Glad to see you’re still with us for our series of articles on dusting the shibboleth cobweb that is modern board gaming jargon. I’m trying to keep the list in as roughly an alphabetical order as I can to make it easy to find your least-favourite confusing term. This is part 7, so I’ve provided links to all nine parts below.
Print ‘n Play (PnP)
Not all games need to be (or even can be) acquired through regular distribution channels such as your FLGS (q.v.). Indeed, board gaming doesn’t even need to be the kind of expense that hits your wallet hard, if you don’t mind a little bit more legwork on your part. Welcome to the vast world of Print ‘n Play games, where you can fill your shelves with titles for the cost of the paper and a trip down to the print shop. Most of these games don’t need much in the way of extra components and were designed to be able to be easily set up at home without more than perhaps a pencil and some dice. That said, if you find yourself in possession of more advanced equipment such as a 3D printer, you can definitely create more deluxe versions of these games.
Some PnP games gain so much popularity that they get snapped up by a large publisher (q.v.) and manage to reach a wider audience that way. Under Falling Skies by Tomáš Uhlíř, a board game take on the classic video game Invaders, was initially released as a PnP game. Czech Games Edition reached a deal with Mr Uhlíř to expand the game’s campaign and released a larger, fancy version.
If you need a gateway to this aspect of board gaming, I can heartily suggest pnparcade.com as the place to go. Many of the games you will find are free, and some will ask you to support their development with a nominal amount of money. Good luck, and may there be mercy on your wallet and printer.
Point salad
Not to be confused with the game of the same name. When players talk about a game being a point salad, they mean that there are many multiples of ways to score points every round (q.v. time in board games) and that scoring is not a simple matter. Sometimes just taking a single action can score points that cascade down: then you find yourself frantically calculating points and moving your scoring marker forward and hoping you remembered to score points for item Z, and not just items A through Y, and you’re left wondering if you added the numbers correctly in your head. Points-heavy board games have a delightful side effect in phenomenally improving one’s arithmetic skills.
The original term for point salad was a “victory point salad buffet”, meaning that players could pick and choose the methods they like to obtain points and not limit themselves to a single dish (i.e. a single strategy [q.v.]). However, the hourglass of time turns, and language changes as it dribbles through the narrow waist of the glass; so too has the meaning of “point salad” evolved, and often it now means not just a wide strategic field, but also a confusing mess of points, and can be taken to be a point of delight as much as a point of derision.
The supreme overlord of the point salad genre is Stefan Feld, and the game that most aptly embodies this is The Castles of Burgundy. It’s amazing what you can do with just two dice on your turn and how many bundles of points you can obtain in a single action.
If we look further afield for examples, though, we can take a look at Russian Railroads, a worker-placement game (q.v.) that tasks players with building railroads on their own player boards, and where every step of the process can amass a veritable smorgasbord of points. Heaven for some is hell for others; interpret as you wish.
Point-to-point movement
When players need to move their tokens from one area to another along a line or a series of lines, that’s a point-to-point movement mechanic. Players can’t follow standard movement and simply place their tokens or meeples (q.v.) wherever they wish: they must follow the line. This makes getting around the board a question of strategy (q.v.).
One of our favourite examples of a game that uses point-to-point movement as a core mechanic is, of course, Pandemic by Matt Leacock. Players are limited in their movements on the board to the lines that connect cities, and it takes an extraordinary movement action to go elsewhere.
Polyomino
A polyomino, according to Wikipedia, “is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. It is a polyform whose cells are squares. It may be regarded as a finite subset of the regular square tiling.” In human English, they’re what we’d call “Tetris shapes”. For some reason, we tend to exclude actual dominoes from this category of games, even though they are absolutely polyominoes of the simplest type.
Games that use polyomino tiles tend to be puzzle-type games, because spatially arranging the tiles in a strategically pleasing way is what these games are all about. Some polyomino games, such as Blokus, are abstract (q.v.), and there’s no real reason or theme (q.v.) to the existence of the tiles. Others have a far more concrete theme, and designer Uwe Rosenberg has created several games that use polyominoes with differing degrees of game weight (q.v.). On the lighter end of things you have Patchwork, a beautiful two-player only game in which players use a rondel (q.v.) to create a quilt, selecting and buying polyomino patchwork pieces to place into their board and scoring points for buttons. At the other end, you have A Feast for Odin, a worker placement (q.v.) game in which players arrange the polyominoes on their boards to try to cover as many negatively scoring spaces as possible.
Pool builder
“Pool builder” is the catch-all term for games that include not only bag builder games (q.v.) and deck builder games (q.v.), but other games that aren’t quite either. One example of a pure pool builder that isn’t also a bag builder is Roll for the Galaxy by designers (q.v.) Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann. Roll for the Galaxy is a dice chucker (q.v.) game that involves a heavy bit of engine building (q.v.) and a clever twist on action selection (q.v.).
Programming
Much like programming a DVR device to record your favourite soapies every weekday at 5pm, a game that involves a programming mechanic enables players to specify a set of actions that must occur on the board during an “execute program” phase (q.v. time in board games). These action instructions could be as simple as “move forward”, “interact”, or “attack”. Usually, each player performs their programming in secret, because the unpredictability of the programming outcomes makes the game fun.
Colt Express by Christophe Raimbault is a western-themed train robbery game that uses action programming as its core mechanic. Players select and play two to five cards every round to determine what they want their character to do. The game with its cardboard 3D train looks amazing on the table.
Closer to actual computers we have Tiny Epic Mechs by Scott Almes, in which players indirectly control mechs on a battleground by programming their actions via a set of cards.
Publisher
A game publisher is a large company, much like a book or videogame publisher, that handles the production and distribution of board games once a designer has created a working, tested prototype of a game. Much like what’s happened in the videogame world, there has been a lot of competition and consolidation in the market, and the politics of board game publication and manufacturing are far outside the scope of this article.
One of the largest publishers is French company Asmodee, which can be considered the boardgame world analog to EA in the video game world. Asmodee has under its umbrella a huge number of smaller award-winning studios such as Z-Man Games (Pandemic, A Feast for Odin), Fantasy Flight Games (Mansions of Madness or just about any other Cthulhu-themed game you can find, as well as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones properties), Plan B Games (Azul, Century: Spice Road), Lookout Games (Patchwork, Caverna: The Cave Farmers), and Days of Wonder (Ticket to Ride) among many, many other studios.
Other, non-Asmodee publishers include Czech Games Edition (usually abbreviated to CGE; known for Galaxy Trucker, Codenames, and other games designed by Vlaada Chvatil) and Hasbro (which is famous for Monopoly, Clue, and The Game of Life, among others).
Push your luck
Some games rely almost entirely upon luck, and such games can leave players feeling a sense of a lack of any agency. One of the best ways to mitigate this is to put some of the decision in players’ hands, and this is where push your luck games come in. Normally in dice games, a player rolls a die and then accepts the first outcome. In a push your luck game, by contrast, players are allowed a particular number of rolls—say three, for example—and they can stop whenever they want to within that limit or accept the outcome of the final roll. (Alternatively, in a game like Zombie Dice, players can keep rolling as long as they like, but with ever increasing odds of losing any progress they made during that turn. –Ed.)
Not all push your luck games involve dice; examples exist of pool builder (q.v.) games with a heavy push your luck element. The Quacks of Quedlinburg, designed by Wolfgang Warsch, is one such game with a bag builder (q.v) mechanic. In this game, players must pull numbered tokens from their bags and place them on their player boards, which thematically (q.v.) represents players putting ingredients into the potion they are brewing. The white tokens in this game are explosive, and if players draw out enough white tokens to total a value of seven, they must stop drawing because thematically, the potion has exploded.
Quarterbacking
See Alphagaming.
Race
A group of people with a shared given ethnic or genetic identity is termed a race. In most fantasy settings, when talking about humanoid player characters, “race” is synonymous with “species”.
Race games
Race games describe a mechanic where players attempt to be first to attain a particular goal. Sometimes the game is a traditional type of race that takes place on a track, but this may not always be the case.
Scythe by Jamie Stegmeyer is an example of the latter, and it’s a particularly sneaky example too. The game looks and feels like an area control (q.v.) or similar dudes on a map (q.v.) style game, and the main mechanic is action selection (q.v.). When you get right down to it, however, the game is a race to earn six stars, and the first player to cross that line ends the game immediately, potentially leaving the remaining players at a severe disadvantage in the points departments.
Race for the Galaxy (and similarly, its sibling Roll for the Galaxy) is a tableau building (q.v.) card game that tells you quite literally in the name what it’s about—the game is a race to a specified number of cards.
In the category of race games that happen on a track, you could easily look to Camel Up as a dice-driven betting game version of this. Another is Long Shot: The Dice Game, another betting-style race game that uses roll-and-write (q.v.) mechanics to drive its core gameplay. In neither game do players control any one racing participant, but rather place bets on which animal will win. Flamme Rouge, by contrast, is a programming (q.v.) game based on a cycle tour where players control cyclists racing on a modular track that players set up before the game begins.
Real time
Most games are turn-based (q.v. time in board games), but some games add a clock or timer to the game, ensuring that events take place in real time. This adds an extra element of stress to force players to perform quickly while under the pressure of time. Some timers are simply the duration of the turn, some time the entire game, and there are some variable ones in between that set timers on specific actions or mechanics.
Most party games (q.v.) use timers to keep the action short, to the point, and moving along quickly enough so that the players who are not on-turn don’t get overly bored (q.v. turn under time in board games). This is, of course, the low-hanging fruit of adding real-time pressure to games. Some weightier (q.v.) board games have managed to incorporate timers in fantastically creative ways. Kitchen Rush by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Dávid Turczi attempts to emulate a busy restaurant kitchen by having players interact with hourglass timers in worker placement (q.v.) spaces. Space Alert, designed by the lord of diverse games, Vlaada Chvátil, uses an audio CD as the timer for the entire game, and players have to manage and respond to the crisis according to the pre-recorded events as they play on the CD. Captain Sonar is an almost unique experience among board games and should really only be played at the full count of eight players. Two teams of four players go head to head as members of two submarines, each player in an individual role. Both teams are attempting to sink the other, and in addition to listening to and responding to orders from their own side, they must listen to and respond to what’s happening on the other team. It’s glorious chaos of the best kind, and the best example of its ilk.
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