Part 2

A board game design process: Synthesizing information

Published in

UX Collective

4 min readMay 10, 2020

A mural of references, with pictures, game components and physical products.

After researching our subject, after gathering lots and lots of information both around the theme and other games and their mechanics, after talking with players (if appropriate) we now have lots of data, but data alone is worthless. We need to make sense of it. Synthesis is the process of taking all that data and creating knowledge out of it.

Hopefully you’ve been classifying the data while you were collecting it, otherwise sorting all that information is going to be the first task.

Categorizing

Each game will require its own type of sorting according to what you’re looking to achieve or understand. Some basic categories would be:

Aesthetics

This is how the game should look, what kind of art would be appropriate, how the genre and theme usually looks like and what we would like to achieve. This can be sorted by style, artist, origin (you can put together concept art, stills and props from a movie for example) or you can create a moodboard by gathering everything you think represents your vision for how the game should look.

A collection of references from movies, products, games and art. — *This is part of Battlecruisers’ moodboard. You can see other game components, concept art, movie stills, UI elements and even some physical products.*

Thematic elements

What elements define the theme and genre. Not only looks but also situations, characters, emotions and actions. Everything that defines the theme, even if it’s not going to be featured in the game, like music or smells.

For Battlecuirsers I had many different lists. For example one of those was of famous phrases uttered in sci-fi like “Make it so”, “I’m getting my men” or even terms like “jaunting” or “brace for impact”. I also listed key technologies like shields, communications, torpedoes and different types of faster than light travel. By grouping those things together I could find themes and patterns that allowed me to think about what was key for the game and the mechanics.

Mechanics

As mentioned in the research article, collecting mechanics in the form of rulesets or images or even notes. Looking at how other games translated different actions into mechanics is always useful. This can be sorted by looking at types of actions (like movement or attack) or even by type of game, so it can be possible to sort mechanics from simulation to absolute abstraction.

For my game I looked at lots of wargames and stuff with incredibly complex and complete rulesets for everything you could imagine but I also looked at some simple card games with straightforward rules and interactions. It’s important to not only look at games in the same genre or theme. I looked at pirate, racing and card only games. Understanding how other people solved different interactions can inspire your own ideas.

A graphic showing the effect of different weapons on a schematic of a spaceship subsystems. An example of a complicated rule. — *Renegade Legion Leviathan’s internal damage model*

Components

Knowing what’s been done and what could be done is important to understand the possibilities and how some mechanics are actually implemented can be the spark that ignites a creative drive. There’s usually talk about mechanics or theme driven design, but components are also an important part of game design and a possible starting point too.

Cards, spaceship models, tokens, dice and everything that comes in the box of the game Star Wars Armada. — *Star Wars Armada components ©Fantasy Flight Games & Lucasfilms ltd.*

Synthesis

By grouping stuff together we get to understand their characteristics, how they are defined and their relationships with one another. An interesting exercise is to go one step further and create maps of how things work. For example a narrative arc of a space battle can be mapped in order to understand how it develops. It can then be contrasted with a map of a historical naval battle to understand the differences. The purpose here is to increase our understanding of the subject and how to represent it.

One caveat of this process is that while it’s presented linearly it’s actually a jumbled mess. Synthesis might lead to more questions that could lead to the need for more research. During research, the information found might spur design ideas and you’ll find yourself going back and forth through the process. A clear example of this is what I mentioned during the research article about detecting this pattern of ‘attack-defense-movement’ core of actions. That realization came from a synthesis process.

The most important warning I have at this point is to avoid starting the design too early. If you’re on the research and synthesis part of the process, game design ideas will flow. That’s great and to be expected, but my recommendation is not to jump into a design spree but rather to write this ideas down and put them away for now, at least until the idea and design principles behind the game are clearly defined, which is going to be the subject of the next article.