OK, for the last five to seven years I’ve mostly been making two things: marketing during the week and board games on the weekend. Kind of a business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back, mullet-style approach to creative. And after having made five to seven board games and at least five to seven marketing campaigns, I’ve started to realize what I already suspected: They’re not so different. Great creative work is great creative work, and what makes one work work might work to make other work work better.
Let me explain.
A marketer and a board game designer are both trying to solve the same problem: How can we connect people with the things they need? The things that’ll make their lives better. Things like achievement, connection, enjoyment, acceptance, and love.
In short, we’re all just trying to make people happy. We’re all in the happiness business. And it’s a shockingly tough business to be in, giving us the hardest question in history to answer: What on this damp sloppy earth actually makes people happy?
Board games can give us some unique insight. When you play a game, you’re learning about people, but not just what they enjoy. You get to see how they think, how they interact with the world, and whether they lean toward we’re-all-in-this-together cooperation or scorched-earth, I-will-destroy-you domination. Each of us has a different definition of what it means to win. But here are some of the ways that board games try to do it.
Tap into emotion.
As a game designer, before you choose a theme, or components, or game mechanisms, you need to determine what your game feels like. In other words, what’s going to make this game fun? Because if it’s not fun, what are we even doing here? Is it about unexpected moments of connection with the other players? The satisfaction of a well-laid plan paying off? Do you want players to feel cunning, or clever, or childlike?
As marketers, we need to start with the same impulse. We know that people make decisions for emotional reasons. We don’t buy a Hyundai Kona because it’s empirically the best car on the market, we buy it because it feels right. Because it feels like us. So when we create marketing communications, we’ve got to put feelings first. Do we want our audience to feel proud, or accomplished, or cared for, or capable, or seen? Pick one. Because if you don’t, your audience will. And they’ll pick bored.
Before you can persuade or inform or convince your audience of anything, you need to make them feel something.
Put everything inside the box.
Every good board game is an attempt to take a non-duplicable experience (for instance, a good time with your friends) and duplicate it, so that everyone who opens the box can experience something with what they find inside. It means that every board game needs to stand on its own. Players will never know as much about the game as the designer does, so it all has to work without the designer there to explain things.
As marketers, we’re never going to be there when our banner ad or YouTube pre-roll or billboard is seen. So we can never expect our audiences to know anything other than what’s actually there. We often want to say more than we have space for, and we always want to say more than our audiences have the patience or attention for. Don’t say more than you can fit in the box.
Don’t attempt to cram everything — create a self-contained package.
Establish your core loop.
Board game designers think in systems. The mechanisms they put together to make a game are there to create what’s called a core loop. It’s a repeatable series of actions that lead players to the result they want. So you need to first clearly state the goal of the game (score the most points, be first to the finish, eliminate other players), then describe what actions they need to take to accomplish it.
In the game Pandemic, players are scientists attempting to prevent the spread of four global diseases. The core loop goes like this: Players move across the map to remove disease cubes, draw cards, and collect them to find a cure, while the game escalates the tension by infecting more cities with new disease cubes. So on a player’s turn, they’re not trying to cure four diseases, they’re trying to travel to Bogotá to remove two yellow cubes so on their next turn they can meet a player in Miami to trade cards. One action at a time.
In our marketing efforts, we don’t need to fully infect our audiences or give them the cure, we just need to give them enough to take the next action (look up Hyundai Kona prices online, schedule a campus tour, get on a mailing list). Every communication needs to prod our audience to do the next thing until they get to do the big thing. We’re not selling bread, we’re handing out yeast.
Always make sure your audience knows what their next move should be.
Make the rules clear.
Here’s a rule you’ll find in a lot of board game rulebooks: “Put the game board in the center of the table.” And the only reason it’s in there is because it has to be. I’ve seen too many game boards on ceilings and half hanging off of tables due to poorly written rulebooks.
Don’t make your audience try to figure out what you’re talking about, and leave no room for misinterpretation. As marketers, we often fall in love with our own words. Our grandiloquent, euphonious, toploftical words. But simple language is always best. Nobody has ever looked at a stop sign and wondered what it was trying to say.
Say it even more simply than you think you need to.
Playtest, playtest, playtest.
You never know if a game will work until you put it in the hands of the people who will play it. Playtesting groups are the board game designer’s best way of seeing how their game will actually fare on the table. You plop the game down on the table, then hide under the table as the players get everything wrong. And that’s what you want! Playtest groups are there to “break” your game. To find all the ways it doesn’t work, the rules that are unclear or contradictory, and the little loopholes that could make the game end on turn number two. And the best game designers playtest early and often.
We need to be doing the same thing with our marketing communications. Get them out of our heads and onto a screen and in front of people. People love to find fault with things, and when you give them permission to rip something apart, they will go directly to town on it. And that’s what you want! Find out what parts accidentally sound dirty, and what parts don’t make sense, which picture is of the wrong client, and why they “just don’t like it” with no rationale.
Note: In both cases, you will think the feedback is stupid and wrong, but unfortunately it’s always very smart and exactly right.
Find the breaking point before your audience does.
Go back and make it look nice.
And now comes every board game designer’s favorite part: making it look cool. Now, and only now, is the time to create the art that brings the story to life. All throughout development, handwritten scraps of paper glued to bits of cardboard were enough to get the idea across, but it needs a trip through hair and makeup to get it ready for prime time. This is when the world of the game becomes the world of the world.
There’s no reason we can’t wait until last to get our marketing efforts into layout, either. Once the strategy is sound, the approach is solid, and the concept is tight, go ahead and turn it into a beautiful ad or website or video or whichever vessel you need to deliver your message.
It needs to be pretty to make it in this world, but it has to be smart first.
Cross your fingers and hope for the best.
We tend to think of our creations as our babies. After all, we dreamed them up, pushed them into existence, and suckled and swaddled and pampered them until they could stand on their own two feet. And here’s where the metaphor still doesn’t break down, because now that your baby (it’s clear that I’m talking about all three things here, right? board games, marketing communications, and real human being babies?) can read and ride a bike and go pee-pee on the potty like a big boy, it’s time to shove them out of the house and hope they find their audience.
At some point, you have to hit send. Good luck, little guy!
The bottom line.
Board games, like the best marketing, are an exercise in empathy. We’re all just trying to connect people to the things they want in life. The things they want to accomplish, the experiences they want to have, the way they want to feel. And people have precious little time to waste with a board game that doesn’t deliver on its promise of a good time, or a marketing communication that doesn’t help them achieve their goals.
But against all odds, when a board game is actually fun, or a marketing communication actually works, that’s when everybody wins.
