Two boardgames that play with the box

The boardgame Perspectives is a game where players are handed different cards, all of which are different bits of evidence for a case. The players look at their cards, and they talk about what they can see, and combine the evidence to understand what's going on - they have some questions to collectively answer. Seems relevant to the forthcoming Western rise of popularity for Jubensha games! Anyway, I haven't played Perspectives yet, but I have played the tutorial – which, enjoyably, is played using the box.

What you do is you put the box in the middle of the table, such that each player can see no more than 2 sides. And then you compare what you see with each other, and so solve the mystery of the stolen Faberge egg, as depicted on the front of the box. I tried this with my housemate and it totally works! Very delightful, especially as the illustrations are not so prominent that it's possible to not clock they are doing a puzzle thing.

And especially good when Act 2 of the tutorial reveals that there is critical information within the cover art of the box!

When I started writing about this, I remembered another boardgame in my possession that also does something with the box. It's Ice Cool 2, a fun game about flicking penguin pieces around. One thing about flicking games is that they depend not only on the physical properties of the pieces, but also on the physical properties of the tabletop that they are played on. I mean, also you probably want barriers and things to aim for and things of that nature. Even shove ha'penny has a particular board that you play on. And if you're selling this as a retail game, you want the box to be a reasonable size, but the board to be as large as possible. I think you see where I'm going with this - the box is one of the components of the arena, and is clipped together with several nested boxes which fit just inside. There are little doorways in the side to allow the penguins to move between the different rooms... again, delightful.

So, because I'm me, let's ask: why is this so delightful? Well, it's because it extends the game slightly beyond the frame you expect. It's the same thing as the classic escape room bit of revealing a second room halfway through - I thought these were the limits of the game, but actually the limits are a little larger. Or you can look at it like a joke - the punchline is something that makes sense but also exists slightly outside the bounds of what was expected.

But this isn't all - in this case, it's also a thing where I get the pleasure of observing things being well-scoped, or the pleasure of watching good value engineering [1]. They came up with a pleasurable solution to getting more experience out of the same manufacturing budget! The cardboard has one more use than you expected! And I know that this meant that some tricky creative work got a little trickier because it had an extra constraint put on it. The job of doing visual design to make a boardgame look like something you wanna buy in the shop - that's a tricky thing to do. Making it also do game design at the same time - oh, it's even trickier now! What are the right proportions for the flicky arena? Hmm, good question, let's do some playtests about it. What are the right proportions for fitting on shop shelves & fitting efficiently on a standard palette? Let's do some math & send some emails. Do these two match? Errr, hopefully!

Anyway - felt good to write about a little enjoyable thing. I got a little stuck on blogging because I started writing about the larp I was recently at, and it turns out that's a big topic. Glad to be making smaller posts while I wait for that one to unclog.

[1] I went to see if I should link this to the Wikipedia page, and saw it has a picture of a smoking Grenfell Tower to illustrate the concept. Value engineering gets a bad rap, okay?

Some responses!

This looks very good, I want it:

And Illimat, which I also have on my shelf but for some reason didn't think of when writing this post:

Although also to be fair idk if I have much extra to say about it.

Also this:

Which video I haven't seen but maybe I should, it might touch on some stuff I've been looking at at work recently.