Spatial Systems

Many games have boards made of spaces, on which players place or move pieces.  These are some of the many types of spatial system.

What is a spatial system?

A spatial system is really just the relationships that all the spaces on the board have to each other. This creates enormous intricacy in the game, but it's also very easy to understand, as players understand which spaces are adjacent. This means spatial systems have an extraordinary Depth:Complexity ratio.

Chess, Go, and Scrabble are games that players can spend a lifetime playing. It's no coincidence that they all have spatial systems.

Beware

Many designers (myself included) instinctively try to represent a theme as it is in the real world — a spatial environment.

However, spatial systems have profound consequences for a game. This includes a plethora of hidden downsides. I've fallen into many of the traps created by using a spatial system, that I simply didn't understand at the time.

Spatial systems typically require a board, and pieces, which add significantly to a game's component costs. Spatial systems can also necessitate vast rules complexity and information overload.

Could your game work without a spatial system? It might sound strange to abstract physical space away like this, but I strongly recommend you do it.

When Through the Ages was released, it was touted as being "just like the computer game Civilization... but without a map". I was as incredulous as anyone, but it really does work.

If you must include a spatial element in your game, the game should be about the spatial element. It must really matter where things are.

In my farm game, you put things on your land. In other games, the placement matters. In my game, I decided that it was a layer of complexity I didn't want. So, in my game, you can put things on any empty space, and it doesn't matter. The complexity of the game is elsewhere.

1D spatial systems

If you do want to use a spatial system, consider using a simpler spatial system, such as 1D (a line or loop), rather than a full 2D one. A 1D spatial system is still a significant game component.

In Boss Monster, players build a 1D dungeon. It's a line of Room cards. The enemy attacks the dungeon, starting at one end, and progresses through the rooms in order (and hopefully not right to the end).

2D spatial systems: Placement

In a placement game, the players place pieces on a board, but those pieces don't move.

In Blokus, players place Tetris-shaped pieces on a grid, but they can (and must) connect each subsequent piece to the corner of a piece they placed previously. The player who gets rid of the most pieces before the board clogs up, is the winner. 

Placement allows full access to the board, giving the player lots of choices, and it doesn't require (often complex) movement or range rules. The shapes and spatial relationships formed by these pieces can be made to matter, and can be the core of the game. There are some great medium-light games, like Carcassonne, Reef, Azul that combine object placement with a simple scoring system.

Placement is the only 2D spatial system that I would recommend to newer designers.

2D spatial systems: Multiple movable units

Think of Chess, or the units in a war game. Each player has multiple movable units.

This kind of spatial system has a massive component and complexity cost. I've only seen a few such games that are less than medium weight.

Having multiple moveable units forces you to make a very specific kind of game.

Moving all those pieces at least a few times each will likely require a long game.

This kind of game is likely also very thinky, as the pieces are known information, and the players will calculate their moves (slowly), rather than intuit them.

You will likely need to include rules for "range" in your game. Even if done simply, this can be complex, and create work. I suggest "range" be limited to two spaces away, if you must have it. Anything more, and players can't work it out easily enough.

You can overcome some of these problems, by limiting these factors in some way.

Chess has almost the simplest possible movement rules for each piece, and only moves one piece per turn. It's still very thinky and slow.

In Santorini, the board is only 5x5, and each player has two movable workers.

2D spatial systems: One movable unit

In some of these games, the player has only a single piece, and the game is about travelling.

In Cluedo, each player has a piece, that they move around a house.

This kind of game is riddled with fundamental problems, that you will need to overcome. I've tried many times to build this kind of game.

Why does the player want to move at all?

When they find a good spot, why don't they just stay there, and just ignore movement?

Is moving actually fun?

You'll need to force or incentivise movement somehow. You can put resources on the board, that the player "gathers" like Pac-Man (or you can "disable" the spaces they use). This is a work step in every turn. You can make the game a race, or make movement to some other point the overriding goal. This works, but it destroys the fun of just being able to go out and explore.

In Clank! In Space, the players move across a spaceship, to get an artifact, and then get out in time.

The most fundamental problem is that the player has to make a journey, before doing what they want to do. A journey sounds cool, but it's really boring.

In one of my prototypes, players realistically moved around a town full of interesting and thematic spaces. They could move a few spaces at once. I never understood why this game wasn't good, but later, I realised the spatial system had crippled the players' access. They couldn't do what they wanted. Despite it being very thematic and interesting, the spatial board was just serving as a way to greatly limit the players' ability to do things. This system also reduced the pace of the game to a crawl. Players wanted to do something, but had to spend four turns walking across the board, to get there.

You need to have lots of interesting things happen during the journey. The game must be about the journey, because the destination is slow and boring. The interesting stuff cannot be at the destination. It must be present in every turn. I learned this one the hard way.

In Clank! In Space, the players use cards from their deck to move them each turn, but they also buy a new card from the card row. In a sense, the movement is only half the game. The other half is this deck-building element.

In my adventure game, the player will draw interesting cards as they travel. More importantly, they're managing their resources as they go. This is a complex mini-game, that keeps the players interested as they travel. Update: it wasn't fun enough.

Even if you do all this, how do you add interaction to the game? This is a game, after all. Travelling games tend to be inherently solitaire. Sure, you can have the players fight each other, but surely they'd have to be near each other on the map. How often will this happen? Do you actually want fighting in your game? And, if you do any kind of spatial interaction between the players, your board just becomes an arena, not a map for a journey.

If you're just letting the players explore, which I've discovered is the most fun, why do they actually want to go somewhere? Each part of the board must be different, and do markedly different things. Your dungeon and forest might be different, but if the player can just search for treasure in the forest, why make the journey to the dungeon? You need to make each area of the board serve a different purpose, so the players must move between them.

Just don't make a game where one or more things move around on a board.

If your game idea represents a place, just make it a board on which you can go anywhere. Do not have "movement".

In my gangster game, the board is a city. You can literally just put your piece anywhere, and visit that place. There is no "movement", but the board still feels like a city.