It’s time for another one of our series of articles on delving into the swampy morass 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 8, so I’ve provided links to the complete series below.
Roll and write
Roll and write games are much like flip and fill games (q.v.) but instead of relying on a shuffled deck of cards for randomness, players roll dice and mark off spaces on their personal player sheets or player boards based on the roll. While there is somewhat more randomness in a roll and write game than a flip and fill, players can still calculate the odds somewhat.
One of the most popular roll and write games is Ganz Schön Clever by Wolfgang Warsch, where players roll dice, select one, and fill in the relevant spot on the player sheet. The game became popular enough to spawn three sequels (as of the writing of this entry), or four games in total based on the same mechanic.
Since the popularity of Ganz Schön Clever, many roll and write spin offs and implementations of existing games have been published, likely because it’s cheaper to produce this style of game than other, larger games with specialised components and chits.
Rondel
A rondel is a modified action selection (q.v.) or resource selection mechanic where all the available actions or resources exist on a circular track. For most rondel games, taking actions further away from the player token is more costly in some way. Not all rondels are round, either, and as long as the track loops back to the start, you can call it a rondel. Sometimes the order of actions on the rondel is fixed, but quite often it varies depending on the setup.
Many Euro games (q.v.) use rondels as their mechanic, including Trajan, The Palaces of Carrara, and Finca. Arguably, Great Western Trail uses a rondel that fills up with actions over time.
I have to mention one game that looks like it uses a rondel, but doesn’t really: Tzolk’in is a beautiful game with a rotating set of gears upon which players place workers, and then when the gear reaches the right action, the worker hops off. What eliminates Tzolk’in as a rondel game is that the action tracks don’t loop: if a player doesn’t take an action by the time the track end is reached, the player loses that action entirely.
Route building
Any game that tasks players with connecting two distant points on a game board is a route building game. What happens to that route is another matter, but it often scores points or enables the player to use it in some way.
Ticket to Ride by Alan R. Moon is one of the first games that comes to mind when thinking about route building games, as are Brass, designed by Martin Wallace, and other similar games that involve trains. Many games don’t have trains as a central theme (q.v.), however, and even simply rolling out an electricity network (Power Grid by Friedemann Friese) or a connection between planetary systems in space (Star Trek Catan by Klaus Teuber) will work.
Runaway leader
Suppose you’re playing a Generic Four Player Board Game, and one of the players is so far in the lead with regard to points that there is no possibility of any of the other players closing the gap whatsoever. What you have there is a runaway leader problem, and this is sometimes the result of a game that’s had insufficient testing before publication, especially if it happens over and over to the player going for a particular strategy (q.v.). Point salad games (q.v.) often have this problem due to the sheer number of points being awarded over and over in a positive feedback loop.
Some games incorporate this by design. For example Food Chain Magnate by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga was designed to be played at high skill levels, with little regard for those game groups with mixed levels of experience. The game is famous for being one you can potentially lose by playing badly in the first round since every action counts so much. Of course, you won’t know it until several rounds in, by which point it’s too late to go back, and there’s no mechanism in the game to enable players in last place to catch up to the leader.
Shelf of shame
Because board game purchases can sometimes get out of control fairly quickly if you have an available budget (“So many games, so little time!”), some gamers become collectors as more and more unopened and unplayed games amass on their shelves. Some people prefer to have an entirely separate shelf for these games to enable them to know very quickly which games need to be unpacked and played. This is affectionately called the shelf of shame. Whether this is a problem or not is beyond the scope of this series.
Snake draft
See drafting.
Social deduction game
In a social deduction game, one or several players are randomly assigned roles and personas that are hidden from the other players, and during game play, players must guess the roles of other players in order to win or make progress. It often involves a high degree of bluffing and misdirection for the players needing to remain hidden. Components tend to be simpler than usual, and often are just a deck of cards. The mass appeal of these games makes them simple to play and some are party games (q.v.) in their own right as well.
Werewolf (or its earlier version, Mafia) is one of the most popular of these, and often makes the rounds at parties or campfires because it doesn’t require anything more than a card describing the role, and for people to sit and blame the “deaths” in the town on a hapless few. It works well for groups who enjoy role playing the entire affair, and can fall flat when people don’t engage with the role-play aspect of the game.
The Resistance (and its arthurian version, Avalon) is a tighter version of Werewolf, and relies on players assigning each other to missions and attempting to figure out who the traitors are by blaming certain players when the missions fail. It requires less role-playing from players because the game ensures that the traitor characters play to theme.
Solo game/solo mode
Games that allow a player to enjoy the game by themselves without requiring at least one other player is said to have a solo mode. Some games are solo only, while others include that option as a gameplay variant. The simplest way to include a solo mode is to create a “beat your own score” variant where gameplay doesn’t change too much from the multiplayer version, but a few rules are added to remove possible choices from the player to simulate other players doing the same.
An automa (q.v.) is a far more involved option, and requires entirely new components specifically made for this mode, but it more closely simulates the experience of playing with multiple human opponents. See the entry on AI for a deeper discussion.
Some games, by contrast, are solo only, and by design cannot accommodate multiple players. This particular genre of games is growing quite quickly as board gaming becomes less of a niche hobby and starts pushing into mainstream entertainment, and has picked up speed post-pandemic. Some of the better-known ones are Friday by Friedemann Friese and Under Falling Skies by Tomáš Uhlíř.
Strategy
Strategy is the long-term, big picture set of goals or ideals for a given situation or scenario. By example, your strategy in a board game may simply be to win it, or to win it within a given set of parameters and decisions. Strategy is proactive decision making—that is to say, going into a situation with a potential end goal and path to that goal in mind. This term is often conflated with tactics (q.v.). The attraction of many board games is that players frequently have to be quite flexible in their strategic thinking as the game proceeds. It’s beyond the scope of this series to discuss the psychological ramifications of static vs dynamic strategic thinking, but it’s definitely an interesting topic of study.
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