Board Game Jargon Primer, Part 5

Welcome once more to our series of articles on clearing the brainfog and clutter 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 favourite confusing term. This is part 5, so I’ve provided links to all the parts below.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9

Hand

A delightful piece of metonymy which refers not to your own physical five-fingered appendage, but to any cards you are dealt that are not sitting in your draw pile (q.v.), discard pile (q.v.), tableau (q.v.), or out of play (q.v.). The cards don’t have to literally be in your hand, either, but must at least be available to be put into play. Your hand may belong permanently to you or may be part of an open draft pool, or even obscured from you entirely (see Hanabi for an example of a game where you know everyone else’s cards, but not your own). Although the term likely originated to mean a handful of cards, its meaning doesn’t end there – it can refer to any pool of items from which a player selects to put into play, including tiles, meeples, marbles, dice, or whatever the game may happen to give to a player to hold onto.

Hand management

The core of hand management is the act of strategically choosing cards to keep or discard based on the chance to later play groups or combinations of cards. Often you’re drafting (q.v.) cards from a pool of available cards to improve your odds of gaining points or resources, but sometimes you can simply have a large hand from which to choose a combination of cards to play. Managing your hand (q.v.) means you’re making strategic selections, and not simply playing the largest or most valuable card at any given time.

Poker and Rummy are both traditional card games that are heavily based in hand management. For something newer that incorporates hand management as part of a larger game, we can turn to Matt Leacock’s Pandemic as an example. In this game players attempt to obtain hands of similar-coloured cards under circumstances where every card is potentially highly useful and discarding feels wasteful.

Hex-based

This has nothing to do with witchcraft. Most people are familiar with grid-based layouts (q.v.). A grid that is formed with hexagonal areas is termed a hex grid, and games that use hexagonal regions can be said to be hex-based. The advantage of a hex-system is that it allows for six directions of play instead of the four allowed by a grid system. Most wargames take place on hex-based layouts, as do most games that require players to make tactical (q.v.) choices when moving. Gloomhaven and Mage Knight are two examples that use a hex-grid overlay on their tiles to indicate where players can move. Hive, on the other hand, is a chess-like game that takes place on an invisible hex grid (enforced by means of hexagonal game pieces).

Hidden movement

In a hidden movement game, one (or more, but usually only one) player makes their moves off the main board, either on a miniature version of the board or by notation on a piece of paper. Usually, this is to entice the other players to attempt to capture the hidden player by intuiting their movements.

In Letters from Whitechapel (an evolution of the game Scotland Yard), one player takes the role of Jack the Ripper and notes their moves on a sheet behind a screen while the other players attempt to hunt down Jack before he makes it back to his hideout. The game is tense and has a different experience for the opposing sides. The best part of playing as Jack is listening to the other players scheme, plot, and attempt to corner Jack; playing as the police has the entire “thrill of the chase” thing going while trying to outwit Jack, knowing that your conversations are common knowledge.

In play

Cards, tokens, or other game pieces are said to be “in play” when they are part of the current game action, and neither in the discard area, draw area, supply, or out of the game. Components considered “in play” enable you to activate, move, or perform another action based on the game piece. Compare out of play (q.v.).

Kingmaker

Suppose you’re playing a Generic Four Player Game, and you are in absolute last place. You could do one of several things; you could acknowledge you’re losing, and simply see the game to completion for the fun of it. Another, more deliciously spiteful option would be to bend your every effort to ensure that someone else at the table owes you a favour in future by ensuring their victory. It doesn’t even have to be the player currently in first place (and usually isn’t): the point is to deliberately sabotage your own efforts to play fairly in favour of awarding points or other victory conditions to another player. (Alternatively, one player could concentrate all their efforts on ensuring that a particular player loses, which speaks more about a player’s maturity and sense of fairness than anything else.)

Sometimes it’s the result of bad game mechanics or poor balancing that results in such a situation, and even though spite may be one motivating factor, it might simply be that the player doing the kingmaking does not have much choice due to their position. However it plays out, the important bit is that it results in one player continuously benefiting unfairly from the actions of another player.

Not all kingmaking is a negative experience and sometimes it’s built into the heart of the game. Root, for example, has the character of the Vagabond which can, if they want, ally themselves with any of the other factions currently playing. This alliance ties the Vagabond’s victory to the allied faction, and both teams win or lose together (to be clear – the Vagabond can, and often does, win on their own without aid). It works in this instance because it’s built into the game and not done out of spite.

Note that this is a hotly-debated topic (see this example of a fine debate in action: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2846837/what-kingmaking/page/1), and people come down on both sides of the fence regarding kingmaking, both for and against. There’s not enough space in this article to go into all the finer points of the argument, except to say that if it leaves people feeling set upon or feeling bad about a game, you probably should address the concept and the issue within your group.

Living Card Game (LCG)

The term “living card game” was coined and trademarked by Fantasy Flight Games to describe an alternative to Collectible Card Game (CCG) (q.v.) where instead of randomised sets of cards, the game releases in themed sets of known cards. It’s definitely not the same kind of money-printing endeavour that games such as Magic: The Gathering produces, but there’s a definite satisfaction (from the player’s side, at least) in knowing that the cards you’re receiving are there to aid you in a story or quest.

You can see Fantasy Flight Games’ list of LCGs here: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/

Other non-Fantasy Flight games that use a similar, expandable, customizable card game format include Ashes Reborn and Summoner Wars.

Legacy game

A legacy game is, by design, a style of game that changes on a permanent basis over a number of plays, usually with the aid of stickers, boxes of content, new cards and tokens, and old cards and tokens being removed from the game (temporarily) or Removed From The Game (more permanently by being torn up and tossed in the recycling).

The term was coined by Rob Daviau who invented the first legacy-style game, Risk Legacy, in which the board and factions permanently changed depending on the outcomes of prior plays.

Arguably the most successful legacy game is Pandemic Legacy by Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau, which has seen two sequels and sat at the top of the Boardgamegeek charts for positively ages (before being dethroned by Gloomhaven, itself a legacy style game).