I feel that I have quite a broad knowledge of the world, but I’m horrible at “small facts”. As such, Trivial Pursuit is not my game! Give me a heavy Euro on the other hand and I’m as happy as a child!

Players want to be challenged when playing a board game. This means doing something they have a chance to win, but that victory is far from guaranteed! As such they need to have the skills to compete; my skillset is for Euro games and not for Trivial Pursuit. Other people however will have a completely different skillset from me. This means that different gamers will enjoy different games, based on whether they have a decent ability of competing using the skills that the game requires.

So what are these skills? Aren’t they the same for all games?

Most certainly not!

In this post I want to go through a number of common skills / abilities that come up in board games. This can be used to recognize which skills are required for your game and to strengthen those aspects. Alternatively, when starting a new project, you can choose what abilities you want to create your challenges around.

I also hope to show that there are many more skills that you could incorporate than what most designers generally consider.

A useful skill

Not all games are designed primarily to be won. For example, a lot of “party games” are mostly designed to let the players have a good time. These games generally still can be won though (even if that winning is less important).

In this post I won’t focus on skills that will make a game more interesting or fun, only on those that help you get to the number 1 position.

1) Dexterity

Dexterity games involve the manipulation of physical object. Jenga is probably the most famous example, where you’re drawing blocks from a tower that gets closer and closer to collapsing.

Most dexterity games are “party” games – simple but highly entertaining.

That is not to say that “serious” games can’t use dexterity components. There are flavors of role playing games where with every action the players attempt, they have to remove a block from a Jenga tower; as long as the tower remains standing their characters achieve what they set out to do. But once the tower comes crashing down, the characters fail, spectacularly!

Dexterity as a skill gives very quick feedback: You know when you succeeded or not. The physicality of it is also something that appeals to players – it has that in common with rolling dice. This also makes it more interesting to watch, either as a bystander or as one of the other players; it’s much easier to see someone do something in the real world, than to imagine what they are trying to accomplish by pushing tokens around.

2) Memory

Memory comes into play when your players have to remember something. This can be the core of the game (such as the game Memory), or something that simply helps when playing (remembering how many victory points other players got in Puerto Rico). It can also be part of a larger skill such as “system analysis” as explained below, where many different game states need to be remembered after having analyzed them.

Like dexterity, many people feel that “memory” should not be a skill that is asked for in “serious” games.

3) Assessing probabilities

A lot of games use randomness, be it in the form of dice, cards or something else. This means that it’s usually possible to get an idea of whether an action is more likely to succeed or to fail. Yahtzee is a prime example of this, but it also holds for Catan.

Assessing what the probability of any given outcome is then becomes a valuable skill.

4) Mathematics

Some games require players to do (fairly) complicated sums in their mind. This can be to add up final scores, to assess probabilities (see above) or to simply see what the potential outcome of a move is.

Most people are not particular fond of “hard core mathematics” and so the common suggestion is to keep it to a minimum. However, it is certainly possible to design more niche games that do make use of this skill

5) ”Systems analysis”

Board games have many components and elements, all of which can potentially influence each other. This creates a complex “system”, which obscures what the “best” move is (and thus keeping decisions interesting. See this post for more on interesting decisions in board games).

Systems analysis then is being able to untangle this system, to see through many steps of elements influencing each other.

System analysis can be improved for a single game (system), by simply playing it a lot. By doing this players build up intuition about how elements influence each other or which pieces are more important than others when trying to achieve a certain goal. Alternatively, players can try to analyze a game (system) without having played it (much), based solely on the rules and components. This is much harder to do as it revolves much more around logic and actually working things out in the mind.

System analysis is the core skill to play many Euro games.

6) Bluffing / Reading other players

Social deduction games let players take on a hidden role, which will have objectives that differ from the other role. The gist of the game then is to try to find out which roles the other players have, whilst keeping your own a secret. This requires bluffing as well as being able to read other players.

Other games will have some of this as well, where seasoned players will try to “crawl in their opponents’ heads” to try to predict what they will do on their next turn.

As human beings are infinitely more complex than any game can ever be on its own, this is a very good way of adding depth and interesting decisions to your game.

Special notice should be given to Poker. In the basis the core skill to play Poker is “assessing probabilities”. However, because Poker is played so much (and for so much money!), people long ago figured out how the probabilities work exactly. This then brings the game to a higher level, where the probabilities are just about irrelevant (as everybody knows them) and the bluffing / reading takes center stage.

7) Knowledge

Trivial Pursuit is about “who knows most about obscure stuff”. There is a bit of randomness, but it hardly matters to the game.

In a sense knowledge is also about memory, except that here it is “memory of things that happened completely externally to the game”.

This is a post about “skills”, but knowledge is not really a skill as such, in that it cannot be trained within the game. If you assess probabilities enough you get better at them. If you do enough dexterity games you get a steadier hand. But playing knowledge games only increases your “skill” in an unintended way, namely by memorizing tidbits that have come up in previous games. To really get better at “knowledge”, you have to go out in the real world and gather it.

8) Storytelling

In Once Upon a Time players vie for the opportunity to continue with a mutual story so that they can play their cards.

Storytelling revolves around creativity and sometimes to ability to improvise. These are not skills that everybody has, or is comfortable showing off.

The best board games do create a story. In this sense the players are not “storytelling”, but they are helping to bring out a story. Bringing this story more to the forefront can help players to imagine what the game is a simulation of.

9) Humor

In Cards Against Humanity a rotating judge determines which player made the “best” completion of a sentence. This doesn’t strictly need to be humorous, but generally making something funny does help in scoring points.

Cards Against Humanity works because it’s hard not to make something funny once and awhile (even if a lot of other sentences really are just awful). A more free-form type of producing humor would run into the same problems as storytelling, in that not everybody has the ability to produce humor on-demand.

10) Drawing

While not strictly a board game, Pictionary asks players to make drawings which other players will guess. Leaning more towards dexterity, Captain Sonar requires players to draw within certain lines before they can take any further actions.

Drawing in games is usually used to convey some sort of information

11) Logical thinking

Logical thinking comes to the fore when trying to understand how a game works. It is one of the sub-skills for systems analysis (see above).

Most games also unintentionally require logic skills, as there are bound to come up situations in play that are not adequately covered by the rules / rulebook. In this case logic can help to make sense of what to do.

12) Spatial reasoning

Carcasonne gives tiles to players that they need to fit into an ever expanding “map”. Being able to quickly see where a given tile will fit then allows a player to (mentally) try out many options and thus find the best location.

Spatial reasoning comes to the fore when the location of something relative to other things is important. This can be in two dimensions (as in Carcassone) but also in three (no example comes to mind as I tend to shy away from those games. But they exist!).

Probably to most famous example of this is Chess, where location of the different pieces and their position relative to other pieces is of paramount importance.

Closing thoughts

When coming up with this list I “discovered” quite a few skills that I had never thought of as being part of board games. I feel my horizon has broadened and I hope I was able to help you do a bit of the same. I’ll certainly consider incorporating other skills than my standard of “systems analysis”.

How about you? Are there any skills that you never really thought about but that you would be interested in incorporating in a (future) game?

This post also made me realize that there are many different types of “players” out there. It’s impossible to have them all love your game, but by incorporating different skills that are required, it would be possible to speak to a larger group of people.

More importantly, this can mean that very different types of people can compete. Not so good at assessing probabilities, you can ace the drawing aspect. Bad memory? See if your spatial reasoning is still enough to beat your opponent.

Feedback please!

I’m very open to your ideas and thoughts, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter if you agree or where you think I completely missed the point?!

Hi, I’m Bastiaan. The goal of this blog is to learn about game design. That’s hopefully for you as the reader, but just as much for me as the writer.

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