What Makes a Good Theme?

Don't make me spend eggs

I’ll start with a few warnings. First, this article discusses board games, which doesn’t fit with the rest of the blog. Second, I must admit that I haven’t played enough games to comment on the entire hobby. I often play games that deemphasize theme, including pure abstracts (e.g. GIPF series) or worker-placement Euro games. As such, I haven’t spent much time playing some of the more “thematic” games. I don’t know much about war games, but their devotees tell me that these games help them learn history. I haven’t played CO2, which seems to teach about reducing carbon emissions. I also can’t recall playing one of those “colonize people and take their stuff” games that I’ve seen criticized on social media. The closest I can think of would be Raiders of Scythia, but that concerns and historical period that doesn’t beget any cultural sensitivity, and it’s so abstracted that I forget I’m supposedly plundering a foreign land.

The mega-hit Wingspan inspired me to analyze theme. In Wingspan, players collect resources and spend them to place bird cards on their tableau (tableau is board game speak for place-where-you-put-your-cards). These cards score points, provide additional actions, and lay eggs. Later on, players must spend eggs to acquire new bird cards. After four rounds, players tally their points from bird cards, eggs, and various missions involving them.

Among the acclaim it has received, many reviewers (and some of my personal friends) have praised its theme. I half-agree with the praise. The game looks amazing, especially with the upgraded components that fans have produced. I also enjoy the idea of a game about birdwatching. Every gamer has spend enough time farming, trading, exploring space, so it’s refreshing to see a game about studying birds. It’s an original idea, and it doesn’t involve killing anyone or building wealth. Yet, I just don’t feel like Wingspan is game about studying or watching birds.

The game includes birds, I can’t deny that. We start with the birds in a public pool, and we spend resources (food items) to bring them to our tableau. These elements fit the theme. I can imagine that these birds appear so rarely that only one of the ornithologists can capture. Next, we place these birds into one of three habits. Again, this works for me. I could imagine each bird would need sit in a separate part of the aviary. After that, however I’m a bit confused. Some of the birds grant special actions like allowing the player take an extra wheat from the supply. Some of these actions can occur on an opponent’s turn. Is the bird grabbing us an extra wheat while our rival scientists is busy studying a new bird? I guess I can allow that. It’s difficult to see the thematic element in actions that include re-rolling a dice, but I can accept the general idea of “bird does thing for me.”

However, the game loses me with the “lay eggs” mechanic. That’s an strange action for a bird watcher to take, but I’m willing to accept it. Maybe scientists can induce egg-laying in their birds. The player can then place these eggs in any bird’s nest, not just the bird who laid them. That’s also weird, but it’s not the weirdest part. Recall that the game contains three habitats for birds. We can place one bird in each habitat for free. After that, we must spend eggs to place to a new bird in that habitat. What, thematically, is occurring here? I could the eggs produce birds of the same specie, but how does the egg of one bird lead to another bird of a different specie? Are we throwing the eggs at wild birds to attract them? Does a bird of specie give birth to a bird of another? Sounds pretty scandalous!

I know, I know. I can probably nitpick many popular games. Almost no game bursts with so much theme that every mechanic aligns with a thematic element. Still, Wingspan only gives a player four actions. One involves laying eggs and another requires spending those eggs to acquire new birds. Successful play filling one’s tableau with a ton of birds (thereby spending a lot of eggs) , and the last round of the game features a ton of egg laying. Hence, half the game’s actions and the bulk of the game’s tension sit on shaky thematic ground.

This doesn’t ruin the game for me, but it does challenge some its praise. On he positive side, I enjoy building a tableau of powerful cards while examining pretty bird drawings. I can’t, however, praise the game’s theme when some core elements seem so bizarre. When fans and viewers praise the theme, I really think they’re praising the aesthetic. Wingspan is aesthetically a game about studying birds. Mechanically, it’s a a game about bird and egg collecting. I can best illustrate the difference between aesthetic and theme with one of my favorite games: Castles of Burgundy.

In Castles of Burgundy, players build a duchy in Medieval Europe or something. Unlike Wingspan, Castles barely pretends to have a theme. To start the game, your duchy looks like this:

I don’t know about you, but my dream duchy looks a little bit different. In Castles, players begin each round by rolling two dice. In the center board (pictured below), players can take a tile from a spot matching one of their dice. Players can then place these pieces into their duchy (pictured above) with a matching dice number. The light green tiles represent farmland with animals, the tan are building tiles, the blue are boats, the gray are mines, the yellow are knowledge, and the dark green are the titular castles (there are no black tiles, just ignore that part).

In games like D&D, dice simulate randomness. The archer can’t always hit his target, and dice allow us to simulate this uncertainty. What then, do the dice simulate in Castles? You try to build a castle, get unlucky, and can only build a boat? Sounds like a case of the Mondays. The tiles themselves don’t deliver much theme either. Boats allow players to receive resources from the main board, but there’s no rivers or to explain how the boats gain these resources. When placing a building tile, the player receives a one-time bonus. Just like real life, buildings can only be used once. For further realism, the game also bans a single city from containing buildings of the same type. Knowledge tiles, on the other hand, provide a permanent bonus. The rulebook doesn’t even pretend these tiles represent a physical structure; they’re not called “universities” or anything. Nope, these duchies contain big chunks of floating knowledge. I could ridicule this game’s theme even further, but The Dragon’s Tomb already did.

All joking aside, there’s no reason this game couldn’t be about designing the king’s bathroom. The “building a duchy” topic explains and clarifies nothing. The player does gain any understanding of the rules by considering the theme. When I teach Castles, I treat it as an abstract puzzle game like Azul. I explain the effect of each tile and the bonuses of each city-tile. I don’t attempt to tie any mechanics to the construction of a duchy in Medieval Europe. Castles has an aesthetic, but no theme.

When, does aesthetic become theme? For me, this occurs in one two ways. One, a game’s mechanics must “feel like” its aesthetic. Two, the a game’s aesthetic must explain its mechanics.

What does it mean for a game to “feel like” its aesthetic? We can’t take this too literally of course; I hope a game never feels like getting clubbed by a Viking. Though I’ve argued for philosophical rigor in previous posts, I’ve got nothing here. The best I can do is run through a few case studies that I think make a bit of sense. Game about conquering opponent’s territory, like Twilight Imperium, should involve direct conflict and sometimes literally negotiation between players. Games about arts and crafts, like Calico, should not. I also think some core mechanics fit best with some aesthetics. Gizmos is an archetypal “engine-builder,” a game where weak actions combo in much stronger ones by the end of the game. Correspondingly, it’s a game about creating a wacky science project. I also enjoy the theme of Geoff Engelstein’s Super Skill Pinball series. These games don’t come with flippers, but they capture the zaniness of their subject. In the series, most turns result in a one or zero points. However, by triggering bonuses, elevating the ball to the back-glass, activating multi-ball (two balls appearing on the same machine), and a bit of cheating, users can score over 100 points in a single turn. As a result, a player who scores 70 points may have only needed a bit more luck to score 3 times that amount.

Aesthetics also becomes theme when they explain the game. In other words, a game has theme when a player says “that makes sense.” Though in many ways a dry Euro game, I think Le Havre features numerous “that makes sense” mechanics. In Le Havre, players gather resources to construct buildings, sell items, and feed their family. Some items can transform into other ones. For example cattle can became meat and leather, while wheat can become bread. Players can feed their family with meat and bread, but not with cattle, leather, or wheat. At the end of certain rounds, the game activates a harvest. Here, a single wheat token produces an additional wheat token, while players need two cattle to produce an additional one. All of these rules “make sense.” By understanding the meaning of the components, one can understand how to play the game. On the other hand, someone learning Castles just needs to memorize that the dark green castle tiles grant an additional action. Nothing about the aesthetic itself implies that.

I like Wingspan and Castles, but I consider both theme-less games. Within the realm of theme-less games, some aesthetics look and feel better than others. Wingspan is gorgeous and introduces the gaming world to a fresh topic. Castles looks like it came from a bootlegged engineering textbook, and features the most generic setting in the hobby. Still, when we praise a game for its theme, it ought to mean something more than pretty pictures and obscure topics. Ambitious designers should aim for a aesthetic that that synthesizes with gameplay.