Connecting Gameplay to Theme in Tabletop Games

I saw a depressing discussion thread recently online. I suppose that’s my fault for reading idle internet chatter; a lot of it fails to think critically about the role of certain elements in gaming.

In this case, it was about theme in games. Others have talked about how “theme” and “setting” are different, and while I agree, here I’m using theme to mean the narrative premise of a game.

Yes, you’re pushing cubes or cards or plastic miniatures around, but what’s the story structure atop these otherwise random actions? That’s the theme for our purposes here.

In any case, the discussion included a majority of people who explicitly ignore thematic text about a game, and skip over it when teaching a game.

This is depressing to me because I think connecting gameplay to theme is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of a game at a table.

I’m going to back that opinion with examples both abstract and experiential, in order to hopefully impart the importance to anyone reading.

Theme in Roleplaying Games

Theme is everything in roleplaying games…right?

It depends on who you talk to. For some, the crunchy mechanical systems are the biggest draw. They want to optimize their character for maximum damage, healing, damage absorption, or whatever else. The narrative and setting are almost secondary.

We’re going to come back to that, because I think there’s something thematic hiding in that sort of mechanical approach as well, and we can use it to our advantage.

However, for many, leading with the theme is going to make an awful lot of sense

Theme in Board Games

It’s easy to see why theme “doesn’t matter” as much in board games. It’s rarely a campaign-level experience like Dungeons & Dragons can be, for example.

Whether or not you’re in ancient Mesopotamia or Greece or the modern day, and if you’re play-acting as politicians, gangsters, or farmers may not actually have an impact on your experience with the gameplay.

At least that’s the justification for ignoring a description of the theme.

This is where the delineation between theme and setting is important to me, though. If we’re simulating the rise and fall of civilization vs. building a civilization (ignoring the eventual “fall”), the tone of those games should be wildly different.

And if you ignore these, you’re likely missing out on something deeper in terms of what a game is saying about its theme.

So ancient Greece could be the setting for both of those hypothetical games mentioned above. But the theme – that is, what tone and feeling gameplay is trying to evoke through its actions and events – informs a lot about how to approach your experience with the game.

Evaluating Design Intent in Games

Despite numerous “hybrid” designs that defy description, it’s historically true to identify certain types of games in terms of their design intent. Some of these are more explicitly theme-oriented than others.

On Mars is a popular game, and it’s an extremely complicated game with a lot of interlocking mechanisms. It’s also about exploring Mars.

Which, ok, cool, particularly if you love sci-fi and space travel as a theme. However, no one who loves On Mars is thinking “Oh boy, I always wanted to feel like an astronaut visiting Mars!”

Rather, they’re lost in the clockwork mechanical puzzle of the thing. The space travel stuff might help to justify certain mechanisms, but the mechanics are the main draw, not the theme.

Once again, I’m going to defend thematic integration even with games such as these in a moment. But I understand why some might say the theme is superfluous.

This is an example of a modern Eurogame, where the main draw is often the mechanical side of things and how they interconnect. The critique of themes being “pasted on” or superfluous follows many of them around, and it’s technically true in many instances. However, this isn’t the same as saying that theme is irrelevant to a game’s experience.

Conversely, wargames connect to their themes quite intimately. Without the conflicts they’re simulating as a backdrop, there would be no reason for the mechanics to exist as they do.

This also occasionally justifies very strange rules in wargames; it would be illogical within the whole, except that it’s simulating some element of history in a ways that doesn’t neatly fit into other rules. Here, the theme is the entire point. Everything else exists to support it.

Other genres fall somewhere along this spectrum, toward one end or the other. Games tied to popular IPs – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and so on – arguably need requisite amounts of thematic integration to pull in their thematic material in ways that come alive for the player.

If I’m playing as Frodo as he tries to dunk The Ring in Mount Doom, I’d better feel like a tiny hobbit surrounded by enemies. If I’m a killing machine that can mow down dozens of orcs single handedly, the game designer has done a very poor job of thematic integration.

Creating Excitement Through Theme

Do you know the most reliable way I’ve found of getting people excited to play a game?

A cool description of the theme. Forget mechanics. Half the time, players don’t know the first thing about a game’s mechanics. They sign up enthusiastically because of the narrative promise.

However, this requires that you actually sell a game on its thematic properties. If you’re not doing this, it’s not going to happen on its own via box art or a dry description of mechanics.

If I start teaching a game with “Ok, in this game you want the most points. The game plays in {X} rounds, and each round, we’ll each get {X} turns where you can take one of {X} actions. The first action…” then I have failed!

If someone else starts their teaching this way, they’ve also failed me a little bit. I’ll try to grasp onto a thematic link on my own, but it’s harder without a guide to provide the link between theme and mechanics.

This is also how I get people excited to play D&D, but it’s on a smaller scale. I’m not pitching them an entire campaign. I’m pitching their individual role in things. Want to play as a badass barbarian who wades into combat gleefully? Want to sing songs and make silly rhymes as a bard while you confound monsters and support your friends?

This is what gets them excited to play, and it’s about their role in the overarching story and thematic elements.

This can even work for the mechanically-minded power gamers I mentioned earlier. Get them excited to deal epic amounts of damage, for example. It’s still a thematic link, and arguably one that will also make them more interested to learn the mechanics as well. You’re making your job as teacher and guide easier.

I’ll do this for board games as well, framing my language in ways that attempt to excite players about the role(s) in the game.

This relates to good teaching via thematic intent. “In this game we play as…” is weak. “In this game, you’ll be…” is better, because it’s framing the action as what each player individually is going to be involved in. Am I manipulating stocks to become the most successful cutthroat investor? Am I an heroic bipedal mouse trying desperately to protect the kingdom from predators that are many times my size? What’s the tone? What does victory look like in a thematic sense?

What am I doing, specifically? This is how to connect players to the theme in ways that matter.

This is also why simply reading the theme text in a rulebook can fall flat. It’s not that the language itself is bad or irrelevant. It’s that there’s a lack of investment in the thematic premise, and that indifference rubs off on anyone listening.

So when I see someone say they ignore thematic context and just dive into how a game plays, I don’t doubt that these things have been irrelevant for them personally, but I disagree that they are this way by default. The potential is far greater.

Creating Understanding Through Theme

I invoked On Mars and wargames earlier for a reason. They’ll both highlight my next point well.

A mish-mash of mechanics that can take 20-40 minutes to teach well can also be difficult to absorb and understand for a new player. This is where the theme comes in.

Sure, maybe the space travel theme of On Mars could easily be something else. But you know what? The theme can help here and there to internalize certain rules and mechanics. If your rover operates in a certain way on the surface of the planet, according to certain limitations, imagining that rover is going to be easier than trying to internalize an otherwise-arbitrary series of movement restrictions.

The game’s designer, Vital Lacerda, has many complicated games like this, and his fans often invoke this idea of thematic integration. On the one hand, it sounds absurd to me, because most of them are like On Mars: even if the theme’s unique, the mechanics don’t lend themselves better to one particular theme over another.

However, I think the reason fans invoke this idea is because they’re using the theme to help them remember the rules. The specific theme may be superfluous and interchangeable, but having a coherent, consistent theme – whatever it may be – is one of the keys to the game “clicking” for gamers as they learn it.

Now wargames. One of the most complicated games I’ve ever played is Unhappy King Charles (UKC). The ironic bit here is that UKC is no more than a mid-weight wargame. Some are far more complicated.

Regardless, I was having trouble learning it from the rulebook alone. At the same time, though, I was listening to a podcast on the English Civil War, which is what the game recreates. I wanted to understand the history behind the game better, and was enjoying the research.

As I learned more, the mechanics that had been difficult for me started to slide into place. In mapping rules to historical realities, it helped me understand the designer’s reasoning better, and also helped me to internalize the whole of the rules.

And when I started playing, it really did feel like a simulation of the English Civil War. This only happened because I had a good understanding of the thematic backdrop. Stripped of its historical theme, the game would seem designed by a madman, with numerous one-off rules exceptions existing for seemingly no reason. But map those rules to history, and suddenly those same eccentricities lend depth and purpose to the game.

Application of Theme When Teaching and Playing Games

When I teach games, I’m providing little thematic touchpoints, to describe how a game is interpreting certain actions. These actions don’t simply exist as mathematical exercises, but have a narrative purpose as well.

What is that purpose? How can you bridge mechanics and themes in ways that will aid comprehension?

Humans remember stories better than, say, ordered lists. We know this from cognitive science. We forgot game rules all the time, but if we remember the thematic flow of a game, the rules will come back to use more quickly after a long absence from playing.

We also enjoy narratives that we can connect with in some emotional way. Stories captivate us. An AI voice reading numbers off of a spreadsheet doesn’t. There’s no story to latch onto.

It’s popular to think that some gamers are just at the table to do their personal math puzzles and try to get the most points, without a care for things like theme, artwork and narrative flow.

I think this is reductionist. I think even these people can appreciate a game more deeply when they have connection points to some sort of story, even if it’s only a “personal” story of what their role is during the course of a game.

Games transport us to a fictional environment, one in which everyone is asked to adopt the same premise and exist “within” that world for a time. Even fully abstract games have an in-game reality and an out-of-game one. And every game, however, short or simple, tells a story.

It behooves us to remember this, and to remember that connection to these things can increase our understanding and enjoyment of the games. Moreover, it can do the same for those we share a table with. If the latter matters at all to you – and I hope it does – I hope you’ll consider the role of theme, narrative and role in all types of games, not just those that lead with their thematic elements.