Examples of Board Games with Design Mistakes You Should Avoid (and suggestions to fix them)

[Music] welcome to board game casual design Diaries a series that focuses on content for aspiring board game designers and things I'm working on as an aspiring designer myself in today's video I wanted to show you some examples of popular games good games that have some pretty big design issues specifically graphic design issues that you should really try your best to avoid in your own designs and I'll give you some suggestions on how I personally would recommend fixing them I recently posted a video reviewing and ranking four new games that I played for the first time a few weekends ago and while all of them are great games two of them really surprised me with some poor design choices so what I want to highlight here is the importance of having intuitive consistent and distinct iconography in your game the first example is in the game Earth here's an excerpt from my review the bigger problem is with the graphic design which led to a lot of confusion like overusing the same icon to mean different things for example there are cards that can place sprouts and they're represented by a leaf icon in an outline of where the Sprout tokens can be placed there are also cards with powers that say you can turn in some number of Leaf icons to get something else however in this case the leaf icons don't mean turning in Sprouts trading in Sprouts are represented by a cube icon with no leaf and in this case the leaf icon is actually referring to your compost cards which also have a leaf on them furthermore the same Leaf icon is used to represent points so the bonus on this card for example isn't referring to three compost cards nor three sprouts and is instead saying three points for every two cards not to be confused with those cards that are worth three points as per the leaf symbol in the upper left corner this design Choice makes no sense to me and more than halfway through the game we were trading in Sprouts until we realized that it actually meant something else why you wouldn't use distinct icons between sprouts and compost and iory points makes no sense to me or at least keep the Sprout icons consistent by using a leaf in a square and put a leaf in a card shape when referring to the cards or or something like that so there's two big problems here the first big no no is that they are using two different icons to refer to the same thing Sprouts or the Sprout locations on a card are represented by a leaf icon in a box but in the tradeability section of the card Sprouts are referred to with a totally different icon this 3D cube you can see how this adds unnecessary cognitive load and confusion ideally you want your game to be intuitive at a glance so as an example take a look at how much more understandable this would be if the same Leaf in a box icon were used in both places of the card when referring ref ing to Sprouts or alternatively using the same Cube icon in both spots to me it honestly feels as if somewhere during the development of this game they changed the icon at some point but forgot to change it everywhere the second issue is that they're overusing the same icon to mean different things throughout the game the exact same Leaf icon is used to represent Sprouts compost cards victory points and more and this only compounds the first issue for example if you were to look at this card on its own you'd immediately into it okay I see I can plant sprouts in these places here and then later I can spend one Sprout to get three soil but you'd be wrong because while this icon represents Sprouts this Leaf icon actually refers to spending compost cards now I understand the fear of having too many icons for the user to keep track of and it's certainly important to have cohesive iconography that works well together and works well with the theme but the way Earth is reusing the same icon is just confusing if I were to suggest some thematic design here I'd say okay the leaf icon is the victory Point icon cool let's go with that for compost then maybe we use a wilted leaf on its side or even a pile of leaves on the ground because compost is typically made from Le leaves that fall on the ground and then for the Sprouts maybe a little bud icon or some Blades of grass right little buds grow into plants with bigger leaves and those leaves eventually fall to the ground I feel like there are easy ways to have more understandable iconography while keeping the game on theme all right the second example of a game with an issue I would recommend avoiding is the design of the food tokens in Mosaic here's another exert from review there are also two types of food tokens in the game one is wheat and one is fish they both just represent food but the wheat tokens represent one food and the fish tokens represent five food but there's no numbers on the tokens so you just have to know that fish equals five on top of that the port token is of a fish that says plus three but you only get plus three food production not three Fish Production which would be 15 food I I don't understand the decision here because it's just confusing now again I get the intention here and I can follow the train of thought wheat well that's grown on land and if you're able to build a port city now you have access to more food because you can catch fish so I understand why they wanted to have two different tokens but even going with a theme I sort of assume that harvesting grain can feed a lot more people than a single fish so I still wouldn't say it's obvious that the fish is worth more than the wheat one simple fix would be having numbers on the wheat and fish tokens so that you can see that the wheat is worth one and the fish is worth five however the port token is still a problem because three fish could still be confused for 15 food so an even better suggestion in my mind would be to follow suit with these Stone tokens in the game visually the one token has a picture of one stone and the five token has a picture of five Stones so the food tokens then could have five fish on the five food token and this way there'd be a lot less confusion of a port token that said plus three it really surprises me that these issues made it all the way into production and weren't caught in play testing maybe these were changes that came in at the last minute or maybe these games were so big that either the designers or even the play testers were more focused on bigger issues with the game whatever the reason both of these felt a bit careless and rushed more importantly they were things that added unnecessary player confusion that could have easily been avoided but unfortunately took away from the overall experience of the game itself so I hope this helps with things to watch out for in your own designs having clear distinct iconography and keeping that iconography consistent throughout your game is so important it may seem like a small thing to think well the user can just learn the difference and then remember them but why add an extra burden on the user if you can avoid it it'll only help make your game more well-received the more intuitive it is if you're interested in hearing more detailed thoughts about either of these games and how they rank up against two other games I played that weekend be sure to check that video out on the channel thanks for watching design Diaries thanks for the likes and the subscribes and be sure to subscribe if you haven't already happy designing happy play testing and I'll see you next time here on board game casual

Channel: Board Game Casual

Views: 1,769

Keywords: board game, boardgame, board game casual, design diaries, diary, how to make a board game, how to, design mistakes, graphic design, design tips, avoid, examples, issues, earth, mosaic, a story of civilization, problems, usability, aspiring, game design, game designer

Id: pUzu2S9IsjQ

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024