No, this isn’t about storing your board games. This isn’t about those kids games that have water in them. Instead, I want to talk about board game design. This isn’t a design diary, but I want to touch on two ways that board games can be designed and how a lot of them run the range on this. Mainly, because, I think for some people, they will lean towards either a nice cleanly designed board game or a mess board game.

Clean and Messy Design

What do those two terms mean when it comes to how a board game is made? Is this something that is inherently in every board game out there?

I’ll start with the second question, every board game has some level of clean or messy design. It is more used to describe how polished a board game feels, how tight the mechanics are. So every game has mechanics clean design or messy design is how we talk about them.

Clean Design

A board game with clean design is one that almost strips down the game to the main mechanics. Those mechanics are then highly polished so that there aren’t any or maybe exceptions to the rules. And the rules can be written in a clean and concise way. This sort of design is really focused on making a game that is easy to remember the rules and that you won’t have questions when playing if you know the rules well enough. It is very focused on neat, tight, game play more so over theme.

Messy Design

Messy Design is the opposite of that. It is really trying to push how a game is thematically. That means that choices are made in the design of the game aren’t always going to be the most straight forward. Often times a game is going to do things to keep the theme of the game. This creates a messier design space and creates exceptions. It also means that there are things in the game that might not be able to be found in the rulebook. Instead it’s more asking the question, if there isn’t a rule for it, what makes the most sense thematically, or what is worse for me as a player?

Which is Better?

I think it’s a common idea that a game with a cleaner design, or some people, is going to be the better game. Or that the ones with cleaner designs should be the better games. I say that neither of them is better or worse. Both have their advantages, and both have their flaws.

Clean Design

With a clean design that is generally going to lend itself really well towards more of a gateway style game or a Euro game. They are the ones that people can get into easily because they are used to games having a pretty specific ruleset when coming from games like Clue, Monopoly, and Scrabble. And when teaching new players some of their first modern board games, I go for that sort of game.

But, the downside is that these games can seem limited. When the rules are written too cleanly, it can mean that the games are generally going to play in a consistent manner. This can mean that the game has limited plays in it because it’ll play out the same. Clean design can be boring at times as well. It doesn’t feel like there is a soul to the game, it just feels like mechanics. Finally, a too clean design means that when something stands out as messy or unbalanced, it’s really obvious.

One game that is kind of like that is Tapestry. Tapestry, and Stonemaier games in generally have really clean designs. Maybe less so on Tapestry, but with Tapestry, the different groups you play are unbalanced. They had to come out with additional rules after the fact to balance out the different groups. Why, because it was glaringly obvious in a game that is so focused on mechanics.

Messy Design

Messy, like I’ve talked about, is going to be all about the thematic nature of a game. It means that what feels right for the setting of the game is what is right for the game. Whereas clean was more gateway, these are the big games on the shelf that everyone stops to look at. Even from the box cover, they draw you into the game and make you excited to play it.

There are, of course, downsides. The main one is that a game like this is harder to get into. I know board games well, so I can learn rules well. But for a new player, it won’t seem right that there isn’t a direct or correct answer to something. That doesn’t seem right for a game that has a massive amount of rules, which can happen fairly often. And when they do try and cover all the exceptions, what is when you get a 50 page rule book.

One game that stands out to me as having a messier design, not always in a great way, is Seafall. That game wants you to feel like pirates, but they manage to create a rulebook that makes it hard to learn how to play the game. And when playing the game, the direction of what you should do and how the story comes out doesn’t work well. Some of this is that they didn’t playtest the whole thing together, but some of it is that they wanted to create a legacy game that was a sandbox.

Which Do I Prefer?

I prefer my games to be a bit messier. Games when they can be broken are interesting to me. I don’t want the games to break every time, but once in a while, if someone gets the right combo, it can be a blast. But more so than me loving a ruleset that has lots of questions with it, it is more me loving games that are very thematic.

A game with too clean a ruleset is boring to me. Not to pick on Stonemaier games, but Charterstone is a great example of this. I love legacy games. But Charterstone is just okay. Charterstone pretends to have a story about building the best part of a town for a king. Then you pick something to either please or annoy the king at the end of each game. There is no story, in fact, it might have been better without any story. Charterstone is a pretty simple mechanical game. So while I like how it plays, playing through all the games to get to the end is a lot. It doesn’t feel like you are progressing, just adding.

Compare that to something like Tainted Grail. There is some to learn to play the game, but most of what you are doing is flipping through things and reading story. The story drives the game and there are things that happen in the story that don’t always make perfect sense mechanically. The game regularly gives you ways to break the rules of the game. But to me, that is way more fun. I can dive into it and see so many unique things and I feel like I’m part of the story and the world that I’m immersed in, in Tainted Grail.

How About You?

Do you prefer that your games have a clean design or a messy design? Obviously there is a spectrum there, Seafall was a bit too much of a mess for me at times. But what direction do you lean?

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.