There’s a bit of a sliding, fuzzy border between what’s “content” in a boardgame. A Magic card that’s really world-specific and flavorful and has set mechanics is “content”. But maybe to some extent, so is “this chess piece moves in an L-shape and can jump”. It’s a sliding scale. I’m gonna propose that the more atomic and endlessly recombinable a game component is, the less it is “content”. The more it is just a game.
It’s not just about complexity either (but it is about tight vs loose coupling), and here’s an example that illustrates that: A jigsaw puzzle is content. Playing the same jigsaw puzzle a couple of times is fun but playing new jigsaw puzzles is even more fun. Contrast this to a tile-laying game like Dominoes, Scrabble, or Carcassonne. The “puzzle pieces” in those games fit together all kinds of ways, always new, always beautiful. So a jigsaw puzzle is more “content-driven” than those tile-laying games. You always wanna get new puzzles with new art, is the idea.
These days, board game expansions often just come with more content. “You like Luke and Leia? Well, here’s Jyn and Cassian. You like Liliana? Here’s Vraska.”
In the 00s when the board game renaissance was first blooming, they hadn’t quite figured this out yet so expansions often made games more sprawling and complicated and overwrought and eventually collapsed under their own weight. Once this got a little bit hammered out it was like a collective sigh of relief across the board gaming hobby as expansions could just provide more content, fits rights into the rest of the game, doesn’t make the game more complicated, just more varied.
But here’s the thing: the game should’ve been more varied from just the game play components alone. We shouldn’t need any expansions.
I’m getting the impression that composition is the culprit here. Baduk is the shining example here of a good game that doesn’t need any “content” expansions. With just two kinds of pieces you can make elephant eyes, tiger mouths, monkey jumps, clamps, iron pillars, stone pagodas, dumplings, sandals, ladders, tables, crane’s nests and all kinds of other shapes, and all those shapes in turn recombine or overlap in a million ways.
As soon as you encode movement patterns into coarser-grained ludemes, like Onitama does with each card showing four or more spaces a piece can move to, then bam, you have content to sell, you can start up the expansion mill and start printing money.
So for me these days when I see that a board game has lots of content and “room to expand”, I see that as a huge red flag. I don’t want each scenario to be a separate box of cards. The game should’ve been replayable out of the box. I want what happens in the game to be fun in and of itself, and that is something a good game can do that comics or movies can’t. What happens during the game, that’s what should be fun. Not “oh, I have a Vraska” but “oh, I can’t believe I fell for that bluff” or “OMG what are the odds of rolling three Yahtzees in a row!”
I don’t mind as much on digital but when tabletop has become the business of shipping an endless stream of boxes across the world, we have a 🌎🔥 problem.