Applying Sanderson's Laws to Board Game Design
Brandon Sanderson, an author famous for his magic systems, came up with three laws for writing a magic system. They are, in order:
- Your ability to solve problems with magic is proportional to the reader's understanding of that magic
- Limitations are more interesting than powers
- Expand what you have before you add something new
These laws apply just as well to game design. Let's look at how.
The First Law
Sanderson's first law states that magic requires foreshadowing, or it does not feel like a fair solution to a problem. My favorite example is in Star Wars Episode 9, where Rey uses the Force to heal an injured snake-like creature threatening them underground. That scene felt cheap because no preceding movie established that the Force could heal, making it seem like the ability was made up on the spot to solve a problem.
Foreshadowing is similarly important in games. The main difference is that in fiction, foreshadowing makes solutions feel fair, whereas in games, it applies to problems. In games driven by a random deck of cards like Spirit Island, Pandemic, or Galaxy Trucker, it is important to give players hints about upcoming cards. Foreshadowing also clarifies what opponents can threaten in games with negative player interactions, so attacks feel interactive rather than arbitrary.
If I had to reformulate the first law for game design, I would probably say something like:
Perceived Fairness = Foreshadowing / Magnitude
Little threats do not need much foreshadowing, while major threats need a lot. Spirit Island is a good example because it clearly foreshadows the invaders' actions. It uses a deck of invader cards that slide across a track one by one. The first time you draw a card, it determines the land type where an explorer appears. In the next round, invaders build a town or city on that land. In the round after, they raze it, causing blight. Each stage is a greater threat: explorers are easy to kill, towns and cities are harder, and blight is very difficult to remove. Since each stage has more foreshadowing than the last, it feels fair. If invaders drew a card and immediately blighted the land, it would feel arbitrary.
The Second Law
Sanderson's second law says limitations or costs are more narratively interesting than abilities. Games are, by nature, sets of rules that restrict what players can do. A game with no restrictions is not a game: limits make games interesting. Spirit Island is fun because your innate powers don't work unless you play the right elements. Heat: Pedal to the Metal is fun because you must limit your speed around corners. Carcassonne is fun because you cannot add meeples directly to occupied features; you have to connect them instead.
My game, Weavers, was inspired partly by the idea that costs are more interesting than abilities. It was about dueling wizards, but cards had only four effects: deal damage, block damage, deal a status effect, and remove a status effect (with five different status effects). The game's complexity focused on how to access these effects, requiring producing certain symbols in a precise sequence. This allowed "weaving" spells together to cast them more efficiently.
To be clear, players like having special abilities that do cool things, but those cool things derive their appeal from the game's limits. Abilities are fun when they break the limits the game has established. Without those limits, the abilities are meaningless. The Second Law does not need changes to work for game design, but if I had to reword it, I would say something like:
Fun comes from obstacles, not actions.
A game consists of goals, actions to achieve them, and obstacles to overcome. The most important part is the obstacles, not the actions or goals. If obstacles are too easy, the game is trivial; if insurmountable, it is frustrating. The Second Law means focusing on obstacles first when developing a game concept, as they define the game.
The Third Law
Sanderson's Third Law centers on exploring the consequences of a magic system rather than adding more to it. In board games, this means not diluting a game's focus by adding too many systems. Elaborate only the systems essential to the game and abstract the rest. Players have limited attention, and dividing it among multiple systems is wasteful. The best part of your game deserves most of their attention. Elaborate other systems only as much as necessary to support the core system.
When I iterate on games, I always look first for things I can cut, and my feedback on other designers' prototypes often highlights opportunities to remove or abstract elements. It is essential to identify the most compelling parts of a game so you can strip away everything else. For game design, I would rephrase the Third Law as:
Elaborate on the core of your game and abstract the rest
Abstraction does not always mean removing mechanics; it sometimes means finding simpler ways to represent them. While developing my tactical miniatures wargame, Junkernauts, I originally had a combat system involving two damage types, tools with different damage resistance, and attack rolls that scaled with the number of melee or ranged weapons attached to a bot. But the mechanics of dealing damage aren't the fun part of the game, so I abstracted it to a system where bots get a fixed number of attack dice, all tools take the same amount of damage to remove, and all damage works the same way.
Conclusion
There are many overlaps between game design and writing fiction, and many of the same principles apply to both. Sanderson's Laws focus on magic systems, but they are really just special applications of more general principles that apply to narratives. Much of what is true for writing fiction applies to designing games, and vice versa, because games are a type of narrative.
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