This video is sponsored by Brilliant. Board games have been a part of human culture for thousands of years. The

oldest record of a board game we know of, Senet, dates back to 3500 BC from

ancient Egypt, and you can still play it now. In fact, it's got a rating of 5.8 out

of 10 on Board Game Geek, which is pretty good for a game that's 5,500

years old. Although we're not sure these are the original rules, as there's no actual written record of them; we're just

kind of guessing what they might be. We do know that throughout history, tabletop games have served as entertainment,

education, and a way to bring people together. And nowadays, there's a huge range of different games, and I've been a

fan of board games for most of my life, so I wanted to make a map of board games to see if I could capture this vast domain

and make sense of it. Also, I've just released my own board game called *Stabber in the Cabin*, which is available

now. More details on that later in the video. Weirdly, the name "board game" is a bit of a misnomer, as they don't always

contain boards. If you go into a board game shop, there'll be loads of games which just contain cards. So generally,

board games can include some combination of a board, cards, dice, playing pieces, but not necessarily any of them. And a lot of

games also use a wide range of other components like timers, spinners, or a load of other things. The general theme

of this map is that all of the borders are a bit fuzzy, but I've tried my best to structure them

somehow. And we'll start our journey with the abstract games, which carry the name "abstract" because they tend to be light

on story and theme and focus on defining a set of rules that pit players against each other as they try to outwit each

other to achieve a certain goal. Chess is perhaps the most famous board game and is an example of an elimination game

where you're trying to take your opponent's pieces. Today, chess is a pure logical strategy game with no randomness

or hidden knowledge. But interestingly, there are thousands of chess variations people have played throughout history, and some of the early versions used dice

for a random element. The game Go is probably the most famous territory control game where you're trying to control as much of the

board as possible. In position games, you don't capture your opponent's pieces; you just maneuver your pieces until the

opponent can't go anymore. Count and capture, or Mancala games, are a family of games where you move glass beads from one

pot to another to try and capture as many as you can. In alignment games like Noughts and Crosses or Connect 4, players are

trying to connect a certain number of their pieces or symbols together. And less well-known are connection or configuration games, which involve trying

to connect pieces across a board or configure pieces in certain arrangements. In the abstract games, I'm also putting

pencil and paper games like Dots and Boxes, which got me and my friends through many tedious lectures. But paper and pencil games are very

versatile. Another example is the word game Hangman. So these aren't restricted just to abstract games. Similarly, Yahtzee

is an example of an abstract roll-and-write game which involves rolling dice and checking the results against a list, but

there are now lots of themed roll-and-write games where you use the results of the dice to generate parts of a house

you're building or doing a dungeon crawl, which this takes them outside of the abstract realm. In fact, categorizing

Board games are really difficult, and I think the reason for this is because they reflect human creativity. Like in the other maps I've

made, um, of different areas of science, there's a baked-in structure that you get from the nature of reality, like

genetics for the map of plants. But with board games, a big part of what's fun about different games is their novelty.

So what I found with this map is that the structure isn't the games themselves, but the common elements

of game design which crop up in many different kinds of games. So any specific game is some combination of these

different game design elements. And so these design elements are what we're going to focus on in this map. A good

example of a design element comes from 'cross and circle' games where you try and be the first to get your piece or pieces

around a board and home again. An example is Pachisi, a traditional Indian game dating from the 16th century, which was then

modified in Victorian England into the game Ludo. Interestingly, Snakes and Ladders also comes from ancient India, where it

was used to teach children about morality; the snakes and ladders being vices and virtues on the way to

salvation. Also, did you know Monopoly originally came from another game called The Landlord's Game, which was designed to

show the evils of capitalism? And Tarot cards were originally used for gaming, not divination, which they're known for now.

But I'm getting sidetracked. The point I want to make is that today the concept of moving pieces around a board has been

used by so many games; it's kind of the default picture of what a board game is. But fortunately, this picture is wearing

out because since the mid-90s, people have invented and modified loads of new design elements, which we'll look at in

The next section, which I've called optimization games. A common theme between many modern games is that they

make the players compete with each other to solve some kind of optimization problem, where you're often trying to get

the most victory points or maximize some other win condition. One example is worker placement, made famous by Carcassonne, where

you have a limited number of worker pieces which you can place to control territory or do jobs, but they're stuck

on the board and you can only get them back when they've completed their goal. So you need to optimize where you place

your workers for maximum points. Similar to this is resource management, made famous by Settlers of Catan, where

you gain resources over time and you can spend these on building your settlement, but also the places you build your

settlement then dictates what resources you get, and this is a feedback loop you need to optimize for victory. In tile-

based games, the skill is to place tiles in an optimal configuration to fit them together. Again, Carcassonne is a great

example of this, where strategic tile placement is another core element to the game strategy. Network and route building was

made famous by the game Ticket to Ride, where you try and develop connected routes between destinations. Turn order claiming is a

mechanic in games where there's an advantage to going first, typically in games where you're competing for the

selection of moves or resources. So there's a strategy in these games to be the first player in the next turn. In

race games like The Quest for El Dorado, you're competing with other players to get from one place to another as fast as

possible using some mechanics. And in engine-builder games, you're trying to build combinations of actions or resources that cascade when you

Activate them, and you're trying to optimize better combos than the other players, similar to engine-building games, deck-building games, or drafting games

like Dominion or Seven Wonders, where you try and build a powerful deck of cards, either by using basic cards to buy more

powerful cards or by taking turns to pick a card before you pass them along to the next player, again trying to

get as many victory points as possible using some mechanics. Now, going further in that direction, you get to the realm of

trading or customizable card games like Magic or Pokémon. But I'd say these are distinct from board games because, as well as the game,

they have elements of collecting cards and hunting for or trading rare cards, so I've put them

slightly outside the domain of board games. And finally, there are push-your-luck games like Quacks of Quedlinburg

where you have to balance the benefits of forging ahead against the risk of being penalized for pushing too far,

which is kind of a gambling mechanic. In fact, it's worth mentioning gambling games because the history of

board games is intertwined with that of gambling. Backgammon is a really good example of a game that was designed with

gambling in mind but is mostly now played just as a board game. And also, I have to mention poker because that's one

of my favorite games. But if you've ever been to a casino, you know that there's a whole world of gambling games out there

which also fall outside the scope of this map. Now I want to look at another important aspect of board game design:

the interactions between players, which is a fun part of many games. This can come in the form of trading, like in

Settlers of Catan, where you can exchange resources with other players and are free to haggle over the exchange rate.

word for sheep, then there are games where players have to try and outbid each other in auction games like Power Grid, or competing in share buying like in the game Stockpile, and negotiation like in Diplomacy, where a lot of the strategy is

in making alliances with other players and strategically breaking these alliances at the right moments. Then we have storytelling games

like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which are weighted heavily on the setting rather than strategic rules and play almost like Choose Your Own

Adventure books. Now I can't mention storytelling games without talking about role-playing games like Dungeons and

Dragons, which I've also put outside the realm of board games because, although role-playing games share a lot of

similar features to board games—dice, rules, and sometimes boards and miniatures—the core of role-playing games are the imaginative storytelling

and improvisation, which I think sets them apart from traditional board games. In fact, there are many other kinds of

tabletop games that, although similar to board games, would need their own entire category. Miniatures and war games are similar to

strategy board games but tend to have much more involved rule sets than board games and are often as much about

collecting and painting the miniatures and creating elaborate battlefields as they are about playing the game. Although

you do get miniatures in board games, and you also get wargame-style board games too, so again, blurry boundaries, but I

wouldn't consider, say, Warhammer to be a board game. But you also get wargames which, instead of having miniatures, have

more abstract counters and are more like simulation games. In fact, simulation games are an entire category to themselves and aren't always about war;

you can make a game to simulate any system, but the focus of simulation games is more on the accuracy of the

simulation rather than for entertainment. Back to the board games, we also have many sneaky mechanics that play around with hidden information for

example, bluffing games like Liar's Dice, which reward deceitfulness where success depends on your ability to strategically lie to your friends, or hidden movement

games like Scotland Yard, where one player is the criminal secretly moving around the board and the other players are detectives who have to try and track

them down by guessing where they are. And there are many social deduction or hidden role games like Werewolf, where

one or more players are secretly trying to sabotage or kill the other players. Now, I'm a massive fan of these kinds of

games, so much so I've made my own game in this realm called *Stabbing in the Cabin*, which is a kind of cabin-in-the-

woods-style slasher film where I've taken the mechanic of, um, a secret murderer, but I've put it on a board, so there's also

some logical deduction involved as well as the social deduction that you get normally. A big part of these games is

going on vibes to try and work out who the murderer is, but because the secret stabber can only stab people in

neighboring rooms, you can use logical deduction to figure out who the secret stabber is. And because each turn you're

The Fascinating Map of Board Games

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