For what it's worth, a tabletop writer who talks about game components or mechanics or strategy is engaging just as deeply with the game as someone who writes about theme or history or uses a game as a jumping off point for a personal essay. Tactility *is* the game. Colour is the game. Sound. Smell.
Smell. Oh the smell. An unforgettable and immersive part of my early board game experiences. In some cases, more charged than the gameplay of the individual games.
I wish more people would right about those things, I was really after some writing on how the mechanics of board games can be experienced as aesthetic through play a while ago & just couldn't find anything.
I recommend The Beauty of Games by Frank Lantz
Nice - thanks, the blurb had me at aesthetics of thought. I'm now midway through a year off from looking at anything academic but that's exactly what I wanted and I'm kind of glad it's only been released now cos i get to enjoy it as leisure rather than 'research'.
It’s a short, fun read too.
I play games to make interesting decisions and occasionally to attempt to pound people into the ground. I prefer games that have a theme / setting / whatever that at least somewhat interests me. Beyond that. I don't care. If I really like the game I might bling it out for the hell of it.
I love theme. I am a theme guy. I am also autistic. & human. & sweet Satan am I bewildered when people create this odd hierarchy where the art & the culture are all instantiated in theme, & not the rattle of a dice box, the clatter of warri seeds in wooden hollows. It's bizarre.
HABA's oversized bright yellow boxes sound like play and that's half the reason why HABA games are great.
Yes I am paraphrasing my own review of a HABA, no I will not apologize, it is the truth.
People joke about wanting to eat the pieces in Azul. We've all felt the reassuring heft of the jewel chips in Splendor. These are not ancillary details! They *are* the game. How they inflect your experience & interactions is the game. These aren't lesser aspects of the art.
I feel like the elevation of theme to the top of the analytical pyramid is evidence of literature envy, basically. A feeling that literary criticism is the model & maturity in the field of tabletop criticism equals engaging with the most explicitly book-like (& grown-up) elements.
I have politely but immovably disagreed with self-styled purists who assert the only true games are folk abstracts. Nonsense. I love the historical undertow driving Joraku, the gut-wrenching stakes & rich texture of Votes for Women, the cutting satire driving you to armageddon in Twilight Struggle.
Theme is the juice & where no explicit theme exists humans have always imagined one - hence Senet boards gradually acquiring more religious iconography across the centuries as players imagined a journey to the afterlife in a formerly abstract race. It's so important. But not *supremely* so.
I get the continual impulse to perform intellect as a kind of adult alibi for play. Engaging with explicit theme is our most direct, point-to-point route for producing criticism that looks intelligent & rigorous by the received standards of academia. But alone, it's incomplete.
I feel very vulnerable when I write about games as I actually experience them, rather than the more detached, objective mode I adopt for most of my reviews. My actual true game experience reads like I'm tweaking off trucker crank. Every sensation is magnified. Every dice clatter a Vince McMahon meme
If tabletop games were *only* a dry interrogation of theme, they would hold no interest for me. Ditto with ttrpgs. What is the embodied, 360 degree sensory experience of play? Not our post-hoc stories about it, which can read suspiciously like forelock-tugging justifications.
I disagree. Board games have been mere playthings and toys for too long. Sure, I love/hate my Uno as the next fellow, but if the marriage of theme and mechanics challenges my perception, like Watergate did, I am all in. Why are we so afraid that our beloved hobby might be appreciated publicly?
I don't understand how this is a disagreement with what I'm saying.
Not to get all Marshall McLuhan about it but you can't extract meaning like a tooth from systems & production & community & the snap of a linen-finished card as if the art survives in theme alone & isn't an emergent property of all these elements working in concert.
I love games that make me think, that implicate me & spark thoughts & make me head off afterwards to learn more. I also love rolling acrylic polyhedrons & smelling the ink on Magic cards & flipping the tiny cardboard tokens in Twilight Struggle as control of a country shifts. These are indivisible.
Yes! Mechanics create the reality that theme lives in. They're inseparable. Stats are flesh, the dice God.
(And of course, abstract games are forms of human expression too, and thus art.)
I don't think one approach is inherently better but I do think how we talk about games has become incredibly skewed in one direction. Even in just talking about components, reviews tend towards surface level descriptions rather than the breadth of experiential tactility that you describe here.
I would argue sometimes it is hard to go beyond surface level critical thought because when we talk about theme and its attachment to its mechanisms in a game, we have to judge if there was actual intent to marry both to fit its subject matter or it was just convenient to use the theme as dressing.
Well, we're sometimes a bit limited by potential outlets & finding a receptive audience. Longform was one way I tried to get round that.
I suspect this has a lot to do with fatigue over the kind of critic proof massive box stuffed full of plastic that takes in the gdp of a small nation on Kickstarter
Shame about the reviewer who did a live reaction to the last zombicide campaign. Some say they're still scrolling to this day.
I'd like to see a Button Shy edition of Zombicide
I love the not obvious tactile things too. Spirit Island for instance. 'good' pieces are smooth, wooden and rounded. Invaders are sharp, angular, plastic pieces. Tell me you don't want to stuff your hand in a bananagrams bag and fondle the tiles and I'll call you a liar.
Wanted to & repeatedly did! They're so smooth!