Component Efficiency: Design With Fewer Board Game Pieces

What is Component Efficiency?

The general concept of component efficiency, a core idea in board game component design, 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 (see board game weight below).

• 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 (token sheets) 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 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 you, your bottom line, and the player. This is because in this scenario, the player would have to organise, set up, and store 104 tokens, which considering the weight of this game would be a big hindrance 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 the 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 these 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, it’s safe to say that not all games 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”.

Board Game Weight: What a Game Weighs and Why It Matters

Board game weight here means grams and kilograms, not the complexity rating that BoardGameGeek also calls weight. A card game in a tuck box weighs under 200 grams. A small box game with a deck or two and a token sheet is usually under 500 grams. A light board game is under 1 kg, a medium board game 1.5 to 2 kg, and a large board game 2 kg and up, with the heaviest reaching 4 kg. Those are the numbers that answer how much does a board game weigh, and the weight sets the freight: every kilogram ships at a price, and it ships to the warehouse, to the shop and to the player's door.

How Shipping Charges Weight

Carriers charge the heavier of two numbers. The actual weight is the game on the scale. The volumetric weight is the space it takes: length × width × height in centimetres divided by 5,000 for air freight (in inches divided by 144 for US parcels). For board games the actual weight is almost always the heavier one, so the grams count. Sea freight works the other way: a full or part container is priced by cubic metre, so a heavy game ships cheaper by volume and a light game cheaper by the kilogram. Shipping cartons hold 13 to 15.5 kg each, and a 5-layer carton itself weighs about 0.8 kg; the board game box weight on the carton label is the game plus its shrink wrap. Our guide to board game shipping cost has the rates and the routes.

Six Ways to Cut Weight Without Cutting the Game

A few decisions can take 10 to 25 percent off a game's weight, and most of them lower the manufacturing cost too.

1. Thinner stock where no one will notice. Reference cards on 300 gsm instead of 350 gsm, tokens on 1.2 mm board instead of 1.5 mm, a small box on 1.2 mm greyboard. Keep the main game board thick: it is the part players lean on. Our guide to board game cardboard lists the thickness each part needs.
2. Fewer parts. Audit the component list before it is final: does every player need a separate set of tokens, or can some be shared? Can a player aid live in the rulebook? Every part you drop is weight, cost and setup time gone.
3. Multi-purpose parts. One deck that is both the randomiser and the phase tracker, double-sided printing, colour coding and icons: fewer parts, and often a cleaner design.
4. A shorter rulebook. Paper is dense; a rulebook on 157 gsm is heavier than it looks. Fewer pages weigh less, print for less and intimidate less.
5. Lighter materials. Metal coins, wooden tokens and heavy plastic trays look good and weigh a lot. High-quality cardboard tokens or a paper insert do the same job at a fraction of the weight and the cost.
6. A smaller box. Many games ship air. When the parts are organised in the box, the box can usually shrink by 10 to 20 percent, which cuts cardboard, volume and the chance of parts rattling loose.

Decide these early, before the files are final. We see hundreds of games a year on the line and will tell you which part is carrying weight it does not need; contact us with the component list.