A Few More Books

It has been quite a while since I've written anything about game design books, but I have been reading a few recently, so figured now would be as good a time as any. There seems to have been a bit of a shift in the last couple of years. While most of the books I had seen previously about board game design were pretty high-level, general stuff (starting with "what is a game") and many of them are aimed at a readership who are primarily interested in video games, I'm seeing many more books that are more tightly focused on areas within the field and more explicitly about board games, and the three books I'm talking about here fit that bill. A lot of the credit for that can probably go to Geoff Engelstein, who is working with CRC Press to build a line of tabletop game design texts, two of which I'm discussing here. These books are pricey, but good stuff. My third book here is from Adam in Wales, whose releases also zoom in on aspects of game design and are far more affordable, but no less valuable.

Three good books, all for different reasons.

Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by Sarah Shipp takes us from some basic definitions and discussions relating to themes, settings, game mechanisms, etc., and then gets into how game structures and mechanisms can be used to get players to engage more with the theme of a game, offering various tools to achieve these ends with plenty of examples and exercises, before finishing off with some good practical game design advice. Of these three books, this is the one that felt to me the most like a study text for a course on board game design, and I hope it is used that way. I found it an interesting and engaging read, and had me thinking more about player avatars within games, amongst other things.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland comes from the same range as the first book, but could hardly be more different. It reads more like a very personal essay, full of examples taken from Amabel's own life as a trans woman alongside plenty of examples from her own work as well as plenty of other designers and from other creative forms. The subject matter is also a really interesting contrast to Thematic Integration. Where Sarah spent a lot of time looking at ways to get players to identify with and immerse themselves in the theme and setting of a game, Amabel spends time exploring the opposite: detaching players from the theme in order to explore actions and systems (often systems of oppression) that might be deplorable to us. Amabel's approach to game design is different to what most texts encourage, so this is a great place to look if you want a fresh perspective.

Adam in Wales: Playtesting by Adam Porter is a spin-off from Adam's YouTube channel, and is very much of the tone adopted by his videos: no-nonsense, detailed, and friendly. This book starts off with some general advice about the playtesting process, before settling in to the main part of the book, which is a list of a hundred questions you might ask players after they have tested your game prototype. Each question comes with discussion about why and when you might ask it, what you might hope to learn from the answers, and what some answers might tell you, as well as some alternate questions that are looking for similar information. Of the three books here, this is probably the one that is likely to be most immediately useful, and it's structured in such a way that you can just flick to a page and get some actionable advice - or at least food for thought. I know I am not great at grilling playtesters for information, so I'm sure I'll be going back to this for inspiration.

So I'd recommend all of these, but you'll have to figure out if they are for you. Give them a look though.