Introduction
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xxxi Introduction Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev ў ў There is no better time to be a tabletop board gamer. Hobbyists will debate whether the mid-1990s, which saw the rise of The Settlers of Catan and Magic: The Gathering, was the golden age of gaming or whether today is that golden age. No matter what your personal view may be, there is no doubt that modern tabletop gaming is in a period of exceptional fertility and is flourishing. Games have come a long way since humans invented dice, pawns, and boards, and archeologists regularly turn up these artifacts at sites dating back 6,000+ years ago. The standard deck of cards has its beginnings over 1,000 years ago, and with the advent of the printing press, games became an evercheaper and more ubiquitous luxury. The history of the last century or so of games encompasses mass-market titles including Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, and Trivial Pursuit, as well as the emergence of a whole new genre of tabletop games. The genre is so new that a single name has yet to meaningfully describe it, though suggestions have included hobby games, designer games, and other strange terms like TGOO (“these games of ours”). No matter what you call them, today’s games feature higher levels of player agency, meaningful decisions, and substantially improved production values and offer something entirely new to players as compared to mass-market games. Others have written about how war games developed into modern games in America and the countervailing rise of a European design sensibility in the post-World War II period that rejected war as a setting and direct conflict as a game dynamic. Our goal here is different. We’d like to address not how games evolved but how games are designed. Even as gaming itself has taken flight, and even as thousands of new games are published each year to an ever-expanding audience of gamers, one
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xxxii Introduction critical aspect of gaming remains in a nascent stage: the art and craft of game design itself. Games have taken great advantage of modern communication networks and methods to spread, but we encounter challenges in spreading the knowledge and skills needed to design these games. In substantial part, this is because we do not yet have a strong shared vocabulary for discussing design. In creative industries, from literature to films to video games, practitioners, participants, and critics develop a shared language, a common reference library, and a set of skills, approaches, and techniques for their fields. Film directors learn the difference between a jump cut and a dolly zoom and how different technical approaches produce different effects. Audiences and critics follow along, recognizing homages and allusions, and appreciating variations and innovations. Tabletop game design is at a somewhat earlier stage, and this book is our attempt to begin to build a broader game design vocabulary and body of knowledge. Rather than attempting to formalize a specific game design language—an approach that is both daunting and perhaps premature—we’ve chosen to look at the building blocks of games themselves: the mechanisms or, if you prefer, the mechanics, as they’re also frequently called by gamers. (We’ll use the terms interchangeably through this book.) The second-best piece of advice any new designer gets is to play more games. (The first piece of advice, by the way, is to create a physical prototype as quickly as possible.) Playing more games helps designers learn and grow by seeing, first-hand, a large variety of possible game experiences and mechanics. This is no different from any other creative field: every artist is enriched by experiencing the art and craft of other creators. Yet games, like books, can take a long time to experience, to master, and to fully appreciate, particularly for games that require large player counts, have long play times, or demand many repeated plays. In an effort to accelerate the learning process, we present this book, which is a compendium of game mechanisms, grouped together thematically, that map the territory of modern gaming. Our goal is not to give a list of steps or instructions for how to design a game. To use a cooking metaphor, this is not a recipe book but rather a catalog of ingredients and how they can enrich a dish. We define close to 200 different mechanisms and variants, spanning topics like Movement, Game End and Victory, Economics, and more. Within each topic, we discuss how different mechanisms create different player experiences, what types of games
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xxxiii Introduction these mechanisms give rise to, common pitfalls in implementing them, and even some of the physical user-interface issues raised by these mechanisms. With each mechanism, we present illustrative examples and games for further study, running the gamut from modern classics to contemporary new releases, as well as some lesser-known titles that nonetheless have much to teach. A good resource for learning more about the included examples is the website BoardGameGeek.com, which contains a massive game database featuring images and rulebooks that can assist in further inquiry. Our hope is that this book serves many purposes. New designers can certainly benefit from reading this book and taking in many mechanisms in a short period of time, but this book can also be used as a reference. Whether you’re an experienced designer looking for an overview of auctions, for example, or a gamer interested in exploring the worker placement genre, this book offers an easy way to review the topic and learn more. We feel this book will be of use to educators, students, professional and amateur designers, and anyone interested in reading about game design. As important as what this book is, is what it is not: a comprehensive listing of all game mechanisms. Tough we strove to be broad and inclusive, an exhaustive compilation of all game mechanisms was never our intention and is arguably impossible. While we do brush lightly on topics like narrative, dexterity, and pantomime, for example, there remains a lot of unmapped terrains. Similarly, while we do sometimes bring in examples from war-gaming, miniatures gaming, classic card games, and collectible card games, we largely center ourselves on modern board and card games. These lines are certainly artificial, and we have not sought to put forward a definition of what games are in drawing the lines as we did. Rather, we are eager to look to a future that continues to stretch, experiment with, and reconsider what games can be in light of new innovations in gaming. We also do not mean to imply in any way that the well of new mechanisms has run dry. The opportunity for innovation in gaming is limitless. Our intention is to make it easier for designers to learn to design, to talk with one another about design, and to mine the existing canon of board games for insight into how to design better games. We hope this collection is useful and inspirational to designers, and we look forward to playing the next generation of their games.
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xxxiv Introduction A Note on References in This Book For your convenience, whenever we refer to another part of this book, we include a chapter reference, presented as an abbreviation. For example, the abbreviation ACT is for the chapter about Actions. A reference like ACT-02 means the second section of the Action chapter. This additional information may be helpful to you in understanding the context of the reference, even if you don’t choose to look it up right away and may help in searching for references in digital versions of this text.
介绍 (Introduction)
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xxxi Introduction Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev ў ў 现在是成为桌面棋盘游戏玩家的最佳时刻。爱好者们会争论20世纪90年代中期——《卡坦岛》和《万智牌》兴起的时期——是否是游戏的黄金时代，还是今天才是那个黄金时代。无论您的个人看法如何，毫无疑问，现代桌面游戏正处于异常繁荣兴旺的时期。自从人类发明骰子、棋子和棋盘以来，游戏已经走过了漫长的发展历程，考古学家经常在距今6000多年的遗址中发现这些文物。标准扑克牌始于1000多年前，随着印刷机的问世，游戏成为一种日益廉价而普及的娱乐方式。过去一个世纪左右的游戏历史涵盖了大众市场游戏，包括《大富翁》、《拼字游戏》、《线索》（Clue/Cluedo）和《Trivial Pursuit》，以及一种全新桌面游戏类型的出现。这个类型如此新颖，以至于尚未有一个成熟的名称来准确描述它，尽管有人建议包括爱好者游戏、设计师游戏和其他特殊的术语，如TGOO（“我们的这些游戏”）。无论你叫它们什么，与大众市场游戏相比，今天的游戏具有更高程度的玩家自主权、富有意义的决策和大幅提升的制作品质，并为玩家提供了全新的东西。其他人已经写过战争游戏如何在美国演变为现代游戏，以及二战后欧洲设计理念的崛起，这种理念拒绝将战争作为背景、将直接冲突作为游戏机制。我们在这里的目标有所不同。我们想讨论的不是游戏如何演变，而是游戏如何设计。即便游戏本身已经蓬勃发展，即便每年有成千上万的新游戏面向不断扩大的玩家群体发布，一个
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xxxii Introduction 游戏的关键方面仍处于萌芽阶段：游戏设计艺术与工艺本身。游戏在利用现代通信网络和传播方法方面取得了巨大优势，但在传播设计游戏所需的知识和技能方面，我们仍面临挑战。在很大程度上，这是因为我们尚未形成一套强大的共享词汇来讨论设计。在创意产业中，从文学到电影再到视频游戏，从业者、参与者和评论家为各自领域发展出了一套共享语言、一个共同的参考体系以及一套技能、方法和技术。电影导演学习跳切（jump cut）和滑动变焦（dolly zoom）的区别，以及不同的技术方法如何产生不同的效果。观众和评论家紧随其后，能够识别致敬与典故，并欣赏其间的变化与创新。桌面游戏设计处于较早的阶段，这本书是我们尝试建立更广泛的游戏设计词汇和知识体系的一次努力。我们并非试图建立一套形式化的特定游戏设计语言——这种方法既令人生畏，或许也为时尚早——而是选择研究构成游戏本身的基本模块：机制（mechanisms），或者如果你愿意，力学（mechanics），因为玩家也常这样称呼它们。（本书中我们将交替使用这两个术语。）新设计师得到的第二条建议是多玩游戏。（顺便说一句，第一条建议则是尽快制作一个实体原型。）多玩游戏有助于设计师通过亲身体验各种可能的游戏形式和机制来学习与成长。这与其他任何创意领域没有什么不同：每位艺术家都因体验其他创作者的艺术与工艺而得到丰富。然而，如同书籍一样，游戏可能需要很长时间来体验、掌握和充分欣赏，特别是对于那些需要大量玩家、耗时较长或需要多次重复游玩的游戏。为了加快学习进程，我们提供了这本书，这是一本游戏机制纲要，按主题分类，勾勒出现代游戏的全貌。我们的目标并非提供一份如何设计游戏的分步指南。用烹饪来比喻，这不是一本菜谱，而是一本食材目录，以及它们如何让一道菜更加丰富。我们定义了近200种不同的机制及其变体，涵盖移动、游戏结束与胜利、经济等主题。在每个主题中，我们讨论不同的机制如何创造不同的玩家体验、会产生什么类型的游戏
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xxxiii Introduction ，实现它们的常见陷阱，甚至这些机制引发的一些实体用户界面问题。对于每个机制，我们都提供了示例游戏供进一步研究，范围涵盖现代经典、当代新作，以及一些鲜为人知但同样值得学习的作品。了解这些示例游戏的一个好资源是网站BoardGameGeek.com，它包含一个庞大的游戏数据库，其中包含有助于进一步研究的图片和规则书。我们希望这本书能够服务于多种目的。新设计师无疑能通过阅读本书在短时间内吸收大量机制而受益，但本书也可作为参考手册。无论您是寻求拍卖机制概述的资深设计师，还是有兴趣探索工人放置类游戏的玩家，本书都提供了一种简便的方法来回顾主题并深入了解。我们相信本书将对教育工作者、学生、专业和业余设计师，以及任何对游戏设计感兴趣的读者都有所帮助。同样重要的是，需要明确本书不是什么：全面罗列所有游戏机制的清单。尽管我们力求广泛而包容，但详尽汇编所有游戏机制从来就不是我们的目标，而且可以说也不可能做到。虽然我们确实略微涉及了叙事、灵巧性和默剧等主题，但仍有大量领域有待探索。同样，虽然我们有时确实会引用战争游戏、微缩模型游戏、经典纸牌游戏和集换式卡牌游戏中的例子，但我们主要聚焦于现代棋盘游戏和卡牌游戏。这些界限当然是人为划定的，我们在划分这些界限时，并未试图定义何为游戏。相反，我们期待展望未来，在游戏创新的启发下，继续拓展、实验并重新思考游戏的可能性。我们也绝不是暗示新机制的源泉已经枯竭。游戏创新的机遇是无穷的。我们的目的是让设计师更容易学习设计，相互交流设计，并从现有的桌游经典中汲取养分，以深入理解如何设计更好的游戏。我们希望本书对设计师们既实用又富有启发性，我们期待着体验他们的下一代游戏作品。
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xxxiv Introduction 关于本书参考文献的说明 为了您的方便，每当我们提到本书的另一部分时，我们都会包含一个章节参考，以缩写形式呈现。例如，缩写ACT代表关于行动（Actions）的章节。像ACT-02这样的引用意味着行动章节的第二部分。这些额外信息可能有助于您理解引用的上下文，即使您不选择立即查找它，也可能有助于在本文的数字版本中搜索引用。