Unboxed

A board game designer offers an in-depth exploration of board game design and experience!

Features insights from 32 leading professionals, including the designers behind Magic: The Gathering, 7 Wonders, Shut Up & Sit Down, and more.

Gordon Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience—the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion—to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with 32 leading board game designers and critics, Calleja—himself a board game designer—provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked. 
 
After considering different conceptions of play, Calleja discusses the nature and role of attention and goes on to outline the key forms of involvement that make up the board game playing experience. In subsequent chapters, Calleja explores each of these forms of involvement, considering both the experience itself and the design considerations that bring it into being. Calleja brings this analysis together in a chapter that maps how these forms of involvement come together in the moment of gameplay, and how their combination shapes the flow of player affect. By tracing the processes by which players experience these moments of rule-mediated, imagination-fueled sociality, Calleja helps us understand the richness of the gameplay experience packed into the humble board game box.Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1 Play 1
2 Attention 23
3 Rules 45
4 Sociality 67
5 Fiction 99
6 Narrative 127
7 Materiality 163
8 Immersion 193
9 Unboxed 215
Conclusion 237
Notes 245
Bibliography 267
Index 283"Unboxed is a wonder! Calleja moves seamlessly from the philosophy of games and the human experience to nuts and bolts practical advice for designers."
—Geoff Engelstein, Adjunct Professor, NYU Game Center, and author of Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design

“Calleja showcases the voices of dozens of world-class board game creators who each share their perspectives about what makes for a truly magical board game experience. Unboxed gives you the tools to think about board games like a true connoisseur.”
—Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design, Distinguished Professor of Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon University

“Unboxed is a must-have for everyone who designs and studies board games. Packed with designer interviews and written in a precise, funny, moving voice, this emotion-centered book is nothing short of brilliant.”
—Richard Lemarchand, Associate Professor, USC Games and author of A Playful Production ProcessGordon Calleja is Associate Professor of Game Studies at the University of Malta’s Institute of Digital Games, which he founded in 2012, and the author of In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (MIT Press). A game designer at Mighty Boards, a board game design studio, he has designed and published Will Love Tear Us Apart?, a videogame adaptation of the Joy Division song, and several board games, including Posthuman Saga and Excavation Earth.