Tabletop board games are one of the best ways to get together with friends and family. They're great for building social skills, making new friends, and spending quality time with those you care about. But what happens when you have too many or too few players to play your favorite game? We've all been there, wishing we had just one more player to fill out our games, scrambling for another game that can fit a larger group instead, or cobbling together some makeshift rules and hoping they work as well in practice as they should in theory. It doesn't matter how many times you try rescheduling because everyone has conflicting priorities and, ultimately, you just lose control over how many players show up. Adventure Together is designing tabletop board games that are modular and scalable so you can play no matter how many players want to join! The best part? You don't have to sacrifice game quality or richness of content because these tabletop board games can be adapted depending on the number of players in your group. Let's say you have 6 players, 2 of which need to leave in 3 hours - you can set up your game to accommodate a 6 player 3 hour game. Sounds great, right? But how did we achieve it?
A SCALABLE FOUNDATION
When we set out to design our games, we realized this limiting factor would take away from the kind of experiences we wanted to create for players; a seamless and magical experience everyone could enjoy together within any arbitrary timeframe. We had to think through every decision from the perspective of scalability, and not only build mechanics that worked but that scaled - and still worked. It needed to be a foundational feature of each and every system within the game. While it added a new dimension of thought to the development process, it also led to a whole new world of possibilities. The impact of every design decision became that much more significant and the mechanics actually became more streamlined and clear in their implementation as a result. We had to hone in on the mechanics that drove the overall time requirements of a game and scale them so that as player count increased the time to perform those mechanics could be decreased. Once we located the factors that contributed the most to time per game, we refined them to to give players more control over how often they would occur in one turn, round, or session. What we ended up with is a modular approach to mechanics, that gives the control over game length back to the players. So you can scale up or down and still arrive at a satisfying conclusion every play session without having to alter the gameplay loop or actions per turn in any way.
BUILDING BLOCKS
We've learned a lot about scaling tabletop board games over the years, and some mechanics work better than others when scaling. We're applying those lessons to our upcoming Kickstarter release, TimeScape, and keeping our eyes peeled for other great tabletop games that have already made it past this design hurdle for unlimited player counts. We'll be looking into what makes these tabletop games good choices for mixed groups with different size and time constraints and how they manage the additional challenges involved in designing their mechanics around scalability from turn one. I'm looking forward to discussing it here more regularly and sharing the building blocks of a more unlimited future with all of you, the Adventure Together community.
In summary, what do I think the benefits are to designing modular and scalable games:
- Designing modular tabletop board games is challenging but rewarding - players gain more control over their experience every play session
- This challenge pushes designers towards creative solutions which can make for an even better experience overall
- Scalable and modular games can be enjoyed by more players, more often. Which is good for the community and the industry as a whole.
Thanks for reading this article about tabletop games! You can check out some of our other articles about tabletop gaming right here at Adventure Together. See you next time!
Adventure Together
Adventure Together is a tabletop publishing and technology company dedicated to creating immersive gaming experiences for enthusiasts and casual gamers alike. Our flagship tabletop experience, TimeScape, is an accessible and family-friendly miniature wargame set in a captivating sci-fi and fantasy universe at the end of time. TimeScape's unique gameplay experience is enhanced by the Scape system, a modular board game system that offers endless terrain customization and replayability - so you can adventure across countless worlds. Discover the fascinating worlds of TimeScape and other exciting gaming experiences from Adventure Together by joining our community Discord or signing up for our monthly Kickstarter newsletter.
