This is the final article in our series seeking to provide light to the damp and dragon-infested cave 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. Links to all of the entries below.
Tableau builder
Tableau has a number of different meanings in both French and English, but in this case we’re talking about a layout of board game components in front of a player, most commonly being an array of cards. Building a tableau means starting with a minimal number of components, and adding to this collection over the course of the game.
Many – if not most – tableau-builder games are also engine-builder games (q.v.), although this is by no means always the case. Valeria: Card Kingdoms, designed by Isaias Vallejo, is one such example where no engine is being run at all, and the player is simply building the tableau.
Tactics
Tactics are the short-term actions a player takes to achieve a chosen strategy (q.v.), or actions one takes to avoid a strategy being thwarted. A player can be said to be making a tactical decision when performing actions that serve the strategy. By contrast to strategy, tactics are reactive, short-term decisions. It is also possible to play tactically without playing strategically.
Take that
A game mechanic that enables you to steal, hinder, or otherwise hobble an opponent without removing them from the game is called a “take that” mechanic. The mechanic is not inherently problematic, because in the right game and in well-designed games, it works wonderfully. It’s seen as problematic in Euro-style games (q.v.) because most of the time it has no business being there, and is seen as a half-hearted effort to shoehorn player interaction into a game that doesn’t really need it, and in extreme circumstances can lead to kingmaking (q.v.).
Terraforming Mars, for example, is an out-and-out tableau and engine-building Euro game with all the trappings, bunting, ribbons and bows of the genre – except for the occasional card with a “take that” mechanic, and it feels bizarre to be playing such cards in the game. It’s made all the worse for the game’s solo mode (q.v.), where these cards do far more to hinder you than anything else.
On the other hand, Dune Imperium is a game that relies quite strongly on its brilliant implementation of “take that” mechanics in the form of the intrigue cards, and while they have immediate effects on a round-to-round basis, you never feel like you’re being stabbed in the back out of absolutely nowhere with no chance of catching up again.
Theme
A game’s theme is the meta-narrative around the game’s setting. A well-developed, strong theme helps with immersion into the game, and helps rationalise the game’s mechanics. Weak theme – also called a theme that’s been “pasted on” – can break immersion at best and is one of the leading complaints that reviewers have about games. How do you know when a theme is weak? There’s a disconnect between what you’re doing in the game and the game’s theme. In other words, you could put just about any theme on the game and it still works as a game. Not every game needs a theme, though, and just about every abstract game (q.v.) is themeless; there’s no pretence, for example, that all you’re doing in Jenga is playing a dexterity game, no meta-narrative about it being an evil tower or whatever thinly-veiled attempt at narrative you may come up with. It doesn’t need one.
The Gallerist, designed by Vital Lacerda, by contrast, is a game with a very strong theme: players take the part of art gallery owners and cultivating art by buying and promoting specific artists, and then selling the art for a profit. You can easily and logically link the internal logic and theme to the external world. Without the theme, the game doesn’t work.
An example of a strong game with a pasted-on theme is Tom Lehmann’s Res Arcana, which is ostensibly about magicians battling it out for power. In essence, it’s an engine-building (q.v.) race game (q.v.) to ten points. There’s not much more to it than that, and you can very quickly, with little effort, replace the theme with something else. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course, but a stronger tie between the theme and mechanics could have made the game that much more immersive.
Time in board games
In many games it’s important to keep some sense of time for the sake of fairness or for the sake of order and organisation, and to ensure that the game session doesn’t devolve into a maelstrom of chaos. Unless it’s a real-time (q.v.) game, it’s important that player turns are discrete and that certain things happen before or after certain other things, although this can be simple or complex depending on the game. As the board gaming hobby has matured, terms that used to be conflated with each other have come to mean very distinct things, and this entry is to distinguish between the terms as they are now commonly accepted. Note that in the rules of older games you’ll still see one term being used when the modern common parlance is a different term. Some of these terms are still prone to change, so these are a general guideline instead of a dictatorial edict.
Rounds
There are three main variations of what board game developers consider a single round:
(1) A full iteration of the game through every player at least once, with every player having a single turn. The simplest and most common round is from the start player going clockwise around the table. Some game mechanics (q.v.) can reverse this mid-game, or dictate that player order be according to a turn-order track on the game board.
(2) One complete run through a set of phases where players may have taken multiple turns.
(3) One full depletion of a set of cards, workers, or similar mechanic, indicating that the depleted sets be replenished. This is common in games where the prior definitions don’t make enough sense or where those definitions are too discrete a unit for the game in question. For example, 7 Wonders has three rounds and during each round, players draft (q.v.) cards into their tableaux (q.v.) until the set of cards for that round are depleted.
For the sake of fairness, most games mark the player who started the game (first player) and when the end-game condition is met, specify that players finish the round, i.e., ensure that everyone has taken the same number of turns, or additionally play one more full round before final scoring. Other games simply end the game when the victory condition is met (Scythe, for example).
Some games have no concept of a round because chaos is the order du jour, and by example I present Cosmic Frog by Jim Felli, where, due to the mechanics, players may end up taking several turns in a row simply because of the way the game decides who’s on turn.
Phases
In games with more complex round constructions, it is helpful to split rounds into phases during which certain actions may be or must be performed. For example, Argent: The Consortium has three phases: a set-up phase that players take simultaneously to undo effects from the previous rounds, an errands phase where players go around the table placing their workers (q.v. worker placement) onto the game board, and a resolution phase where the players resolve the actions of the worker placement spaces. In this game, one round is one complete run through all the phases. By contrast, 7 Wonders has no phases.
Turns
A turn is generally taken to be the set of actions of a single player, and these may change depending on the phase. There are two main types of turn: sequential (players take turns one after the other) and simultaneous (players take turns at the same time). In sequential plays, the player who is currently taking actions is said to be on turn.
Actions
An action is a single, discrete play by a given player who is on turn. Depending on the game, players may be allowed to take a limited number of actions, or be limited by their components or the board. For example, in Ticket to Ride, players may take only two actions per turn. Many deckbuilding games (q.v.) on the other hand allow players to take as many actions as they can or want to, provided they have cards to play.
Trick-taking game
A trick is a single round (q.v. time in board games) played from a hand (q.v.) of cards (or similar component), the winner of which is determined by some factor on the cards themselves, whether it be the value of the cards or the set of cards (suite). Some games count wins by the number of tricks a player or team of players wins, and others count wins by the values of the cards in the trick (also called a point-trick game).
In most trick-taking games, players have to follow suit if they can, meaning that if the first player places a card of a given set, everyone else must play the same set if possible. Being unable to follow suit usually means you forfeit that round, unless a trump card is played which beats other, non-trump suites. There are an astonishing variety of trick-taking games, which may not be surprising given that they’re also one of the oldest types of card game out there. The earliest examples date back to the second millennium in China. Trump cards and suites only made their appearance around the 17th century.
Many of the most well-known card games are trick-taking games, such as pinochle, whist, hearts, and klaberjass. However, that doesn’t mean new games using this mechanic aren’t still being developed. One of the most popular recent games using trick taking is The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine (and its sequel, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea), which gives players a mission-based cooperative experience using trick taking. The missions are made more interesting for the fact that the win conditions for each mission changes from mission to mission from simply ensuring a given player wins a trick with a particular card, to enforcing a strict order in which tricks must be won.
Variable player powers
Not every game starts off with all players on an equal footing because doing so would detract from the fun and challenge of the game, and in a game with variable player powers each player is given a unique, often rule-breaking, power to start off with. Many designers (q.v.) attempt to limit these powers or expand them enough to ensure that the game is still balanced, despite the variable abilities. Sometimes these variable powers are included as a way for players to try different strategies (q.v.).
And some designers just want to watch the world burn. The game that most emphasises this to a delightfully chaotic level is Cosmic Encounter which is published by Fantasy Flight games. The entire attraction of Cosmic Encounter is that everyone’s powers completely break the game in unexpected ways, and fun was clearly more emphasised than fairness or balance.
On the other side of the spectrum, Clans of Caledonia, designed by Juma Al-Joujou, was playtested to exhaustion to ensure that each of the clans, although wildly different, still presented a fair experience to every player.
Wargame
A game that represents a scaled-down depiction of conflict can be said to be a wargame, although not all games that include any kind of fighting can be said to be wargames. In paticular, wargames attempt to emulate some aspect of conflict in some way or another, usually through minis (q.v.), cards, or something similar. While a lot of wargames are dudes on a map (q.v.) types of games, there are many that attempt to encapsulate some other aspect such as the operational side as opposed to the tactical end. Arguably, wargames are possibly the most diverse and numerous type of game available. Wargame themes (q.v.) run the gamut from stone age tribesmen lobbing rocks at each other to spacefaring armadas casually lobbing ionised energy across the void and everything in between, from just about every period of conflict in human history. We have a lot to draw upon in that regard.
When people say wargame, the one that comes most readily to mind is Warhammer 40,000, now in its ninth edition (as of the publication of this series of articles, anyhow). Many COIN games (q.v.) are also wargames in their own right, complete with variable player powers (q.v.).
Not all wargames are made for experienced players, and there are several gateway games (q.v.) into the world of wargaming. Memoir ‘44 by Richard Borg is one such, and attempts to streamline and ease players into World War II wargames in an accessible manner.
Weight
On the BoardGameGeek (q.v.) website, you will see a weight underneath each game title, alongside the playing time and suggested number of players. Weight refers to how complex the game is, but this is a controversial topic. The number isn’t an absolute, and can describe many different kinds of complexity and unless you play the game, you can’t be sure which kind you’re dealing with. The weight number ranges from 1.00 (easiest) to 5.00 (hardest).
The two main types of complexity you’ll run into regarding weight are rules complexity and technical complexity (although these are not the only kinds). Rules complexity describes how many different rules you’ll need to memorise to be able to play the game effectively. Mage Knight (weight 4.63), for example, is ridiculously high on the rules complexity end because there are so many different kinds of conditions and cases involved in the game, but from a turn-to-turn basis, you won’t ever deal with more than a few of the rules at once. In terms of technical complexity you’ll find The Gallerist (weight 4.27), where each action has many multiple steps attached to it, and even though you only have four worker placement (q.v.) spots, each one has many ramifications.
Worker placement
One of the most popular mechanics to come out of modern Euro style (q.v.) board games is the worker placement game, which is a kind of modified action-selection (q.v.) mechanic. In such games, the shared game board contains a series of spaces to be occupied by a player component (often a meeple [q.v.] or a die [q.v. dice placement]) called a “worker”. In most cases, only a single worker may occupy a single space, but some games allow for multiple workers to occupy spaces on the condition that the space becomes more expensive to occupy the more workers there are. Limiting the choices makes becoming the first player (q.v. time in board games) a valuable action, since the first player has every choice available to them. The first worker placement game is acknowledged to be Keydom by Richard Breese, published in 1998 by R&D Games.
Any game that places a (hopefully interesting) variation on this mechanic is called “worker placement with a twist”. For example, Architects of the West Kingdom by SJ Macdonald and Shem Phillips gives each player around 30 workers each, and for most spaces on the board there is no limit to the number of workers a player may place. However, instead of it becoming more expensive to place workers, the space becomes more valuable the more workers a player has, and as an action (q.v. time in board games), other players may round up all the workers of a given player and “imprison” them for a bounty.
More recent games have attempted to combine worker placement with completely disparate mechanics such as deckbuilding. One such game is Dune: Imperium by Paul Dennen. Other developers (q.v.) have combined it with tableau building (q.v.) instead, and this has resulted in games such as Everdell by James A. Wilson. One of the most creative worker placement with a twist games is Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani. Players place their workers on gears, and as the gears turn the workers are placed in front of different actions. Players perform the action of wherever the worker alights from the gear. However, players may only place a worker on a gear or take a worker off a gear during their turn, and so may be torn by having several workers on different gears all reaching desired destinations at the same time.
Conclusion
That last entry brings our series on board game jargon to a close. Hopefully by now you’re an expert in the language of board games, if not the games themselves. If we’ve missed a term that you still don’t understand, please let us know in the comments! And let us also know your favourite mechanics and games. We would love to hear from you!
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