Trying to explain to someone who doesn’t play board games why this game about trading feels thematic but that other game about trading has a pasted-on theme is, in my experience at least, a ticket to a conversation that both of you lose interest in once you’re far too deep into it to easily back out. That is why I don’t envy Sarah Shipp’s task in trying to define concepts like a board game’s theme and when theme integrates well with a game’s mechanics. This is the sort of thing that is intuitive to many who have spent time in the hobby – they know thematic games when they see them – but despite what some American jurists might believe this is not particularly firm ground for a working definition. In Thematic Integration in Board Game Design Shipp sets out not only to define and explain these concepts in a manner that can serve as a foundation for future discussion, but then to also provide advice to designers on how best to effectively integrate their game’s theme with the mechanisms and rules.
Most of the book is aimed towards designers rather than people like me who ruin parties by bringing up board game themes. It is far more of a guide to designing thematic games, including literal guides to doing this at the end of the book, than it is a deep discussion of how theme and mechanism interact. Despite that, my favorite parts of the book are probably the early sections where the challenges of defining theme are most prevalent. Shipp is faced with taking terminology that has developed on internet forums and in casual discussion (e.g. “pasted-on theme”) and attempting to refine them for a more robust academic discussion. This is always a fraught process at the best of times and runs the risk of multiple authors introducing different sets of terminology for the same topic, creating endless confusion. Shipp does an excellent job at charting a course with her chosen terms (in particular, talking about themes in layers and how well the games interlock with the theme). Shipp shows an appreciation of the need for academic language without getting lost in the mazes it can create. That’s not to say that the opening chapters don’t at times get a tad labyrinthine, but they generally deposit the reader in a clearing with a working understanding of the language that will be used throughout the rest of the book.
Readers who don’t particularly care about thematic games may object to the fact that the book takes thematic games as an inherently desirable outcome, but then if you are reading a book on integrating theme into board games, maybe you shouldn’t be surprised that it unabashedly supports integrating themes into board games. The chapters on narrative and designing characters within your game were particularly rewarding reading, and I very much appreciated the reminders that a game can have too much theme in addition to having too little. However, the book’s best aspect, to me at least, is how Shipp encourages a wide engagement with art. This is most explicit in the section on research, but throughout the book she encourages readers to watch films, listen to podcasts, read books, and play other games. Familiarity with a wide variety of cultural material is essential to developing good themes and avoiding falling into boring tropes that have been used many times before.
As someone with no published game designs, and no hobby-style designs in the works, I can only provide so much commentary on how well the book works as a how-to guide for designing thematic games. I certainly found the arguments engaging and I found myself periodically spacing out and losing my place on the page because I was thinking about game design – which is usually a good sign, at least for this book’s subject matter anyway. It helps that Shipp herself is a published game designer and does an effective job at using her own designs to make several of her points, so the advice feels like it comes from a place of experience and not speculation.
I have one or two minor nit-picks. Many current hobby board games are mentioned throughout the book, but often how they work is explained only in a cursory fashion. For readers who are already familiar with modern hobby games this will pose no real barrier to understanding, but I could see those from outside the hobby finding it hard to follow in places. Some of the end notes encourage readers to look up Let’s Plays of the games, or try them for themselves, and there are certainly ways for people to get over this hurdle, but I would maintain that it is still a (small) hurdle. Detailed breakdowns of each games’ rules would likely have bloated the book to an unreadable size, but a little more detail would have helped. In particular, many games are simply described using their core mechanic, e.g. X is a deck-building game or drafting game, without defining the mechanism. Even if just a one or two sentence endnote, a little more detail would have been welcome.
I would also have preferred it if the author made more of an effort to mention games’ designers, especially in the section at the end of each chapter that lists the games mentioned in the chapter. It is simply a list of game titles, but I would have expected it to include the designers at a minimum and possibly also publishers, artists, and years first published, for a more complete ludography.
Overall, Thematic Integration in Board Game Design is a great book. There is plenty here to spur the imagination of a current or potential game designer and even as someone who probably won’t work in the space this book focuses on (it’s entirely hobby game focused, very little discussion of wargames or TTRPGs, for example) I still found a lot to benefit from here. It’s a great start to CRC’s new series on tabletop game design. Here’s hoping the trend continues with future volumes.