Nice article on story arc and good summaries of the two games, both of which I have yet to try.

It’s interesting, though, that League of Six is one of my group’s favorites from Essen this year, although it, too, has been criticized for its lack of story arc (which is why I didn’t jump in when it was being played).  It just makes me wonder if there are exceptions to the rule, as there often are in game preferences (such as a player who loves theme suddenly being enamored with an abstract game, etc.)

I love Mission: Red Planet and I would be interested in an expansion that changed things around, but I wouldn’t want the game to be any longer.  We can just squeeze a game in on our lunch hour.

Great post and analysis of two games based on the story arc concept. I think it’s really interesting that even some abstract games like DVONN have a story arc of sorts that arises naturally from the mechanics; if you’ve played it you’ll know what I mean.

I think the reason some games are not deliberately created with a story arc is that a sense of narrative is simply not necessary for some gamers and designers. I have finally decided that games can be lumped into about three major categories, regardless of theme, mechanic, or length.

For me, it’s most useful to organize games by what I personally get out of them and how I think about them: as Stories, Puzzles, or simply as Entertaining Pastimes. For example, I play games like Fury of Dracula for the stories they create, whereas I play Blokus or Ingenius or Scrabble because I sometimes like the challenge of a good competitive puzzle. Games like Trivial Pursuit, Twister, Checkers, most Party games like Apples to Apples, all qualify as Entertaining Pastimes but aren’t ever going to be much more than that. The great thing is, they all have their place on my boardgame shelves.

I think as mechanics and features of both European and American games blend and merge in this current Golden Age of Cardboard, categories like “Story/Puzzle/Pastime” will become more useful than “Eurogame” and “Ameritrash,” simply because when we look for new games, we want to know things like whether it “has a story arc” or “has good replayability” or “has elegant mechanics.” We’re really asking if it’s a good puzzle or tells a good story, and whether we can consider it a good investment that won’t quickly wear out its welcome.

I’d like to hear more from you on the games you play and which ones have a good story arc, since that’s the category I’m most interested in.

I’m currently working on a game where I feel that the main thing missing is an arc, so lots of work to be done. Thanks for re insuring me that that is the main thing I should focus on when further developing my design.

Kris wrote: “I wish each player’s hand had a couple of cards that would have allowed more activity on Mars.">

Kris, you can explore this aspect of Mission in future games by playing these cards early, then picking them up again halfway through the game and using them again. I’ve taught the game a few times, and in their first game people tend to play most of their roles before refilling their hands; in later games, they have more of a plan, so they tend to refill earlier in order to play certain cards again.

J.M., I like your story/puzzle/pastime categories a lot. They’d make sense to people who aren’t immersed in games, and they tell you more about the games themselves than Euro- and Ameri- categories.

Great post!  I wasn’t familiar with the concept.  Here’s the original article you’re referring to.

I was especially pleased to see in your recent Gone Gaming post that you had read the Albion rules.  We did 23 revisions of the rules, and I wish I had read about story arcs earlier because it would have saved us a few revisions!  Without realizing why, over time we added more of an arc. 

Initially, players could claim high kingdoms at any time.  We added a restriction that they must claim three petty kingdoms first.  I did this to prevent the beginning of the game from becoming scripted, but it added a beginning to the story arc, where your invader is establishing a presence, conquering the natives and setting himself up in a position for a larger kingdom. 

Very late in the design process, we added the notion of the final kingdoms of England, Scotland and Wales, primarily to add some uncertainty about final scores.  But the result was that it provided a nice end to the story arc in keeping with the story line of establishing ever larger kingdoms.

Now that I’ve read your post I understand why this works as well at is does!

Best regards,

Jeffrey

I’m flattered to have affected your thinking about game design, Kris.  When I set out writing those articles, one of my goals was to help shape the language and framework that people use to describe games.  “Story Arc” seems to have been the one that stuck.

So now, maybe thanks to your encouragement, I’ll get off my fat ass and write a new article for the Journal of Boardgame Design.  I tend to work on these things during lunch time at work, and I’ve been too damned busy lately.  With so many months between articles, I fear that I’m losing my credibility.

The term story arc stays in my mind because it was already there before I got heavily into gaming.  For about five years I made my living reading scripts in Hollywood for movie companies. I’m not sure that first act, second, act,third act, and plot point are terms that will work as well in the gaming world as in the script world, but story arc works equally well in both.

Ahh.  I too made my (meager) living reading movie scripts for about five years.  Each of my original “Game Theory 101” articles, which describes an element which makes a game great, intentionally uses a parallel from story telling, whether it is story arc, characterization, conflict, or plot reversal.  However, only in the first article did I actually use the term from story development.  In one case, “nervous systems”, I borrowed a term from industrial operations.  You can imagine how well that one caught on.