This week I read up on some material about tips on how to improve on the user experience (UI) and rule writing for board games. User experience is how the player interacts with the game, for example the pieces in a game of chess. The research material goes into great detail about this aspect of board games, specifically how it affects the players overall experience of the game. A component of this mentioned in the article was making the pieces of a board game as identifiable as possible. This can be done by altering their color, their shape or in the case of card games, their suits. It was stated that many people suffer from some form of color blindness, so these mechanics can be vital to include these people and since the pieces in games such as card games cant be reshaped, suits over a solution for people who are visually impaired.
The article also talks about using legible font because it can be really annoying to the player if they cant read the cards/rules. One aspect it mentions to include is to differentiate the 9's from the 6's so that they aren't identical when viewed upside down. The material even talks about how different regions write their numbers differently, so for example in some regions a 1 may be mistaken for a 7 in other regions. So its important to put the effort into differentiating these kinds of things. One more thing that is mentioned in the material is the box that the game comes in. While this has no influence on how the game actually plays and how enjoyable it is it must be considered for a view reasons. Mainly for marketing purposes, for example putting the name of the game on both the horizontal and vertical sides of the box in big clear writing, this way the game can catch the viewers attention and the name/logo will be visible regardless of if the store staff stock it vertically or horizontally, this is something that is an aspect that is often overlooked by a lot of board games surprisingly.
("Monopoly", a game widely known for its diversely shaped playing pieces)
Additional Research
An article by Desi Quintans that outlines the fundamentals of user interface and delves into some examples of the best and worst user interfaces in games from recent history.
An article by Alexander Yordanov that discusses the pitfalls of user interface that countless games have fallen into, particularly picking on aspects such as slow UI that plague video games containing them.
An article by Jim Ross that talks about how board games incorporate aspects of user design (specifically monopoly) and what kind of user interface he as a player and customer likes to see in games.
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