Smooth Sailing: 3 Tips For Streamlining Your Gaming Experience

What board games do you play the most, and why? Are they the ones with the best mechanics, or an immersive theme you can really appreciate? What about play time? Maybe you don’t have time (or patience) for those multi-hour epics. While longer, more complex board games are great in their own way, you probably find yourself reaching for games with a combination of quick setup, shorter playtime, and easy to teach rules. So why is that?

- Ian McEachen

If you’re a regular host of board game nights or bear the title “Bringer of Games” to your friends and family, then you understand that there’s actually quite a lot that goes into making a board game night successful. It’s the setup and teardown, the understanding of how to best teach a game so as to not be intimidating, and how to keep the game running smoothly without worrying about additional components, rules, etc. Casual games have risen in popularity for the beforementioned reasons when it comes to what I’ll be calling “board game management.”

1. Speed Up the Boarding Process

Board game setup is something designers are paying attention to, and it is seemingly one of the easier things to nail about a game. Much shorter games tend to have shorter setup and teardown, while longer games take more time. There is something elegant about some smaller games like Coup or Love Letter that allow you to jump right in without shuffling multiple decks of cards, setting up player mats, or distributing resources across a table-sized board. Likewise, games with a lot of setup can really affect a player’s experience if the directions are unclear or complicated. If you’re hosting a game night or bringing your game to one, you don’t want players to be waiting around a table while one person ponderously sets up the game.

It’s not uncommon to see games that take half an hour to set up, with Mansions of Madness or even Big Book of Madness being examples of this. (I’m not sure if the madness is a recurring factor here.) A group’s first game can easily take four hours to complete, especially including rules explanations, character and board setup, and some of the usual analysis paralysis. There are solutions out there, like token organizers, or setting the game up beforehand, but that’s not always an option.