As our first blog of many, we wanted to start with a topic that’s highly relevant and related to the core principles that made Hexopolis the board game it is today. We hope you enjoy it.

so, what’s a minimalist board game?

Minimalism is broadly described as the practice of removing elements from a creation with the intention of create more space and overall capacity for the things that support that creation’s purpose. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, check out this blog by Suzana Lazarevska that explains it in a neat way.

A minimalist board game is essentially applying these concepts so that it can achieve a more intentional design all while using fewer components. By removing any unnecessary bells and whistles, the game becomes less muddled and its best attributes are given room to shine. This applies to your game’s rules and mechanics, but can also be extended to aspects such as box design and aesthetic components. Take this minimalist redesign of Hasbro’s cult-classic Scrabble by boredpanda’s Mr Dodd as an example:

This redesign does not change how Scrabble is played, but makes everything left after subtraction that much more impactful and important. For example, the shape of the letter tiles and their ability to form words is brought front-and-center to the audience’s attention.

Created with minimalism as a driving focus and design by subtraction as a method to achieve it, Hexopolis seeks to entertain and create new challenges for players with only the essential components of a great board game. For that reason, we wanted to share with you 5 key principles that Andrew used when he designed Hexopolis almost 2 years ago. We hope you find them helpful:

1. Don’t write anything down

When you set out to design a board game, the creative person you are is going to come up with a lot of ideas for prototypes. As you excitedly share one idea after another with designers and friends, you might be thrilled to find a lot of them sharing in your enthusiasm by telling you to keep a journal so as to record all of these ideas so that you’re sure to remember them down the line. We advise you not to do that! Strange, right?

The fact of the matter is that as a designer, your creativity rarely has an off switch, and you’ll quickly find yourself bombarded with a near-endless flow of ideas once you get rolling, not knowing which to choose over the other. Some of them might be promising, others less so. If you begin writing all of them down, you’re likely to get overwhelmed later down the line when the time comes to choose one of them and move forward with it.

On the other hand, if you avoid recording everything right from the beginning, you’ll find that while most ideas come and go, a handful of them will continue to stick even months after having first popped into your head. This is your mind serving you as the best filter possible. If an idea seemed brilliant in the moment but you forgot about it after just a few days or weeks, then it probably wasn’t that good to begin with. However, if an idea is keeping you awake at night because you can’t stop considering all of the possibilities and mechanics it opens up, there’s a chance it’ll do the same to your players.

2. form Follows function

When designing anything from an iPhone to a table to an opera house, the designer is faced with an important decision: should this creation be designed with its form serving as the guiding confines within which it’ll be planned and built, or should its function be the guiding factor? In other words, does the designer prioritize the creation’s beauty and how it aesthetically looks and fits into its surrounding environment, or should they prioritize utility and derive aesthetics afterwards?

The general rule for minimalist board games is to start with function and have form follow afterwards. Consider that every time you iterate upon your game’s design, there are possibilities of needing to change pieces, materials, board sizes, and the general physical form it takes. Now imagine you not only have to design this object but also decide how it functions and why each of its physical components works the way they do with an outcome in mind. If you’ve worked your way backwards from form to function, you’ll find that some of your game’s aesthetic elements lose their purpose in later iterations, while some of them may not be suitable for integrating your game’s functionality.

On the other hand, when form follows function, it ensures that the mechanics of your game will be at the core of the message that it brings to your audience. We already established that minimalism in general puts a primary focus on purpose with everything else simply being a byproduct. This means that for your game to be minimalist, its function and the purpose it serves need to be definitive before you can decide how it looks.

For more on this topic, we encourage you to read the explanation laid out in this article by Brandon Rollins from Pangea Board Games, where the author uses the iterative nature of board game design to answer the form vs. function argument.

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3. Everything needs to support the core mechanic

Now that you’re designing a minimalist board game, you need to determine how things progress mechanically. Just like how Checkers revolves around jumping over pieces and Chutes and Ladders is known for players moving up and down ladders, your game needs a core mechanic that will stick in players’ minds. Moreover, if you really want your game to be minimalist in nature, that should ideally be the only core mechanic that is explored through moments of play.

A great example of a game with a strong core mechanic is Super Mario Bros., where all gameplay revolves around jumping, whether it’s to break blocks, defeat enemies, or overcome obstacles. Even other abilities in the game support this core mechanic through their design. For instance, one of Mario’s power-ups has him shooting fireballs downwards at an inconvenient 45-degree angle, encouraging the player to jump for optimal aiming and once again supporting the game’s core mechanic.

In Hexopolis, the core mechanic is stacking. This gesture is repeated whenever players build up towers for vertical leverage, fit their chip onto an adjacent cell, or override connectors to alter the board’s logic. The game goes so far as to support the stacking mechanic through its box design.

If you begin to add multiple core mechanics, your game is at risk of becoming chaotic and unfocused. An overwhelming number of factors will then render it difficult to predict the game logic and therefore prevent you from playing with intentionality, whereas the minimalist approach of centering everything around a strong core mechanic allows players to spend less time learning your game’s basic rules and more time mastering it.

4. Keep an open mind, with exceptions

When you’re working on a game, it’s more often than not essential to move forward quickly and iterate rapidly. To avoid being faced with an overwhelming amount of uncertainty down the line, it can be very beneficial to settle some decisions early on in the iterative process so as to build a strong foundation on top of which you can then innovate, all while keeping a few immutable parts that you can keep as a reference.

Back when Hexopolis wasn’t yet called Hexopolis and players competed by forming mathematical expressions, Andrew didn’t feel particularly attached to it involving numbers. However, he was certain about the strategic as well as creative aspects of the game through which players would form a unique board with each round. Identifying those aspects he was sure he wanted to keep helped him make certain design decisions more easily down the line. For example, it helped him make the choice of removing the mathematical aspect of the game almost entirely, as the obligation of assembling formulas limited the building options that were available to players. Instead, he decided to abstract the game even further by swapping out mathematical operators for paths and walls, specifically because it would best adhere to the building aspect of the game that he had decided to preserve early in development.

Image: Early play-testing of Hexopolis mechanics

Thanks for reading our first article! We hope you enjoyed it and look forward to catching up with you on our next blog post a month from now.

Sincerely,
The Hexopolis Team