This video is three years old but I just found it. A lot of board game reviewers talking about if they are a “thinker” or a “themer”.
And by themer they mean “theme appreciator”, not “theme creator.”
Fun video!
Here’s where I am with this. To answer the question they’re looking for, I’m a thinker. I love abstract games, traditional playing cards, numbers and colors and vertices and nodes and emergent properties of systems. A good theme won’t draw me into a game while a bad theme will put me off a game.
But then to add some nuance to that: I’m much more of a “Mel” than a “Spike”. I don’t need “meaningful decisions” to have fun with a game and I don’t need the game to be a test of my puzzle-solving skills or be a vehicle to prove myself. I just want the game to have a variety of outcomes, of unpredictable, emergent outcomes.
And if a game does have a theme, I do get into it. I do read the flavor text and look at the art and keep up with the lore and story. And I love to “play pretend”. We were playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill last year and when I started like “play walking” my character from room to room and really upping how much of a dollhouse I was treating the game, at first the other players scoffed at that but quickly they got into it too. So I do appreciate and love a theme when it’s there. We play Caylus all the time and I’m like “Okay we need to go to the fairground, then the carpenter”, I really do want to know the theme behind each tile and I incorporate that in my headspace of the game. If the game has a good mapping of thematic ideas to system process magic, that’s a home run.
And as y’all know I also love RPGs and story games much more than I love board games!