Would you play an open world board game?

But I wonder about the "open" world part. Is everyone talking about a possible "infinite" expansion? Or would it be a "random" world, each time it is played?

I don't want to sound like a downer, but as much as I do like variety and a lot of game modes, having a board or card game that's "open world" just lends itself to a complexity that would take too many moving parts to achieve.

I mean a game like Thunderstone or Marvel Legendary are very setup-intensive games that only focus on one aspect.

If you have a game that tries to do everything, you'll end up having to make mechanics that are shallow at best. If you're planning on doing something that's Zelda-esque, you'll have to create separate games just for all the smaller aspects of this endeavor.

I love board games because I know I'll be committing a certain amount of time to it and I'll be pretty much done. An open world, while brilliantly executed in the newest Zelda, just can't (or is very difficult) translate as a board/card game unless you have modules that expand every aspect of the game...then it gets overcomplicated with modules no matter how simple the gameplay is. You'd have to design everything up front...which was mentioned at the start.

I dunno, it just doesn't seem like a great idea and energies could be spent on smaller, more tighter games, imo.

Gabe,

I come at this question from a not-too-distinct angle. As a 35+ year role player, I have had absolutely no interest in card or board games (Thunderstone, Descent, Gloomhaven) which try to capture an RPG"s essence and for me, simply dilutes it to a series of cards which determine the flow of the game.

The genre, which includes the 1-player community's #1 game, Mage Knight, must clearly have a following, as evidenced by Gloomhaven's and Seafall's success on KS. It's just not one that endears me. Give me a table of 3-5 players and a few hours to weave a tale, enjoy the encounters as they occur, and allow the player's characters to advance in skill and abilities.

Anyway, just some thoughts...well before my first cup of coffee.

Cheers,
Joe

I've been enjoying this discussion and had another thought to add, partly inspired by professor Joe's post above. I think the concept up for discussion is a game that walks the line between a single session thematic board game and a multi-session RPG.

Maybe the key to that lies in the objective of the game as much as in the mechanics. If the main objectives are character building and quests, it's going to feel like a scaled down RPG. If it's co-op, that also adds to the RPG feel.

I'm just thinking out loud I guess, but what would the ultimate objective of the game be? Completing a story? Defeating a boss? Finding or reclaiming some talisman? Or something altogether different? Because those are all very "RPG", and it occurred to me that a different type of replayable objective, such as survival (7th continent) or race against Time might provide a less than RPG-ish feel...?

So the thing I'm wondering is, could that sort of game objective meld with an open world in a way that creates an in-between genre? Or would it still just feel like a scaled down RPG?

Gabe,

Yes, I absolutely agree that most, if not all board and card games, even the currently, wildly-successful City of Kings by our own Frank West has combat and leveling at its core, but seems to ratchet-up the story aspect to make it intriguing. I, myself, purchased and have played Mage Knight (I couldn't resist when the price plummeted to $54 during the Christmas season) which really scratches the RPG-ish itch for me...given both the time and energy I want to expend on a game of that nature., To your inquiry however, what makes an RPG compelling? For me, it's the ability to do almost anything, coupled with the social interaction I have with fellow characters (as a player) or as the DM.

Cheers,
Joe

I think it's great that there have been some skeptical comments in this discussion - in fact I think those comments are vital here. If everyone just said "sounds great, go for it", we would be missing out on something important - the identification of the major obstacles that would cause this kind of a project to fail.

There have been several examples of games that have "come close" to achieving the type of open world adventure here, but perhaps they failed or fell short precisely because they didn't identify enough of the obstacles that have been mentioned so far here.

But now you've got a great descriptive list of the various pitfalls to avoid in this kind of a project!

As a side note, this has spawned an interesting multiplayer co-op game idea in my head, so I'll start a thread on that once it's had some time to develop a bit more.

Would it be kinda like "Betrayal at House on the Hill"? Or some more open-ended, fancier type of storytelling??? That game already has an "exploration" mechanic and it also features custom storytelling for Phase #2 of the game.

But it could be functionally something similar but more elaborate, no?

What about going with a mix of something in between?

Instead of classes, maybe it could be set characters but they can be developed in many different ways? You could get experience and leveling, but it could be more limited.
And the rest of it could be gathering items that improve your character, and maybe some forms of training could also be available to improve them to teach them new abilities. Which could work as items, represented by a card.

But the base character could have a few characteristics and limitations.
If there is an elf, she could be unable to use the heaviest weapons and armor for example and could maybe carry less, but could move faster on foot or have other benefits.
She could still be a warrior, mage, thief or whatever kinds of skills she persues, but all options would reflect her race and character.
For example her religion could be some nature god. If she'd be a priest, she would be a priest of that god.

And maybe the dwarf could have less magic potential, which could render spells of the highest level unavailable to them but they could get bonuses in mountains or such.
He could still be improved in many ways.

This approach might also make it a little more personal, and could allow characters to be given a background, setting up the beginning of their adventures but they can be taken in many directions.

Possibly they could all have maybe three possible ultimate goals to fulfill which ends the game, and the player can pick one of them.
That could be stuff like slaying the most powerfull dragon, become king or queen by their own hand, obtain ultimate power through a specific artefact, make the land safe, etc.

A nice possibility to this more character driven approach could also be to have maybe multible minifigures available for each character to represent their flexibility.
Like one could show them in robes, one in light armor and one in heavy armor. But stuff like that could be good for stretch goals and expansions of course.

To officially answer the OP... Yes, I would play such a game.

So, here is my mostly unedited 2+ cents... I hope it all make sense in some way.

Some of the core ideas behind open world design in my mind are:

• Player freedom from "script" but not the absence of story
• Player meaningful choices/consequences (many paths)
• Player tools with many functions
• Functional interaction with the game world and local environment
• Near limitless combinations

Some of the core challenges to making a board game version in my mind are:

• Making it approachable by non-hardcore gamers
• Reducing record keeping to simple but meaningful things
• Keeping user interface and iconography simple and intuitive
• Maintaining a good level of replayability
• Breaking out of the board game mindset

In video games "the game" itself can teach you the limits of the game world through trial and error. A player can just try something and the game answers back yes or no. This is so intuitive that most people do not realize that in just the first 5-10 min of playing such an open world game they have learned enough game rules to fill up a board game rulebook twice over.

Because of this, the board game mindset is much different and many people will not play games that have complex or long rulebooks until someone they know can walk them through how to play.

For any such open world game, a video series on "How to Play" would be vital to reaching a larger audience.

Part of the board game mindset is that the game does not "react" dynamically to player randomness. This is not to say that board games "can't ever" just that in the vast majority of cases it can't.

As you and Tom were talking in your last podcast, one answer to some of these issues might be a companion app that players can use to get that sort of feedback.

One idea is to give the players a diverse enough set of action, skills, and tools that directly correspond to everything else in the game in more than one way. This will make free action selection easier for players to understand at a glance. This is where a robust user interface and iconography play a huge role.

This set of player actions needs to be robust enough to cover the things it is used for in the game in an intuitive and meaningful way while at the same time being a short enough list so it is not a burden to the players and also generic enough to fit many things you might add at a later time for expansion content.

In some ways, the heavy lifting for such a list has already been mostly done by the many video games and board games that have come before. Harnessing that work is not an easy task, but I see it as something that can be done.

Words like "interact" as an action type is underutilized in board games but is used extensively in video games. Having an icon for such an action choice and the text/rules for that item on the card or board space where the players will encounter it is enough. On the flip side of that design choice is, of course, the hundreds of hours needed to develop the backend of the interactions with each of the places you put that icon.

Giving the actions a two part cost can make building diversity into such generic actions more user-friendly to the players. A standard "interact" action might cost the player a set number of "stamina" or "action points" but having the icon for "interaction" also bear the second half of the cost can give you a wide range of interaction costs based on a pre-determined "difficulty" of that individual interaction. This might be a "hand" icon with a number on it +/- the normal cost to "interact".

• Interact [4 Stamina]
• Large chest [Hand +2]
• The unlocked door [Hand -3]

The major part of making this sort of game function well is on the shoulders of the designer(s). All of the "work" of figuring out the what can happen, how action/reaction will work, and what the players need to know to run the game intuitively needs to be pre-crafted. If you place any of that sort of work on the players the jig's up, and you might as well have a Dungeon Master do the work.

Crafting many stories from the same game world should not be an overwhelming task. There are many ways to craft new stories from a common set of locations the way you have described things. Giving the locations flavor text that is partially generic and letting a scenario book fill in the finer details can drastically change the game world from one scenario to the next. This can also be done with other components such as monsters/enemies/NPC. The card for the monsters can list costs/powers and the scenario book can name the one you are fighting now and even give it/them altered stats or abilities for this encounter. Having a set of generic looking NPC face tokens that have no other information to them and giving the additional information/stats in the form of an expansion card or scenario book entry should work wonders for replayability.

Keep in mind that in an open world you can still set boundaries and rules. In Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and similar games, players "can" do "anything"... but the game still holds the consequences for that action and many people overlook this because the consequences make sense within the theme of the game world.

In a board game form, this would not need to be any different. Basically, from a programming or design sense this type of ruleset called "error checking". In a board game version of an open world game knowing and understanding the limits of the format should point you to the places where you need to insert this type of error handling ruleset. These rules only need to make thematic sense to the gameworld to be effective. The hard part is each such ruleset must be learned by the players before or during play. Learning before playing is hard and during play can be frustrating or get missed.

Building rulesets and error handling into the way the components work might be one way to handle such things. This might require several versions and a lot testing to find the right combination.

In Oblivion, one way this error checking/handling was used was in the form of town guard that would show up and ruin your day if you did something that the developers did not want you as a player to be able to do (like kill NPCs).

So for the "what if a player wants to do X thing" but I don't have time do design something for that thing... insert X error handling event ruleset.

If a player wants to attack and kill an NPC you have put in the world to further the story and you don't really want such a thing to happen. Instead of just saying that players "can't" do such a thing (the normal way board games handle such things), you just need to make a way for said action to have an outcome that players get looped into whenever they take those types of actions. This might be as easy as adding a rule about how violence in town does not go unnoticed and so players can't do such things or as complex as adding an adventure mode where the player is now running from the law for an in-game number of turns... then a new NPC icon tile replaces the function of the one that was "killed".

Error checking is designed around the idea that if anything falls outside of a set normal range of input, then that thing gets sent to a place where it can't do any damage to the program as it runs. I am not saying that making such a system would be easy, but it might work well if done the right way.

You could have an "unnecessary" system for how long a player can be underwater before drowning (in turns or action points used) and hide it in with swimming skill tests. This means they "can" try to swim down to the bottom of the ocean if they want... they will just die or pass out before they succeed. It also means in some future scenario book you can have a pond or lake that was on the game board just for looks in the core game now hold a new challenge. Or the expansion might have equipment for going down off the coast to explore a shipwreck... potion of water breathing or a diving suit.

Back on the idea of open-world player actions. If players have the raw skills/tools they need that can then be matched to the things they will encounter in the world, adding more content becomes much easier.

One player might have a lockpicking skill or might gain lockpicking equipment that can be found/bought. This that might have a cost to use and you can have many locks in the game that have the second half of a cost or there might be some sort of icon matching system. I have the "ability" and "master lockpick" icons between my character and equipment cards that match the icons on that locked chest we found... if I don't have the right icons yet the chest can't be opened yet.

The "I have the same icons, so I can do or try to do X thing" method might work for many things in such an open-world game. In expanded content, the same icons are just arranged in different combinations for the new items/challenges. Also, having more than one way to match the icons would make things more intuitive to the player if done the right way. Shape/Color/Symbol

I might have three red squares with an arm inside for strength on my character card and get a fourth from a skill or ability that has a cooldown. so once every four turns I have 4 strength and the rest of the time I have 3 strength. If I get tired I might lose 1 strength until I rest. The challenge in the game might have such icons located on them to show what is needed to complete them. So until players can muster 4 strength and 3 sword Icons they can't kill the monster guarding the door to the tomb. In this way adding new monsters later is just a matter of a new combination of the same icons that the players have had access to from the beginning.

Getting the right number and combination of icons in-game might be as hard or as easy as you want to make it for the players.

Developing a good core set of icons for what you want players to be able to do and for what you want to be able to add to the system later is the real trick. (something I am still working on wink)

Having players run into things they can't do yet is a vital part of the exploration side of an open world game... a cliff that can't be climbed until we have the right climbing skill or the grappling hook. This gates the player's ability to move past some things in the game until they are ready for them in a less obstructive way. The fact that there are gated puzzles to be solved in the exploration of the game world also makes for the ability of the designer to later add scenario based gates to the same world we played last time that change where we can go this time until the players clear the gate requirements.

These are all things that can be done with mostly just a few icons and some easy rules for how those icons are used. Developing the common list of tools/skills that are used to complete challenges is vital.

Tool cards might also have a token for durability the way some skill cards in Gloomhaven have small round tokens that track how many turns that skill is active. But in this open world sense finding the lockpicks might only let you open 4 locks before you need to find/buy more. In a simpler tracking method, the edges of the card might have the number of time the item can be used and the player just turns the whole card to show how many are left (as in 7th continent).

That is about all the crazy brainstorming I can muster for now. I love the idea of an open world board game and I am trying to work out some of these same issues for a game I am making called "Crash Landing". More info to follow on that in the future.

I hope something in this rant is useful to you in some way.

It sounds like you already have a good grasp of how you want these types of things to work in your open-world game, and based on what you have said so far in this thread, I think you will do well in making it.

It also sounds like you have moved past the "I have an idea for a game" and have begun actively testing the flow of a set of mechanics?

If this is the case I would love to hear more about the mechanics and systems you are testing for this open world idea.

Sorry for the Wall of Text...

@BHfuturist

Here in the last few days I have come to agree that weapons would be hard to do with a standard durability mechanic. However, it occurred to me that a two state weapon or piece of equipment might be just what the doctor ordered for this sort of game. This is a normal state and a degraded state. Both states keep the item in use as long as the player wants to use it but gives the ability for it to have better stats after being repaired(or first crafted), so a new vs. used sword. Not having the item ever "break" but just degrade "one step" (flip the card or have a top/bottom of the front side and turn 180). Some items the player could "repair" themselves given the right cost (time/resource) and others would need to be taken to someone who had the "skill" to "hone" the item back to peek status. Also rather than tracking this turn-by-turn, it might only happen at the end of an adventure or other set duration in the game.

This is still just something I am rolling around in my head but this would not increase the number of items and weapons in the game and players would not be searching for new items all the time. This same mechanic could also be use for other two state items like torches (lit/unlit). I light the torch, then it goes out after this use of the item, but I can re-light (refresh the ability to use the torch) again if I have some cloth/oil or just X amount of time/stamina.

I feel like this just happened:

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: You have to tell me about that sometime.

Shepherd Book: [pause] No, I don't.

Only I am Mal and Gabe is Book, LOL

@BHFuturist

P.S. Just kidding about the last part ;)