Written by Niall Crabtree
Niall is the director and designer at Crab Studios, and external designer at Team 17. He specializes in game design.
What is Component Efficiency?
The general concept of component efficiency is: “to use design/art to minimize the number of components required to achieve the desired gameplay”.
Why be Efficient With Components?
There are many reasons why you should be efficient with components, that both benefit you, the player and your game.
-
The obvious, the unit price of your game will be cheaper as a result of fewer components.
-
The size of your game should hopefully be smaller, and the weight of your game should hopefully be lighter, resulting in cheaper shipping.
-
Players have less components to set up and manage, resulting in less of a barrier to getting games to the table (this is applicable for all weights).
-
It is generally easier for players to be onboarded into your game with fewer components, less chance of them being overwhelmed and depending on the design, less for them to learn as well.
How to be Efficient With Components
Let’s start with an example. Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is a game in the “Tiny Epic” series by Gamelyn games (surprise I know).
In Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, you track two types of resources, meat and vegetables. Unlike most games, that would simply provide 2-3 punchboards worth of tokens for all players to use to track the number of each of these resources they have, Gamelyn simply added a track around each player’s player board. As you can have you can have a maximum of 13 of each resource, and it is a 1-4 player game, the game would have had to come with 104 tokens. Instead, with this method it only had to come with 8.
This is also a good example of how efficiency can be beneficial for the you, your bottom line, and the player. This is because in this scenario, the player would have to organise, setup, and store 108 tokens, which considering the weight of this game would be a big hinderance and a big barrier to the table as the time it would take to distribute these tokens evenly amongst the players would be a significant chunk of time spent with this game on the table.
Another example is in the game The Binding of Isaac Four Souls. On the surface, this game isn’t super-efficient as it boasts hundreds of cards. However, that was necessary to create the experience required for the game and is actually a good example of when being inefficient is needed for the sake of the design.
However, with regards to another aspect of the game, health tracking, the game saved a lot of money for publisher, and removed pain from the player by replacing heart tokens with dice for the monsters.
Using a D8 to track health (meaning that the dice face indicates the current health of the monster) rather than heart tokens, saved on potentially 40 heart tokens (as there is the potential to have 5 or even more monsters (though unlikely more than 5) on the field at once). Additionally, like Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, it saved the player from having to use this tokens on an already crowded table to do the same job.
Sticking with Four Souls, the game was also designed to make health tracking as a whole easier on a turn-by-turn basis. Players themselves start with just two health, and health resets every round, meaning that there is no need for a physical track for players to remember this information, saving components, table space, pain for the player, and money!
Overall, its safe to say that not all games to do this with every aspect of their game, as it is difficult to know with certainty whether you are adding or taking away from the player experience for the sake of the bottom line, and for creatives that is hard to consider. However, through playtesting it is incredibly important to always ask “do I need these components, are they necessary?”, or “Is there a more efficient way to achieve the same effect”.
