardin et al, 2019; Huang et al., 2019; Nakao, 2019; Sousa 2020). Going deeper, the author found that Autonomy and Relatedness were indeed more important for students when perceiving their emotional engagement when playing the board game than the card game. However, the research also revealed that students in general perceived a greater negative emotional engagement with synoptic board games. Therefore, the researcher has qualified game-based learning with a synoptic board game as an emotional rollercoaster with important emotional consequences on both sides. Furthermore, the diagnosis card game is safer although it generates less important emotional reactions from students, so it can be a relevant and safe emotional icebreaker.

Project outcomes & results

Therefore, the researcher qualified game-based learning with a synoptic board game as an emotional rollercoaster with important emotional consequences on both sides. Furthermore, the diagnosis card game is safer although it generates less important emotional reactions from students, so it can be a relevant and safe emotional icebreaker.

The cross-analysis revealed that students from X and Y generations  perceived greater positive emotions (Arousal, Flow, Control, Relaxation) than students from generation Z with the board game, who are genuinely accepting more easily this type of game-based learning. However, with a diagnosis card game, students from generation X were the ones perceiving less emotional engagement. The author then saw a confirmation of the idea that each generation has its own socio-psychological perception (Vlada, 2020).

American students were more critical towards the synoptic board game as the results showed 20% of higher negative emotions with this type of game-based learning activity. This contradicts the report of Metaari (2020) which shows that the American continent is the first customer of serious games in the world and suggests that Americans would be more used to such activities, also supported by Ferreira et al. (2016).

Conclusion

The researcher has qualified game-based learning with a synoptic board game as an emotional rollercoaster with important emotional consequences on both sides.

The diagnosis card game is safer although it generates less important emotional reactions from students, so it can be a relevant and safe emotional ice-breaker.

With a diagnosis card game, students from generation X were the ones perceiving less emotional engagement whereas American students were more critical towards the synoptic board game.

The researcher suggests further researches to be conducted with different types of games and bigger samples to be able to create and share more exhaustive guidelines on how to integrate all types of games efficiently in learning.

The post Card Games or Board Games? first appeared on Ludogogy.

Narratives, toys, puzzles, and games all share some similar characteristics. But what makes them different and how do games tie them all together?

Narratives

What are narratives? Narratives in their broadest and most interpretative sense: are anything that is told and recounted. Think about a scary ghost story, a tale told by your grandparents, or your favorite movie or novel. Narratives are about things being told and recounted.

This means that narratives are meant to represent their environment. In a way, they are part of the environment as the presenter or storyteller is present in order to share the anecdote.  Historically that meant that the storyteller shared the narrative during live theater or performance art. But with modern film and television we can now record the narrative days, months, weeks, or years ahead of when we plan to share it.

Meaning is part of the framework that gives narratives and stories longevity. Meaning is established as part of the whole narrative and as part of the experience.  The narrative is often reflective of human actions, experiences or events. That is what makes them relevant for their audiences. Because of that, narratives are meaningful for the audience because they can relate to those same experiences.

That’s why it’s important to impose connections in narratives. Narratives cannot connect on their own. They are a piece of media, something that is shared. But the connections to their audience is what makes them unique. The audience may not have any interesting choices to make with narratives, but they can at least claim a connection to the story.

Toys

Compared to narratives, toys possess a completely different meaning. Unlike narratives where the only meaningful choice are to listen or not to listen; toys offer the user complete agency. They can use it, manipulate, or play it. A toy  as any play thing is often used by a child was created for that purpose.

 Toys are objects that humanity has created and used throughout time. They are artifacts of how we’ve come to engage and change our world though the actions of young minds. Some of the most memorable toys are also some of the oldest, such as the ball, kite, or yo-yo. Because of that toys have over time become part of our shared vocabulary. They span different cultures and geographic boundaries.

Narratives lack the same amount of complexity that toys provide to their users. Toys allows two main directions for use: imitation or instruction. With toys, children can imitate what they see adults do with toy ovens, phones, or lawnmowers. Otherwise, toys can be used for instructive means as simple as letter blocks or as advanced as speak and spell digital devices.

Puzzles

Puzzles further iterate on what are present in narratives and toys. Narratives produce a whole experience for the user, but no interaction. Narratives have a finite beginning, middle, and end; toys do not. Someone can continue playing with a toy for an indefinite amount of time.

Puzzles on the other hand have a definite beginning and end. Compared to their narrative and toy counterparts, puzzles are not meant to immediately convey clarity to the user. Rather, the root of the word puzzle in Middle English poselen means to “bewilder and confuse.”

However, as one becomes more adapt at completing puzzles they can determine that a good puzzle is one that can present its structure (but not solution) all by itself.  And therein lies the end to puzzles. Narratives have a beginning and end like puzzles.  But narratives have no interaction. Toys provide that level of interaction but have no structure. Puzzles have with a beginning, an end, and have a structure with a solution.

A great puzzle is one that begs to be solved. But the solved state of a puzzle also means the death of it. Solving a puzzle means that the mystery is over. It’s the end of the enigma. And for most puzzles that is its entire lifespan.  Puzzles only have two states: solved or unsolved. Every other state is just a delay of the inevitable.

Games

Games on the other hand are able to combine the characteristics of narratives, toys, and puzzles. They incorporate a narrative into their structure, they include agency in play, and they have a finite conclusion at the end.

Games are activities that were played for pleasure and without specific purpose. They have since evolved into other areas like simulations, serious games, and gamification.

The structure of games includes several components. Those components include rules, goals, agency, and interaction. Most importantly, games also include the lusory agreement, or the “magic circle” where players know that what happens in the game is only accepted within the game.

Games have also been adept at integrating more story into their play. Similar to narratives, stories have found their place in the structure of narrative gaming. It is here where the traditional stories and structures of anecdotes and narratives wind themselves into what games have to offer. They allow players to explore a story with greater agency than before.

Though this changing context for narrative based games is nothing new. With the advent of options like “Choose your own adventure,” we’ve witnessed readers and players alike being able to take control of the path and style of their character through the fictional world of the narrative.

Rather than thinking of the narrative base in game play as separate entity, think of them in relation to how narratives, toys, puzzles, and games are structured. The narrative itself is just one way of understanding the structure of the experience. Toys and puzzles further augment what it is to have agency and control in these mediums.

Structure

The common thread that winds itself between narratives, toys, puzzles, and games is structure. They all include and define structure and how their players or audience views and interacts with the medium. Just like how a challenging puzzle is never obvious at first glance, narratives, toys, and games also provide a bit of serendipity when first presented to their users.

That bit of serendipity and surprise is important. That is something integral to games in order to keep players playing and engaged with them.  You can see this in any number of different mobile games on the spectrum of complexity. Those can include unlocking new game items, locations, or furthering the story.

Furthering the story is where we intertwine those elements in games.  There are often narrative and engagement arcs where a sequence is followed in order to engage the player. This can be seen in games with the core loop element and how that loop is followed by the player as they progress throughout the game. Likewise, narratives have a similar arc through setup, conflict, development, and resolution.

However, unlike narratives, games provide players with the agency to change the outcome. That means that games augment the traditional narrative and concept of the arc. They affect the game as well as the environment.

Environment

There are environmental challenges when it comes to games as well. One might even point to the lusory agreement that players make when they play a game, where that environment doesn’t exist even outside of the game.

Toys are part of that environment as they are often the play things of children.  Toys are part of their cultural experience. That experience that can be shaped, molded and influenced by their play as well as through influence from their caretakers, parents, etc…  The concept that toys share most in common with the games environment is that they must be voluntarily played with. Toys, like games, cannot be forced onto players.

And that agreement works out well for games, toys, and player alike. When playing and when gaming, the individual can escape from the real world even for just a moment.

But this escapism doesn’t have to always mean detachment. Puzzles are highly involved activities, where good ones are designed to teach the player. But they often lack a viewpoint or narrative that is often included in games. We don’t see puzzles the same way that we see narrative storytelling or narrative games where we experience the narrators’ values, beliefs, and other underlying motivations.

Narrative games can do this through specific structures and mechanics like characters, emotions, and plots. While these are structures that are immediately imminent in narratives, that is not always the case for games. Narrative games on the other hand need to accomplish all of that and more in a way that is playful, engaging, and intrinsically fun.

Meaning

This intrinsic fun is the greatest driving factor in developing meaning for activities in toys, puzzles, and games. Puzzles are activities that evoke a feeling of mystery and drive for the player’s desire to learn and explore more about them.

This meaningful emotional connection can also be seen in narratives where characters represent both the audience and the players in a make-believe world. A place where the audience can see themselves from the character’s perspective.

Branching scenarios and decisions

Giving the player the agency to make decisions and reap the benefits from them is part of what makes games so engaging. These decisions are incentivized by giving the player the ability to find out what will happen next. 

This is especially true when following a narrative philosophy as the audience is trying to figure out what will happen next.  In narratives that can be the case for a while, before the audience finds out what happens next. But that will only be a surprise for a limited amount of time as anyone who has experienced the narrative already knows what comes next.

Puzzles are the same way the first time they are completed.  To the player they are unique. But for the designer and past players, they have already been solved.  Out of narratives, puzzles, and toys; only games provide a true unequal and unknown outcome to players.

It’s the game’s interactive elements that can take on aspects from narratives and toys that makes them so engaging. The game scenarios and the decision and agency afforded to players is what makes it so that the participant is left continually guessing.

It is the feeling of control that makes it so that narrative based games allow the player to discover pre-determined paths as well as the outcomes of themselves in the process.

Applications

With narratives, toys, puzzles, and games, there are a nearly limitless variety of different interactions that players and audiences can pursue in their consumption of them. They can even be combined to provide players with experiences that were previously not available. We see them in narrative based games, escape the rooms, construction based toys, and other mediums yet to be explored.

Narratives continue to play a strong role in shaping how humans consume different mediums. Their divulgence of patterns, themes, ideas, and concepts permeates toys, puzzles, and games alike. This means that incorporating a narrative basis into design can still provide great outcomes for audiences and players.

Yet the chance involved in games remains ones of its most defining characteristics. While narratives still possess the pre-defined and determined path, games still leave the outcome up to the players. That gives them the greatest agency, the greatest choice, and the greatest prospect to learn from what they’ve experienced.

To learn more about narratives, toys, puzzles, and games in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to his Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalogue of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

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The post Narratives, Toys, Puzzles, Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

My husband wrote a comment on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago mentioning that I carry round a selection of dice with me at all times ‘just in case’. This is perfectly true, and over the years the selection of dice types in my little pouch has moved well beyond cubes with 21 dots, to include different symbols and different shapes. So far, I’ve been prepared for every ‘just in case’, but like cards, dice are just so versatile, and new mechanics are being created/discovered all the time, so it’s only a matter of time….

Beyond pips and cubes

The flatness of cards informs how they can be played with, and in the same way, the fact that dice are 3D objects opens up different possibilities for their use. Although I do own some spherical (internally weighted) dice, these are by way of being novelties, and most dice require a shape which will allow them to reliably land, and stay, on one face, so that another face can be upwards and display a ‘result’. With one (at least in the commonly used dice) notable exception, the tetrahedral die, this means that they can be stacked.

They are compact, and can therefore be used as counters, markers or game pieces in other capacities, in relatively high numbers, without taking up too much space.

Varying the number of faces has the obvious effect of changing the number of different outcomes or values that a die can ‘hold’. Add to that the potential to substitute with any kind of value or symbol that will fit on a face, and you have nearly endless options for using dice in play.

Randomness and Chance

Dice are most well known as components to produce random results, and even when they are used in the many different ways listed below, randomness still often features in the way they are used.

For the purposes of this article, the simple action of producing random results is not an especially interesting mechanic for dice, simply because it is so widely-used and well-known, so I will not examine it in detail, but mention randomness and chance where relevant in the explorations below

Pieces with magnitude

As 3D objects, dice can be used in a game as counters or tokens, fulfilling the jobs that these pieces usually do, such as recording progress or marking positions on a board. However, possessing numbered faces means that these pieces also have magnitude.

One game where this is used really well is Dice Hospital. Dice are used to represent patients, and the face value of any particular die shows the current level of ‘sickness’ of the patient.  Patients are treated, and their increasing health is indicated by turning the die to a higher value, until they are discharged, earning points for the player. Untreated patients get sicker, and if that means they are turned to a value of 1 or below, they die.

Dice Hospital is available from Amazon

In another way this could be seen as the value of the die being augmented or being ‘used up’, and this opens up possibilities for the values on dice being available as spendable ‘currency’ in a game. In its simplest form this is what happens in roll and move games like backgammon, where you ‘pay for’ moves with your dice pips.

Other ways in which these ideas could be deployed:

• Pips on a collection of randomly rolled dice determine how may actions points are available to a player.
• A piece moves along a track trying to reach the end before all pips are ‘spent’
• Different pip values correspond to different actions that can be taken
• Pip values of more than one die can be added to make ‘stronger’ dice

Dice as resources

Resources can also be represented numerically, but different symbols (or indeed colours) are often used where dice are used to represent material resources in a game. In Castle Dice (now sadly out of print), colour, symbols and numbers are used to signify resources which are rolled into a shared ‘World’ at the beginning of each round, and then drafted into each player’s individual holding in turn, enabling them to pay to build parts of a castle.

Other possibilities include:

• Worker placement using dice – Alien Frontiers also allows for special placement depending on the throwing of doubles or trebles
• Direct use of dice as a game resource, as in worker placement, or use of the die as currency – with or without reference to the value shown on a die face
• Direct use of die utilising its physical characteristics, e.g. stacking to build a tower or wall

Alien Frontiers is available on Amazon

Ranking and allocation

Numeric dice facilitate ranking, for a number of ranks equal to or less than their faces, and dice with either numbers of symbols can be allocated to corresponding categories of things within a game.

In the game Corinth, for example, players roll a pool of (six-sided) dice at the start of their turn. The dice are sorted into groups of face value, and placed on a six category board. All dice that show the highest value are placed in the topmost category, and all dice showing the lowest value are placed in the lowest category. Then the remaining groups of dice are allocated to the remaining categories starting from the next bottom category.

Corinth is available on Amazon

This is an ingenious way of making some categories rarer than others. If dice were simply allocated in categories 1 to 6, over time, the probability of rolling each category would even out. With this method, the ‘higher’ categories, other than the topmost, become ‘rarer’ because some rolls will include gaps where no dice show a particular value, and these gaps will then be allocated to the higher categories.

Colour and other characteristics

Colour can be used to identify dice as ‘belonging’ to a specific player – as in the worker (bee) placement game Waggle Dance, or can add an additional aspect to the dice, for example, different rules or powers could apply to different coloured dice. In Sagrada, the game of stained glass windows, each board has restrictions about which colour of dice can be placed, and further rules about allowable ‘shades’ (designated by the die value).

Sagrada is available on Amazon

In this way, characteristics of the die can be ‘layered’ one over another to ‘encode’ complex information in the object itself. These characteristics include:

• Die shape (e.g. cube, dodecahedron etc.)
• Numeric face values
• Die size
• Colour
• Symbols on faces

Additionally, more information can be encoded by the interaction of dice with the other components of the game:

• Position on a board
• Position relative to other dice / components (including stacking, tessellation and other arrangements allowed by the shape of the dice)
• Timing of ‘playing’ the die
• Combination of a die with another component when ‘playing’

Through combination of these characteristics, the possibilities for what a die can do or be within a game is effectively limitless. For example, let’s say that in a particular (worker placement) game, COLOUR represents a category of worker (project manager, consultant, intern), and SHAPE represents level of experience (a greater number of faces representing more years), SIZE could represent rank/salary band within the company, and the SYMBOLS represent specific skills to be utilised in a game action.

Dice can be played to a BOARD POSITION to represent deployment to a project, and could be COMBINED with other dice to create customised actions composed of multiple skills. TESSELLATION of dice within a project space could represent weighting of worker influence on project outcomes.

All this would probably (almost certainly) create unnecessarily complex mechanics in a game, but it does demonstrate the complexity of game information that can be held in a very small component.

Other possibilities

This article has been a relatively brief exploration of the potential for dice in game design. Other possibilities will be discussed in a further article, in the interests of keeping each one of a manageably readable size.  These will include, dice as mechanism for scoring, mutable dice, deckbuilding with dice, and using dice as playable surfaces, among others.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy experimenting with the ideas above in your own game design.

The post Take a chance on Dice first appeared on Ludogogy.

I tend to think of this principle frequently – basically, how can we get people to interact with a product, a service, or a concept such that they are introduced to it in the easiest possible way? The goal should be to make the first interaction happen so seamlessly that they feel it’s something simple and useful, which encourages them to dive further. After all, if something is too complicated, it’s likely to not generate interest or confidence.

In analogue games, you are interacting with the objects inside it directly, making it a direct application of the aforementioned principle of tactile stimulus. As soon as you are introduced to a game and its storyline, your resources and characters are all in your hands, both literally and figuratively. This is also why enthusiasts relish their collections, the meeples, the boards – they represent the experiences they had with these items. With that primer, I would like to to talk further about what makes the cardboard medium games uniquely powerful.

They are undeniably social

Sometimes games let us play ourselves – in party games, for example, we are not taking on new roles. We are bringing our own personality to games like Truth Or Dare, where mechanics like Disclosure are used in ‘Truth’ to reveal our true feelings about something (or someone). In many other games, we are required to step into the shoes of a different character, lending us to perspectives we don’t get to experience otherwise. Character sheets are used in RPGs to create personalities with some degree of control, and fascinating backgrounds that serve a purpose. Sometimes these backgrounds also lead to side plots that shed light into the psyche of the character. As a result, RPGs have been shown to improve social and emotional learning, and discussions on taboo topics.

When I talk about the social aspects of tabletop games, I usually start with Modern Art. The players operate as museums from fashionable cities like Milan and Paris, dealing in paintings from famous artists. In various rounds, through auctions and bidding, players have to buy and trade paintings, to obtain the most valuable collection and win the game. When I played this game a few years ago with absolute strangers, I was placing outlandish bets from the very start. It caused a lot of humorous frustration in the other players because of my unpredictable gameplay, keeping them on the edges of their seats. In just 30 minutes, we were all ablaze on the table. I also enjoyed listening to some commentary on the paintings from the players, and how they’d be proud to snatch it from my rogue grasp – which brings me to the next point.

Modern Art is available on Amazon

They are competitive – and fun

Psychologically, we are wired to feel proud of ourselves upon completing a task. One of the most important uses of gamification is making tasks fun so that we complete them. Achieving this becomes more convenient when we include the mechanics of competition into the mix. Anybody who has been to a long board game session can testify how intense it can get, bringing people to promises of ending their friendships.

Inside a room like that, everyone is playing to win, to explore a new tactic, and sometimes to induct newcomers into a favorite game. The atmosphere generates possibilities of competing, which is a psychological construct that motivates us to push on even when we are tired. It’s the reason gamification tactics like leaderboards work so well.

Self-improvement as a result of competition is the reason why we are more motivated to work out when our friends post their cycling journeys on Strava. In the same way, competing for rewards and resources brings a sense of urgency to a tabletop game. A classic example in this regard is Ticket To Ride. It has comparatively simpler mechanics and ways of completing the game, making its strategies more approachable to the rookie player. At the end of a game, it’s simple to ascertain what decisions and strategies could have been played better. Often, in Ticket To Ride, it’s easy to observe what a competing player did correctly, as this game’s progress and movement is visible on the board for everyone. We therefore compete better in the games to follow, and know exactly how to play the game. The sense of achievement we feel by making progress on something that’s fun is a central pillar of tabletop games culture, which is achieved by healthy competition.

Ticket to Ride is available on Amazon

They improve us

The evident connection of tabletop games with awareness is becoming more popular in recent years. It is a commonplace understanding that stories create deep empathy and connection with a setting and character. Games are essentially storylines with more choices and mechanics, at the end of the day. As a result, games are a medium that educates us about the intricacies of a situation by taking us through the experience, which is way better than a second-hand written account. Since first-hand experience is not always feasible to achieve, games fill in this gap.

Games can be defined and designed around a topic or theme, and playing it can inculcate a sense of curiosity and exploration. In the aforementioned games Modern Art and Ticket To Ride, some of the comments from newcomers have been downright amazing. They called Modern Art a crash course in understanding paintings – and that was not even the central part of the game! They said that apart from the auctioning, bidding, and social deception in the game, the conversations on common practices like layering and glazing gave them awareness they had simply not anticipated.

On the other hand, Ticket To Ride was applauded for introducing to them the geographies of the USA and Europe in a way they had not seen before. For people who do not get regular exposure to the cities in these continents, the knowledge is mostly based on what we hear about in the news, movies, etc. There is no reason for a movie to talk about a story which is based in Montréal, Atlanta, Dallas, etc. unless the story actually demands it. But since that is not the case usually, we might know their existence but not their location. After playing a game of Ticket To Ride, these very players were highly confident about the situations of such places on the map, even gaining secondary knowledge like their (approximate) distance from the coast.

Using board games for bringing a culture of experimentation, enquiry, and learning, is a severely underrated application. I’d like to make a callback to the first anecdote from the very beginning of this article –  that interaction with a MacBook that makes you just 1% more confident and aware about what the device feels like, what the wallpaper looks like, what the screen looks like, how the keys are placed. Just by achieving this, you feel a lot more optimistic about the product, as it opens a mental conversation inside you, with growing curiosity. Tabletop games introduce you to topics and people – sometimes in a deeper level, sometimes at a rookie level. The feedback mechanism wherein you express something and get a positive or negative response is short and fast in these games, and that’s what makes them an essential tool of the modern social learner.

The post Playing your Cards Right – Walkman Lab first appeared on Ludogogy.

Both my parents and (both sets of) grandparents were keen card players, and also saw no reason not to include even very young children in the more ‘grown up’ games. I remember the ambivalent attitudes to gambling – that it was simultaneously very, very bad but also OK as long as it was only for pennies – a dispensation, that, I’m guessing, had to be made because several very enjoyable card games don’t really work without wagering.

So, I learnt very young to play Rummy, various flavours of Whist, Bezique, Canasta, Cribbage, Newmarket, Blackjack and Poker, and began a lifelong love of cards as tools for play.

A search in Ludogogy for cards reveals a wealth of articles celebrating this very versatility.

Now I work with games all the time, and that just reinforces, with each new mechanism I encounter, the versatility of cards as physical components to create an almost infinite variety of play experiences. This versatility comes from both the physical characteristics of the cards – the materials they are made from, their flatness, their two-sidedness and so on, and from the ‘content’ they hold, e.g. whether they are standard playing cards or some other type of card. The rest of this article is dedicated to exploring that versatility and to some games design challenges you might wish to try.

It necessarily just scratches the surface of what is possible, so please excuse if your favourite aspect of cards in play is not explored below. I have just tackled a manageable list. More will inevitably follow in other articles.

Standard playing cards

A pack of cards is a deceptively simple thing. Examining the concepts which underlie its design (or of conceptually similar objects like Mah Jong tiles) can reveal all sorts of possibilities for play. A few of these concepts are:

• Magnitude – cards have values which can be compared with each other (Snap), used in arithmetic (Blackjack), sequenced (Whist), matched (Go Fish), grouped (Rummy), form complex combinations, or combinations of combinations (Mah Jong)
• Suits – categories can facilitate grouping (Solitaire), Evaluation (Poker), powers (trump cards)
• Frequency and distribution – each card occurs just once in a deck, each suit has the same number of cards and each number occurs four times.
• Attribution – values or suits can be attributed special characteristics (wild cards), or actions (Crazy Eights)
• Narrative – more explicit in Tarot cards, but even ordinary playing cards can have meanings attached (dead man’s hand, cartomancy, ace of spades as bad luck)
• Etc.

Their design as physical objects affords several ways of using them:

• Revealed or hidden information – the two-sided design of cards means that their characteristics can be at any point in the game shown to or hidden from players, and furthermore that disclosure can apply to some players and not others
• Inclusion or exclusion – certain values or suits can be excluded from play, or play can be limited to small subset of cards (one’s hand)
• Randomisation – cards and tiles can be shuffled
• Their flatness allows them to be used as a surface and the shape of most playing cards allows them to be tessellated
• Etc.

In turn, the above facilitates all sorts of different play experiences. We are all familiar with cards being used to create experiences of Chance (Beggar my Neighbour) vs Skill (Gin Rummy), Bluffing (Poker), Competitive (Bezique) or Cooperative (Bridge) play and Gambling (Blackjack), but we can also include:

• Utilising skills in probability to gain advantage
• Card counting or other memory feats
• Map creation, or creation of other kinds of playing surface
• Changing the rules (Switch)
• Etc.

Games design challenges

• Take a standard pack of cards, and a theme (e.g. running a pizzeria, turning base metal into gold, opera singing, whatever). For the first set of bullet points list as many ways as you can think of that those concepts could support your theme. E.g. The suits of cards could represent components of a pizza, the values could represent different levels of skill in singing.
• Randomly choose three of four of the bullet points above (or concept within, if they have more than one example) and design a game. Try again with another set of bullet points if you want.

Pictures and text

Because cards are prime real estate for printed information, the sky is the limit when you use them as a way of introducing information into a game. Tarot cards, for example are primarily containers of imagery, but through symbolism and traditional metaphorical attributions they are rich in meaning.

Games such as Mysterium and Dixit use cards that are very similar to tarot decks to create play which incorporates narrative and player intuition.  For those who are doubtful as they read this, I can recount a situation where I was asked to refrain from using Dixit cards, as prompts, in a learning setting, in case it upset religious people in the cohort.

Mysterium is available on Amazon.

Dixit is available on Amazon.

There is inevitably overlap in the play experiences that are created by different types of cards, and my splitting this article into sections and themes is subjective and arbitrary, but the play experiences facilitated by image-based cards include:

• Interpretation (Tarot, Dixit)
• Narrative prompting
• Rebuses and other word play (Eyetoons)
• Matching and categorisation (Mysterium, Codenames Pictures)
• Creation of a session unique playing surface/layout (Tranquility)
• Supporting a game theme (Magic: The Gathering)
• Etc.

Tranquility (and the other games listed here) are available on Amazon.

Once words come into play, the possibilities are opened up even further. Text on cards can provide flavour, list powers or instructions that playing the card activates, provide information, keep score – the list is literally endless. Notable genre-creating (or busting) uses for text on cards over the past couple of decades include:

• Iterative additions of new game mechanics to an existing base game idea (Magic: The Gathering)
• Secret roles, hidden goals (Shamans, Secret Hitler)
• Cards as representations of complex multi-faceted entities such as projects (Terraforming Mars)
• Etc.

Terraforming Mars is available on Amazon.

Games design challenges

• Take any type of cards (other than standard playing cards), from a game that you own. List the experiences that they create in the game they are from (e.g. a Dixit card prompts a ‘clue’ sentence. It can (and the game relies on it) be interpreted differently by people with different life experiences – if I use the name of a TV show from the eighties as my clue, I can hopefully rely on my husband to ‘get’ it, but hide my meaning from my daughter. The card can be correctly matched to a clue or not)
• List the experiences that such a card COULD create but which is not used in the game it comes from. (e.g. the Dixit card could be sequenced with others to prompt the writing of a story, its significance could be in its colour rather than its image. It could be won in a ‘trick’ based on some criteria (number of objects in the image, or whatever).
• Create a game based on the ‘new’ experiences, but including none of the original ones.

Hidden and disclosed information

Cards are two-sided, a characteristic which can be exploited either to double the potential information (text or images) that a card can hold, or to create a ‘hiding’ mechanism by having a universally similarly ‘blank’ side for a deck. Hidden roles and secret goals as listed above are only two of the vast number of play experiences that this opens up.

• Hiding what resources are potentially available to all (draw pile) and available only to others (individual hands)
• Deduction (Love Letter)
• The game system itself hides information from all players (Cluedo)
• Hiding how well or badly you are doing (Settlers of Catan – hidden victory points on development cards)
• Etc.

Love Letter is available on Amazon.

Information on cards can be disclosed permanently in a game by turning them over, or temporarily by revealing them briefly before hiding them back e.g. in your hand. They can be disclosed to all or just to some. The size and portability of a card makes it ideal to be used in this way. Disclosure can facilitate the following play experiences:

• Asymmetry of information
• Gradual unfolding of narrative (Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr)
• Changing the conditions or direction of the game (Fluxx)
• Making a move (Magic: The Gathering)
• Etc.

Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr is available on Amazon.

Deckbuilding and set collection

The compact nature of cards, in relation to the information they can hold, and the size of the play experiences they can create, makes them ideal for creating games which can be constantly added to; which can become ‘collections’.  This in turn, facilitates a situation where games can be played with a subset of a larger collection, and where new powers and mechanics can be added to an existing game easily. Collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering demonstrate this well

Within play also, a large variety of cards with differing characteristics allows highly varied play within the same rule set. This can be seen particularly in Engine / Tableau Building games like Wingspan.

Wingspan is available on Amazon.

Play experiences which this allows includes:

• Extending the game backwards into an extensive planning/building stage (great for games-based learning around strategy
• Almost limitless combinations of actions to create previously unseen approaches to winning
• ‘Themed’ strategies
• ‘Puzzles’ to be solved, for which the solution is a particular combination of cards
• Etc.

Games design challenges

• Take some (random) cards from a collectible card game (Pokemon, MTG), list the many different powers / actions that they have.
• Alternatively use cards from a standard set of playing cards and assign a different power /action to each suit, value that you have in your selection. (e.g a club will compel your opponent to reveal their hand to you, a nine allows you to draw two new cards)
• Take subsets of the cards, and construct ‘strategies’ for winning based on those cards’ actions/powers. What would you call that strategy?

The future of cards

Although it seems like a bit of cheat, in an article about cards, written to a magazine theme of ‘Cardboard’, I would like to explore how cards are represented electronically in a new app called Deckible.

Full disclosure – I have two (at the time of writing) decks of my own in this app.

Deckible expands the above versatility of cards. Some of the things listed above which are advantages of the card format, can also be limitations. One of the most notable things that Deckible does is it removes the limitation of two sides. Deckible cards can have many sides, increasing the information they can hold.

A journalling feature means that you can interact with cards by writing about them. A timeline tracks and records all interactions with cards. Reflection and meditation is facilitated by a timer. Users are able to curate their own ‘superdecks’ using cards from decks that they own within the app.

Above all, Deckible prioritises portability. If you are a keen user of card decks, it can be challenging to carry them all around, not to mention that doing so might damage what can be beautiful, and expensive, objects. Deckible allows you to take your decks wherever you can take your phone.

Deckible will launch on September 16^th, when it will be available on the Play Store and App Store. Until then you can browse the decks which will be available in the marketplace.

You can check out my own two decks, The Gift Horse and The Museum of Impossible Objects through my creator profile.

The post The Versatility of Cards first appeared on Ludogogy.