How to Make Board Games Less Painful: A Game of Thrones Case Study

On a snowy evening when winter was coming, I sat down to play A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (second edition) by Fantasy Flight Games, introduced to me with much excitement by my friend Emily. And then, as with most complex board games, we sat for about an hour before playing while Emily patiently read out the instructions and explained how the game worked.

As we asked endless questions about the rules, I could feel my enthusiasm ebbing away. My excitement to play was fading because we had to spend so much time learning how to play first.

Board games, it turns out, have one of the worst new player onboarding experiences of all time.

The complex setup diagram from the manual for the many pieces involved in the game.

Problems:

It’s best to have someone there who has played the game before, or it’s a bigger struggle to understand how to play
Players spend a long time listening to or reading instructions and not playing
Typically players end up with an incomplete understanding of rules, which leads to them making suboptimal moves, which makes them feel bad afterwards

Game of Thrones is a complicated board game, with many layers of interaction. So, it’s the perfect game to use as a case study for how game designers can improve the painful process of getting started playing. In fact, the answer to improving player onboarding in board games is deceptively simple.

Board games need to have varying difficulty levels.

Video games often open with a tutorial, in which the first few easy levels gradually introduce new mechanics to the player. Board games don’t have this tutorial. They plunge players into gameplay that is far too advanced, too quickly.

But we can fix this. Imagine a board game manual that provides rules the same way a video game tutorial does. Instead of giving the player a massive information dump about all the components and what each does, it introduces the components gradually, on a need-to-know basis.

This ideal manual is organized by difficulty levels, containing sections ranging from “just starting out” to “expert”, which each provide the minimum amount of information to get players into the game as quickly as possible. (Of course, more difficult sections would build on previous, easier ones.)

For example, instead of describing what ALL the action tokens do in one section, the manual should introduce only the basic action tokens in the “just starting out” level. In a sense, game designers would need to reverse engineer their complicated systems in the full game to develop playable partial versions.

Using combat cards, which provide special effects during battle, is another layer of interaction on top of combat, which is the primary mechanic of the game.

In stripping the Game of Thrones board games to its bare bones, I’ve outlined five steps for creating a basic board game, based on establishing purpose, developing mechanics, and finally adding flavour (such as randomness).

Five steps for designing a board game

1. Determine goal and win condition (what is this game about?)

Conquering territory
Win by conquering “x” number of castles

PURPOSE

2. Establish the game’s turn structure (what happens each round?)

Something random happens based on an event card
Then, players participate in a planning phase, followed by an action phase

MECHANICS

3. Introduce necessary frameworks

Supply (determines how many troops you can have on the battlefield)
Turn order (based on order of players on the Iron Throne influence track)

4. Introduce necessary interactions

Combat and movement (in order to conquer castles, which is the goal)
Mustering (getting more troops)

5. Add elements of randomness and flavour

Westeros cards (event cards) are drawn at the start of each round, before the planning phase

FLAVOUR

Each of the steps above can be embellished as much as the designers choose in the final product. However, initially, it’s important to include all of these elements but keep them at a bare minimum for the lowest difficulty level. This will introduce players to the game and familiarize them with how it works, giving them a groundwork to build upon.

The influence tracks, and how to rank higher on them to gain special benefits, can be introduced individually to the players across the difficulties as described below.

To illustrate the complexity of the Game of Thrones board game without going into as much detail as the 32-page instruction manual, I have prepared this chart that shows three potential difficulty levels. These levels add layers of complexity by tweaking design elements across purpose, mechanics and flavour of the game.

	Basic	Intermediate	Advanced (full game)
PURPOSE
How to win?	Conquer 5 castles	Conquer 6 castles	Conquer 7 castles
MECHANICS
Supply Limits number of troops	Yes	Yes	Yes
Actions Five different types of order tokens exist in the game Move/attack Defend Consolidate power (gain power tokens and muster) Raid (removes one order token after reveal) Support (supports attack or defence of adjacent spaces)	Move/attack Defend Consolidate power/muster	Move/attack Defend Consolidate power/muster Raid	Move/attack Defend Consolidate power/muster Raid Support
Units in play Four different types of units exist in the game, each with their own stats and abilities Footman (1 attack, 1 defence, costs 1 mustering point) Knight (2 attack, 2 defence, costs 2 mustering points) Siege engine (4 attack, 0 defense, only when attacking area with castle, costs 2 mustering points)	Footmen Ships	Footmen Ships Knights Siege engines	Footmen Ships Knights Siege engines
Influence tracks Players are lined up for each of these tracks in order of their “influence”, which can change during the game based on events in the Westeros cards. The top player in each track gets special benefits as follows. Iron Throne: determines turn order Valyrian Steel Blade: breaks battle ties Messenger Raven: can change planned action after order tokens are revealed or look at the top Wildling card and decide whether to replace it or return it to the bottom of the Wildling deck; order on track also determines number of star order tokens that can be placed	Iron Throne	Iron Throne Valyrian Steel Blade	Iron Throne Valyrian Steel Blade Messenger Raven
Combat cards Each player has a set of cards, specific to a character of their house, that add values to combat and/or additional effects. Before combat, the two players secretly choose a combat card. They then simultaneously reveal and resolve the cards, causing potentially unexpected results on the battlefield.	No	No	Yes
FLAVOUR
Westeros cards Three cards containing random events are drawn at the beginning of each round	Yes	Yes	Yes
Wildings There’s a wildling track on which a wildling counter gets advanced every time a wildling symbol appears on a revealed Westeros card. When the wildlings have advanced “to the wall”, they attack, and a Wildling card is drawn to determine what happens if the wildlings win or lose.	No	Yes	Yes

Consider that only the “advanced” level is in the real game rules, so you have to learn all the information at once.

The wildlings counter and deck of possible outcomes from a wildling attack are not strictly necessary to gameplay, they are more flavour and can be introduced later to avoid confusion when first learning the game.

Managing difficulty is an important task for any game. For board games, giving players the option to have an easier point of entry would greatly reduce frustration. It would reduce the time between wanting to play and being able to play, and allow players to have a smaller, more manageable ruleset to remember when playing for the first few times.

Different difficulty levels would also allow players to learn the game by actually playing a version of it, which makes a lot of sense. Additionally, it would extend the longevity of the game by increasing its replay value, because there are “new” things you would not yet have tried.

Be your own game designer.

The next time you are faced with the frustration of playing a really complicated board game, I encourage you to take the game apart, strip it down to its core elements, and tweak its rules to simplify it for a first playthrough. Then, when you’re ready, increase the difficulty of the purpose, and gradually add mechanics and flavour back to the game.

The board game designers have provided you with a framework and their rules, but you don’t have to listen to them. You’re in control of designing your experience, so go on, reduce that initial frustration, or take out the parts you find boring.

Design how you want to play the game.

how to make board games less painful: a game of thrones case study

Board games, it turns out, have one of the worst new player onboarding experiences of all time.

Board games need to have varying difficulty levels.

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