A Minimalist Approach to Exploring Board Game Design

Minimalism conceptually begins in the sculpture and artwork of 1960’s New York (Meyer and Meyer, 2004) but now is used as an approach in many different areas, design, literature, architecture to name three. Strickland (2000) defines minimalism as a “style distinguished by severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of structure and texture.” It is an approach that also has been implemented as a design methodology in video games (Nealan, et al, 2011) (Carroll, 2004) (Myers, 2009). Yet, there is limited literature on minimalist board game design.

The minimalist approach is often used to create a constraint encouraging the game designers to focus on the most important core mechanics, whilst still maintaining the goal of creating a viable play experience. There is alternative opportunity for the minimalistic design approach, to be used to examine the most fundamental and basic elements of games.

This paper proposes using a minimalist approach to examine and explore the fundamental elements of board games. To do this both existing games, mechanics and systems will be analysed and new minimalist board games generated. The resulting analysis will create meaning and context for individual board game mechanics.

References
Carroll, J.M., (2014). Games as design archetypes. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, pp.197-200.
Meyer, J. and Meyer, J.S., 2004. Minimalism: art and polemics in the sixties. Yale University Press.
Myers, D., 2009. In search of a minimalist game. In DiGRA Conference.
Nealen, A., Saltsman, A. and Boxerman, E., (2011), June. Towards minimalist game design. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 38-45).
Strickland, E., 2000. Minimalism--origins. Indiana University Press.