Nobody wants to talk about auctions…ok.

There are very few games that don’t have a theme. Card games are among them, as well as word games and some very abstract board games like Blokus. But otherwise, from Monopoly to Catan to Bang!, every game has a theme. As well they should; there are many good reasons. Listing only a few will take me the entire article:

·        A theme attracts players. Both when purchasing a game and cajoling otherwise-reluctant friends to play, a theme that sounds interesting can lure people in. Lunch Money isn’t, truth be told, a very good game, but the idea of Catholic schoolgirls beating each other up holds interest for many. On the other hand, Bohnanza (the “bean planting game”) is fantastic, but you have to twist people’s arms to get them to play. Exotic locations (Tikal, Puerto Rico, Taj Mahal) seem very popular.

·        A theme can convey and help set the mood of the game. Bang! and Lunch Money are aggressive games that are all about fighting the other characters. The themes help you get into the mood and start trash talking. On the other hand, Carcassone and Puerto Rico are constructive game where you can often avoid confrontation. In Australia Rails, what are you doing? Building a railroad line, obviously; people come in understanding that the only conflict might be the race for the best land.

·        A theme makes it easier to teach and remember the rules. In Catan, you get wood from forests and grain from plains. Easy? Easy. And you build a city with stone (for the walls) and wheat (to feed the people). With its rules printed on every card, Magic might have the most complicated total ruleset of any game; but a glance at the card art can remind an experienced player of the name of a card and its powers without having to read it.

·        A theme makes it easier to distinguish between otherwise similar game elements. In my themeless takeoff of Clue, keeping the Spades, Hearts, and Diamonds straight was taxing. Nobody confuses Professor Plum for a Wrench. (And nobody will confuse Mephistopheles for Atlantis in Cabal.)

·        A theme can turn a game session into a story. We had a session of the Lord of the Rings board game where Frodo got eaten, but Sam managed to drag the Ring into Mount Doom and save the day. Sweet! Or you might remember the Risk game where a huge army in Iceland (Vikings, perhaps?) swept through all of the Americas in a single turn. A memorable game can occur in any game, like being dealt a grand slam in Bridge; but a theme gives you an easy way to talk about it. I can easily and evocatively describe the placement of armies in Risk or my opponent’s vast corn and indigo fields in Puerto Rico; it’s painfully boring to describe the locations of the missing face cards and trump in a hand of Bridge, even if I happen to remember.

·        A theme can be the entire point of the game. The more of a simulation the game is, the more this point applies. It applies less to board games, which tend to be abstract; but let me assure you that nobody would ever touch Axis & Allies if it weren’t based on a fascinating chunk of world history. A lot of historical computer games, like my pet favorite Europa Universalis II, follow the same pattern. Similarly, the economics games often played in classrooms exist to demonstrate how systems work, not for the general amusement of the players.