by Jeff Grisenthwaite

I’ve been playing games on BGA since 2014, but it wasn’t until this past year that I made the leap to developing games on BGA.

My goal is to start a discussion about what I’ve learned about making gameplay feel just right within the unique environment of BGA, using examples from a couple of my games, Soothsayers and Positano.

Simulating that Board Game Feeling

BGA is weird.

It’s a huge collection of online games that bear little resemblance to the experience of console, PC, or mobile games. Instead, BGA strives to replicate the feeling of playing board games together in real life for all those times when we can’t actually be gaming together.

And they connect players with the whole world. One of the tenets of BGA development is to stick to pretty basic, vanilla code, in order to make the games widely accessible, regardless of players’ hardware or browsers.
For Positano, the big challenge was to capture the 3D look and feel that people love about the game but to do so in the 2D non-dynamic world of BGA.

Side-by-side images of Positano in real life and Positano on BGA
The solution was to simulate the 3D hillside and buildings simply by layering images at a fixed angle. It retains the beauty of the physical game, while keeping the technical approach as basic and widely accessible as possible.

Teach Through Play

I don’t know about you, but I try to use BGA as a shortcut to avoid reading rulebooks. The tutorials are great (shoutout to Nekonyancer!), but what can be even better is when the BGA adaptation teaches players as they play.

Here are a few techniques that help to teach the game to new players:

Tooltips: When players hover over a card or other component, showing a zoomed-in display of that component, along with explanatory text, helps players to access additional information when needed.

In Soothsayers, players can hover over any card to view detailed information about it.

Title Bar Text & Buttons: BGA’s standard convention is to present the choices available to a player on a given turn as buttons in the title bar. To help players learn the game, dynamically update the text in the title bar and the text and icons on the buttons to best inform players of their options.

In Soothsayers, buttons explain the costs and effects of each action.

Player Panels: Summarizing key information within player panels, particularly scoring, reinforces for players the important metrics to pay attention to.

In Positano, the player panels help players to understand how each building they construct affects not just their overall scores, but provides detailed scoring for sea views, gelato, and three different public goals.

Animation: Using animation in key places can help players understand the effects of their actions and notice changes in the game state. For example, in Soothsayers, when you use the Judgement tarot to steal a Fate token, the Fate token flies from the rival’s card to yours.

How To Play Rules: Because BGA automates the setup and administrative steps between turns and enforces the rules during play, the text of the How to Play tab below the game can likely be 90% shorter than the full rulebook.

Undo

Before I started development, I asked game communities within Discord and on Bluesky what are their biggest points of frustration with games on BGA. The most common complaint was when games don’t provide the ability to undo your last action or reset your turn.

There are two main reasons for providing the ability to undo at key points:

1. New players are learning the game. After seeing the consequences of their actions, they may need to retry a few turns.

2. Errant clicks. BGA is trying to simulate the tabletop game feeling with as high of fidelity as possible, which is why it feels so bad to have your turn ruined by accidentally clicking or tapping on something and having no recourse.

Not every single action needs an undo, though. Providing too many can slow down games, and players should never be able to undo an action after hidden information is revealed.

In Soothsayers, after completing your turn, a Confirm button displays with a 5 second countdown before it auto-confirms. If you’re not satisfied with your turn, you can choose to reset.


Layout Considerations

The second biggest player complaint is when BGA games require too much vertical scrolling to understand the game state, so here are a few techniques to reduce the need to scroll:

Robust Player Panels: By displaying all the key information within player panels, players often can bypass needing to view opponents’ tableaus or auxiliary boards.

In Soothsayers, the player panels display the levels of all 8 cards in each player’s tableau, who holds the Fate tokens, coins, and the number of cards in each player’s hand.

Floating Hands: Many games demand that you play a card or tile from a hand to a tableau or place on the board. By anchoring the hands to the bottom of the screen and allowing them to float over everything else, players can always view the cards in hand when making the decision for where to play them.

Responsive Design: To accommodate players on tiny mobile screens, on ultra-wide monitors, and everywhere in between, responsive design techniques should be employed to make the best use of every screen size.

In Positano, the goal cards are displayed below the beach board on mobile, but when on a larger monitor, they're displayed to the left of the hillside.

Player Preferences: We’re all different people. BGA games should reflect that by providing ample player preferences to tailor the game experience to your needs.

Soothsayers player preferences include options to change the card size, remove pulsing animations, and more.

Turn-Based Play

Some games work really well in BGA’s turn-based (asynchronous) play mode. These tend to be games with chunky turns, in which you’re making big moves each turn, as opposed to micro-decisions interrupted by other players. Turn-based play on BGA lets you luxuriate in over-analyzing your strategy without worrying about holding up the game.

A few techniques for making turn-based play go a bit smoother include:

Automate Non-Choices: By identifying the spots in the game in which players don’t have an actual choice to make, you can save everyone a lot of time by automating those decisions.

Provide a Robust Log: Sometimes days pass between turns, and other times players are playing multiple turn-based instances of the same game at once, so it’s important to provide a detailed, easy-to-scan log that players can use to catch up on the most recent turns.

In Soothsayers, the log provides small renditions of the cards drafted or played to make it easier to scan.

Simultaneous Decisions: BGA offers a mode in which players can all take their turns at the same time, which can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a turn-based game.

Developing on BGA

Programming games on BGA is not easy. It takes a long time, and the documentation could be more robust. The upside is that BGA connects your game with a global audience who can compete at the highest levels.

My hope with this article is to share what I’ve learned as I strive to provide an ideal BGA experience for my own games.

I’m also hoping to start a conversation! What else can developers do to provide better BGA experiences?

Jeff Grisenthwaite is the designer of Positano and Soothsayers, both available in stores and on BoardGameArena.

by Jeff Grisenthwaite

There’s something magical about a good pub trivia night. You and your crew huddle together, heartily debate the answers, and marvel at each other’s unexpected pockets of deep knowledge. You groan together when you’re wrong and send up a loud cheer when that answer that you pulled out of your @$$ turns out to be right.

These are the feelings that I aimed to capture and bring home with OUTFOX the FOX.

My Brother is My Target Audience
I made this game for my brother, Mike.

Growing up, he was the popular jock, and I, as you might surmise, was the nerd.

When it comes to games, he certainly enjoys them but he doesn’t want a bunch of rules to get in the way of a good time. The games he plays are easy to learn, promote strong interaction among all the players, and set the stage for dramatic or hilarious moments. And his whole family really likes trivia.

I wanted to make a game that Mike would love. If I could make a trivia party game that BOTH of us loved, I knew it could be a hit.

Hold Your Horses
My first prototype was horse-racing themed and featured top 10 lists, such as:
• Countries with the largest populations
• Movies with the highest ratings on IMDb
• The most popular sports in the world

The game provided three of the ten answers in random order and asked each player to come up with an answer and write it on a mini-whiteboard. Then players could place horse-racing style bets for which of those answers would be highest in the top 10 list.

Early prototype that featured horse-race style betting that was far too complicated.
Players would get points for both:
• Winning their bet.
• Getting other players to bet on their written answer.

This initial prototype (like nearly all initial prototypes) had some big problems:
• It didn’t feel anything like pub trivia night due to the lack of teamwork.
• Betting was way too complicated.
• Each player struggled to individually come up with answers and place bets for questions that were outside their area of expertise.

But there were some seeds of fun in that problematic first prototype. If I could solve those problems, there could be a great game on the other side.

Get Foxy
My goals for my next iteration were:
1. Infuse a lot more teamwork
2. Make the trivia easier
3. Simplify the rules

I restructured the game into a one-vs-many format, in which each round pits the current question reader vs. everyone else.

I shrunk the question from top 10 lists to top five lists and provided all five answers. The question reader gets to pick from three different questions to give them a chance to pick a familiar subject. They secretly look at the top five answers on the back of the card and think up a fake answer.

All six answers (five real + one fake) are read aloud in a random order and written on mini-whiteboards. Then everyone else gets to team up to guess the order of the top five list and which of the answers is fake.

Letting everyone team up to answer the question accomplished two things quite well:
• It made tricky trivia questions easier by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd.
• It recreated the collaborative, sometimes raucous, atmosphere of a great pub trivia night.

For the theme, I swapped out horses for a fox to lean into the sly feeling that you get when you fool everyone else with your fake answer (now referred to as “The Fox”).

I ran a number of playtests at Break My Game, Protospiel Chicago, the Chicagoland Boardgame Designers and Playtesters Meetup, and with friends and extended family, including, of course, my brother. As I iterated and improved upon the game, I was finding that players were loving the lively team debates to rank the top five lists, and they found particular joy in coming up with fake answers that tricked all their friends.

My niece, Chloe, was totally right about this one. We should have listened to her!
It was time to start showing my prototype to the world.

Contest Winner
I entered the game in a design contest from The Board Game Workshop. At the time, it was called Fox Five. Here’s my sell sheet and pitch video:

The sell sheet for my design contest submission.
Youtube VideoMy 2-minute overview video for the design contest submission.
Happily, my game won first place for the light game category. Even better, the prize for the winning entries was the chance to speed pitch in front of several publishers, including Curt Covert, the owner of Smirk & Dagger.

Curt immediately saw potential for the game, and we started discussing what would need to be true for it to be published by Smirk & Dagger.

Working with Smirk & Dagger
Curt’s biggest piece of feedback was that we should replace many of the questions that are more “things you learn in school” with questions that are more likely to incite amusing debates and hilarious moments for the players. This led to questions like:
• Gross things that the most people admit to doing in public
• Funniest English words according to a scientific study
• The most boring things in life

Additionally, we collaborated to expand the number of questions to 250, so that you could play many, many games with fresh questions each time. Finally, we refined the scoring to simplify the rules and ensure that everyone has a chance to come back from behind.

The published components of OUTFOX the FOX are great. It packs a lot of fun into a small box!
By my reckoning, the last great trivia game we had was Wits & Wagers by Dominic Crapuchettes, released over 20 years ago. We’re way past due for a new trivia game to test our knowledge and provide the kind of atmosphere to make us cheer, groan and laugh with our friends.

My hope is that OUTFOX the FOX can be this game for the world. I want everyone to be able to experience the joy of a great pub trivia night in the comfort of their own homes.

And I want to thank my brother for being the inspiration to make that happen!