Board Game Design Day: Cardboard Interfaces: UX for Board Games

[Music] good afternoon everyone my name is Randy Hoyt I'm an owner and game producer at Foxtrot games today we're gonna be looking at tabletop games as cardboard interfaces one thing they asked me to remind you is to fill out your session survey evaluation after you after this talk you should get that in email they want to know how I do and I want to know how I do so please feel please feel free to give us any feedback as I mentioned I'm the owner and game producer at Foxtrot games or a small tabletop game company we've put out six games so far with one more on the way four of those we've funded through Kickstarter campaigns three of those we've put straight to retail most recent games by club on Kickstarter will be out this fall this summer we'll have it available in stores in my day job I am a user interface engineer a software engineer I've worked for marketing agencies and software companies startups one of the

things we focus a lot on in our software interfaces is usability as I've studied usability for decades now I find a lot of the principles that you find in interfaces apply to tabletop games as well they're of course not identical there's not digital interfaces that perform functions behind on the back end but both interfaces and tabletop game components and graphic design both interact with abstract underlying systems that humans players or users are interacting with so a lot of the things in my work as a game producer I find really studying usability and looking at the principles of usability really help improve the tabletop gaming experience Jakob Nielsen a usability expert is broken down usability into five main attributes we're going to be looking at these in tabletop games there's learn ability how easy is it for a new player a new user to learn how to interact with an interface how memorable is it if they spend some time away and then come back how easy is it for them to regain

proficiency to remember what they had learned the first time they interacted with it efficiency once they've used the system once they've used the interface or played the game how quickly can they perform the different tasks if if something takes too long in tabletop will you often hear the adjectives clunky or fiddly applied to it it's just not as efficient to do the things that you know how to do already accuracy how often do users make mistakes and this is a big difference between tabletop and digital type experiences if you're using an interface and you believe a button will do something when you click it but you're wrong when you click it it will do the wrong thing it'll do what it's been programmed to do with a tabletop or analog experience if you believe something costs less than it does there's nothing that will enforce the real costs if you move a knight in chess illegally the game won't stop you it won't give you an alarm or a bonk or you know read redo your move and if the

other player doesn't know you can just easily play games wrong I follow a lot of board game players and designers on Twitter and you see all kinds of posts like oh I've been playing my favorite game wrong for five years that just happens a lot with tabletop because the game isn't enforcing it in fact I hear many stories when people pick up a digital copy of a tabletop game they finally learn oh that's how that worked the last element is satisfaction now with a user interface you know you think about if you're using software to file an expense report or book a flight or like a message on Facebook you have a main utility of that app you're trying to accomplish a task and how you feel about it is sort of secondary obviously if you enjoy your experience will be more likely to come back and it's an important part of usability but with games especially there isn't exactly a task that you're trying to complete it's the satisfaction is the main utility you are trying to have an experience there are a lot of other goals but really are you having fun is it enjoyment are you

feeling skilled or you're gaining mastery is it providing context for social interaction all of those things relate very tightly to how you feel about the experience so a lot of these things we're going to look at usability really drive that satisfaction that you have with the product the game and make you want to come back to it so we'll look at a number of examples from games some I've worked on just because I have the scenes insights on those as well as some popular games that you're probably familiar with and we'll look at these games and along these some of these different aspects so we'll start with a pretty popular game Catan Catan has three types of wooden pieces in the game roads settlements and cities one of the things you do on your turn is you spend resources to place one of these wooden pieces on the board that's a pretty intuitive rule and when you learn the game and someone's explaining it to you they say turn in resources put the thing on the board it's pretty intuitive how to do it there are some rules some restrictions but one of the things

that's the hardest to remember or to learn is what exactly each thing costs they've tried really hard with Catan to make them feel themed attic so it makes it a little bit easier to remember but when you come back to Kitaen after having not played it for a month you might be a little confused now what do I have to do to build a city exactly again and also these wooden pieces will generate resources that's part of the game you roll the dice and if you're built on a corner with a number you'll produce that given thing that given resource again that's a rule that's pretty straightforward but the costs to help with learnability and memorability the game includes reference card this reference card includes the building costs that includes the victory points that you get for each one so it's very common to easily remember the rules for how you build but not remember exactly what those costs are so they provide this reference card after you've played a few times maybe you don't even need it but it's there to help get players over that learnability and memorability issues another game that uses similar pieces

Terra Mystica it actually has three of the same pieces plus three others these all have different costs they have different benefits the way that you earn resources from your buildings in Terra Mystica is not as straightforward each one produce a different thing in a way the resources are easier here because there's only two there's not five resources like in Catan but then it makes it a little harder to remember through matically so there's workers and coins and it can be really hard to remember what a Trading Post cost to build and so our simple reference card probably wouldn't been enough for Terra Mystica so what they did is they give you this really large player board and you place all of your wooden pieces on the player board so right next to them it shows the costs to build them but the benefits that you get from building them are underneath the pieces so when you put a piece out on the board it reveals the benefit so there's an income phase and all you have to do is there's no

table there's no reference card you don't have to count how many trading posts you have out on the board you just look at what you can see on your board that's visible that helps a lot with the accuracy if you had a table in the rule book and you had to count how many temples and how many trading posts you had you'd be more likely to make a mistake so to help both of learnability memorability and with accuracy Terra Mystica comes with this player board also each faction now can have slightly different costs and slightly different benefits because every player gets their own board and they do have some variability in them many modern tabletop games have cards in them and cards have a few usability issues or considerations if you look at efficiency of playing cards if you got a hand of cards being able to see as much relevant information to that card while you hold them in your hand is really important for efficiency

playing cards didn't used to have the number and rank in the top left hand corner if you look like 150 years ago you'd have to flip through all of your cards to sort of see which ones you had or fan them out really far but here a hand of nine cards you can see all the information that you need of course in modern table top games cards have a lot more information that you need on them and so you really have to prioritize what goes in the top left corner what can go in different places I've got a couple of different games to look at here seven wonders one of my favorite games you start the game with a hand of seven cards and you can if you have the resources you can build one which is place it on the table in front of you the building costs for these are all in the top-left corner so you can even with a hand of seven cards you can see all of the requirements for you to build you can quickly scan your hand and see oh well I can't build those five and at the beginning of the game there are many you can't buy so you can just focus on the two or three that you may be able to build the benefits what you get when you

build them is all in the top up there you can see a series of icons so as you play them on the table you can stack the cards you don't have to have the whole thing visible seven wonders does not have any card text which is an interesting choice the it has a really robust system of iconography that could be a little tricky to learn but once you know it it makes the gameplay a lot more efficient you don't have to read all of the card text just as an example I taught my son who at the time was seven I think to play seven wonders and he could play it it's not a game for seven year-olds but he could I could teach him what all the icons meant and he could learn and holding them all in his hand he could process what they were we played some other games that had card texts that were simpler but he didn't read fast enough he couldn't see them all at the same time so he's flipping one card at a time reading the texts and before he even got through his whole hand he forgot what cards he had available so having that

iconography makes it really efficient however it does inhibit learn ability to some degree here's one example card this card what this iconography means is when you build this card you gain two coins for every gray card you have in your civilization Plus at the end of the game you gain two victory points for every gray card that you have that's a nice long paragraph of text could have had that that you might not intuit that that's what that means from looking at it but once you learn the game that's something that you can then remember and process efficiently they do include on the back of the rulebook a giant list of all the icon references just about every game I play a seven wonders and the third eight everyone picks up their hand and someone says pass me the reference book as a reminder now another popular game Dominion puts it building cost in a different place in the bottom left hand corner now the reason for that isn't in Dominion the cards start out on the table and you can see their costs who

draft them into your deck once you get them into your deck that cost is irrelevant so when you draw the card and you hold them in your hand you cannot see the building cost anymore you're it's like where your thumb is it's hidden because it's no longer relevant in the top corners they show the when you play a card what it produces they use some color coding to show what types of cards you have now the action cards which are grey you do have to read you can see the name of those when you're holding them in your hand and they are thematically tied to what they do so the thief unsurprisingly lets you take cards that you wouldn't normally have access to and so by driving home that theme it can help you remember what they do they do have another type of action card which is a reaction and those are coated in blue so you can play those on other people's turns again just using color as a slight nod so you know when you're holding them in your hand and you can see that across the top game that I've put out Fox in the forest it's a

two-player trick-taking game the cards do have numbers or ranks and suits just like a typical playing card but all of the odd cards have special powers and those are all written on the on the card themselves the special power is tied to a fairytale character that they represent and so one of the things we found in playtesting was that we could really help the learn ability the memorability of the game by putting the name of the character at least in that top left corner so all the 11s are monarchs and they all have a certain power we included a reference card so that players can quickly reference what they do that's all pretty standard we want a little step further and we commissioned an author to write us a custom fairytale that really helped kind of explain why the characters had that power so the rule book we kind of sprinkled these excerpts throughout so from this fairy tale you can see why the eleven and the one which

is the monarch and the Swan interact just as a little way to help every little thing you can do to help a character or player remember what is the 11 do why is the one related to it those kinds of things and really as you're playtesting I strongly encourage you always to look at playtesting as usability testing as well of course early on you don't know if people are gonna enjoy the mechanics that you have but as those mechanics start to get refined as players are consistently having fun with the game you can really start to take a look at the usability how players interact with Fox in the forest we asked players after they played weed quiz them a little bit hey what's the power on the three which character lets you change the Trump suit what number is the Fox and as we play tested that especially once we put the character numbers in the top corner that definitely improved and so we were able to get players by testing testing them as well as the game to see where was it starting to become easy to learn easy to remember what they're doing now

just to give you some context on the work I do as a game producer if you're not familiar with the board game process or how board games today get made typically what happens is a game designer will create a prototype and pitch it to a publisher it's a bit like an author submitting work to a publisher looking the author will write a manuscript here the the prototype will be fully playable who have been tested been found to be fun it will even have some clean graphic design probably maybe some clipart or some stock photos to help set the atmosphere of the game but I won't have any of that artwork done yet they'll pitch it to a publisher that will come in and someone at the publishing company will take on the role of game producer which is continue play testing continue development on the board game side we have a little bit different terminology for designer and development than you might find in the video game world because a designer can a game designer can make a complete fun

functioning game without any special programming skills any of that so for development at a publishing house was a bit like an editor in that book process so the author will write the book then they'll work with an editor to refine it and that that point a developer is really helping they ought the designer refine the gameplay test it and then of course you're looking at artwork and layout so it'll Commission the artist commissioned a graphic designer to kind of handle all that work and get it ready and so when the game producers work is done what you have is a product design ready to go to the printer it's usually a bunch of PDFs is the output of this process at each step of the way you're continually checking for usability one of the biggest things I find in my work is a nice clean prototype has very good graphic design and when you start to add artwork and make it beautiful that starts to interfere a little bit with the usability and so there's a lot of work that has to be done I've got some

examples of that that I'll cover as we go to dive in on some of the development I'll start with one of our games World's Fair 1893 this is the prototype that was pitched to me you can see there's some you know public domain paintings on there some tokens with icons from a site called game icons dotnet or the noun project those are two popular places to find a simple clean icons and this was pitched to me I evaluated it played it and decided I wanted to publish it one of the mechanisms that we changed in the game was the scoring so in the game there are five regions and it's there's three rounds and you're gonna be trying to get the majority in an area you want to have the most influence in each of the areas and at first the area is all scored with slightly different point values so here this one the one on the left was five points for first three points for second the other one was four points for first two points for second and one of the things that the way that that tracked that scoring was tracked

was with generic scoring tokens variously denominated so there I think were one three and five so if you scored four points you'd take a one and a three-point token there was a lot of back-and-forth making change it was a bit too slow for that scoring round so we looked at adding a score track we thought a game like Ticket to Ride has a scoring track and this is a similar weight but an important thing to know what ticket to ride is you're not scoring ten different things all at once in the middle of the game you're scoring every time you build you score and then at the end there's a big scoring round so as we play tested this continue to do usability testing we found that in the scoring phases people would just start to check out a little bit and once one player starts to check out and everybody starts to check out then it takes longer to do the scoring and it makes it seem more so the game was playing about 45 to 60 minutes people really enjoyed it but you could just tell watching them that we needed to keep them more engaged and so we looked at and this was more trouble than you might think to try to figure out the

best way to track the scoring so what we ended up doing was we changed all of the regions to be worth four and two then what we could do is just have a four point first-place token and a two point second-place token it's much easier to just pass those out than it is to count out who's blue let me count you four spaces on the scoring track or even handout just varies to oh you need a three and a one oh you've got ten when you make change so you can much more easily get through the scoring around the game now plays in about thirty to forty minutes you know and reviewers always talk about how great the game is for its decisions versus the time and reviewers will always mention that they'll be like man for a 30-minute game this has a lot of decisions and we found in play testing that 45 to 60 minutes it just wasn't quite delivering the satisfaction that we wanted another example of a fun component is from a game called camel up if you've if you ever played this game it's hilarious you're watching a camel race you're betting on this camel race and the way the camels move is there's one die

matching each color of the camel and they can move one two or three spaces each round each camel will move one space now to roll the dice they have this pretty crazy pyramid contraption it comes in the box as a piece of cardboard you fold it up wrap a rubber band around it and it's got this little trigger so to roll a die you flip it face-up you push in the lever pull it back one die falls out and then you lift it up and you reveal oh the white camel moves one space now I hear a lot of people all the time say well that's ridiculous you didn't need this crazy pyramid right and that could be true you could just put the dice in a bag and pull them out pull one out and then roll it but what's interesting there is that when you're rooting for a camera like I really need that blue camel to move two or three spaces if they drew out a white die you'd be like oh I don't care about the number on the white die so you check out this way you revealed the color and a number at the same time keeps everyone engaged until it's revealed there's no partial revealing of

information again silly nice little touch but it does it keeps the color and the number hidden until the exact same moment one of the things in tabletop that we often do as publishers is redeemed games I don't know how common that is in the video game my understanding is that by the time you get into designing and developing you're pretty much committed to your theme but with tabletop games the mechanics are abstract enough there's a lot that we have to abstract away you know you play a card and that counts as building a resource or building a building and so publishers will at times wreath in games this is one of our games that ivory themed it was pitched to us as a flower themed game so you were planting flowers harvesting flowers and making bouquets nothing wrong with flower themed games or have been some have done quite well but it wasn't particularly interesting to me but when I read the rules I was really fascinated by the mechanics and the way the game works is you place a tile and all there's four colors all on

the different sides and whichever way you place it everybody at the table will get a resource matching the color that's facing them and I thought that sounded fascinating and wanted to play it I played it loved it but wanted to look at reach ancient a theme so I made this seamless prototype I used the paint shop or the Photoshop paint bucket tool to color out all the flowers and just make a solid color abstract version and listen to what players as they played what they said about the game so they the mechanics would give them these feelings simple and elegant it's calming it's delightful relaxing to play and flowing and I sat back and thought what theme has all of those same attributes now the mechanics in your game will produce an atmosphere will produce a feeling independent of the of the theme and a lot of times people will feel a dissonance between the theme if you have a cute theme but a heavy aggressive mechanics players will just not quite

feel so what I wanted to do with this was give it a theme that matched the feelings of the mechanics at the time I was talking to another number of other parents about why the movie frozen had done so well compared to the movie Tangled and I had that scene entangled with the lanterns and the water I was like that perfectly captures all of those feelings that the mechanics capture and so we spent a good amount of time working on renaming that game to lanterns the Harvest Festival this is probably our most popular game right now it's it was nominated for the or was a finalist in the South by Southwest tabletop game of the year a few years ago and we started working on the artwork for the game as you can see I kept some flowers in there as a nice homage to the original theme this is one of the the artwork for this is one of those times where you're looking at the the prototype was really useable just solid colors but you want to try to then add artwork and make it beautiful how do

you still make it usable so I worked with the artist here Beth Sobel she did a great job of sort of making sure that the design the layout would still be able to communicate to players what the the gameplay was which colors were on the sides she made the different lanterns a different shape to help with colorblind friendliness and also just looking at it across the table and they all have different arrangements as well you get a bonus in lanterns if you match two tiles of the same color side-by-side and so she even made if you do match them they sort of complete a pattern that if it's a white and a purple it won't quite make the same nice symmetrical pattern as the white ones do when you match them together I mentioned our most recent game spy Club this is a game where you're playing you know neighborhood detectives solving neighborhood mysteries and the prototype here the was very simple very clean someone who did has done graphic design for me designed the game so of course the graphic design of the prototype was very clean

very solid color so you're looking across the table what you're trying to do is get five yellow cards into the center to solve the object five blue ones to solve the crime and you can look across the table and see what colors everybody else has we worried very much about when we add artwork how easy is it going to be to tell that they go together so we worked with an artist and tried to figure out a way to make all of the objects look yellow even though you know not with like a mask or something that make them look washed out before we commissioned all the artwork we wanted to see if something like this was possible could we get photos that were sort of yellow ish and see if they would work together so what I did was I found a mobile wallpaper pack mobile wallpapers are more or less the same size as playing cards at least the same shape and so I created a prototype like this you can see the flashlights the stamp and the lipstick they of course don't look anything like that but those cards were all yellowish and for the motives I got

cards that all were kind of reddish the blue got cards that were all kind of bluish and then we played this course I didn't play this with outside play testers only internal team members because that's a little jarring when you have a prank card and it's a mountain landscape but we played with this a number of times to just see before we commissioned thousands of dollars worth of artwork if the if their photos which were different but we're still kind of blueish if they would be able to be played and seen across the table so in the end this is what the artwork looks like so you can see the objects are all yellowish the crimes are all bluish the motives are all reddish and it's worked really well he did a great job making them all look natural kind of the only comment we had is why do all the people wear purple clothes in this town because the suspects are purple so that's always a challenge for us and just about every one of our games is trying to make the art just as playable as the as the prototype and sometimes we have to get pretty creative with that we're about

out of time so just to wrap up want to remind you of the five elements of usability learnability how easy is it for people to learn for the first time memorability how easy is it for people to remember once they've already learned it efficiency how quickly can they perform the tasks once they know them accuracy how likely or unlikely are they to make mistake with errors there's a lot to be said about rule books in there I wish if I had another half-hour we could talk about rule books and accuracy and then satisfaction how do people enjoy the game I want to leave you with a few tips as you're testing so when you go into a play test have very specific things that you're testing you know I mentioned we tested these weird photo versions of the spy Club artwork there will be things that come up of course that you can't anticipate and that's also a big part of testing so write down every time a player makes an error every time they ask a question it's really easy when someone says how much does this cost again to just say oh three would and move on but write that down and if you

start to see the same questions over and over say why do people always ask this is there something we can do to make them not ask it is it not intuitive is it not obvious that a city would be three or and to wheat well a reference card solve it is there something we need to do to make it more thematic more memorable if you're a game designer I highly recommend you watch people play other games when you play test you're gonna be watching people play your game a lot but if you've never just sat and watched people play other games you won't quite know what you're observing you know you ask people did you like the game they say yes you could say well we're done then but if you've watched people play games that they love you'll know if they're responding to your game like they respond to those games it can feel a little weird and creepy to watch people play games of course conventions are a great place to do it if somebody's started a game just walk up his Haven wanting to learn this can i watch you play for a little while and see if I can learn it and then that's not creepy and also I'd recommend you study interfaces another game so look at the

graphic design in other games look at the way they use score tracks tokens coins all these things this one can be really tricky you as I was preparing for this I saw an article that criticized Dominion for putting the costs in the bottom left instead of the top left like other games like Seven Wonders or int like magic which is in the top right but of course those are in very different contexts again in Dominion the card is already on the table and you can see it it's not in your hand at this time again we looked at World's Fair and a score track who's that well other games use a score track but again that was a different context so I do recommend that you study all these games other interfaces and games but be careful that your situation might be a little different and be very careful to pay attention to those nuances that's all I have for now we have time for probably one question if there is one I'll be in the overflow room for more questions after this so anybody has one now or if we want to just wait till the overflow that's fine

[Applause]