What we can learn about strategy from boardgames
Boardgames are a big part of my life, and as we enter winter lockdown , perhaps you’re reluctantly dusting off an old boardgame in the corner of the cupboard for a bit of distraction.
This (rather self-indulgent and nerdy) essay looks at how you might get more out of it than you realise…
Boardgames and me
Currently I play a big sprawling boardgame called Blood Bowl, where you play a fantasy American football team (but made up with the kinds of folks you’d see in Lord of The Rings). You can play in a league across multiple games, with your players gaining skills and developing. You can spend weeks or months painting and crafting you figures to play with. Or just play with grey plastic out of the box.
There is a big unofficial ‘regulating body’ for the fantasy Blood Bowl league — the NAF (the Nuffle Amorical Football, based on Nuffle being a bastardisation of NFL and Blood Bowl being a weird descendant of conventional American Football). There’s an international tournament scene. There’s a world cup which is one of the biggest competitive real-world boardgame events in the world and over 1500 coaches turn up.
It’s a compelling and strange way to spend your spare time. But it’s a popular one — Games Workshop, the company that develops it has been an absolute smash hit of the UK stock market, giving even the fizziest of tech stocks a run for their money. (It has recovered fantastically post COVID crash for example.)
I’ve also written about boardgames, with a focus on ‘6 Strategies for Playing Monopoly (or why Monopoly is terrible and what we can do about it)’.
Needless to say, I like boardgames.
However, I think we can also learn a lot from boardgames. They’re not just a disposable waste of time, or a rainy weekend argument generating device. They can teach us some interesting and important lessons about strategy, and, I think, about life.
Boardgames are designed systems
Boardgames are closed systems that have been designed for a specific aim. They can be instructional, they can be aesthetic, they can be fun. But each of the decisions that make them is intentional. A foundational part of good boardgame design is that of balance — you want to balance many different factors, and ultimately balance the game between different players and the game itself.
There are a couple of fundamentals of what makes ‘a game’ — predominantly that it’s a closed system with defined rules and some win conditions. That’s the difference between a game and, say, Lego or any other open-ended play. However, within that there are many many variations.
A good game should have a sense of competition but balanced with fairness, it usually combines elements of challenge with fun. Actions have consequences, but unpredictability can help create randomness and unexpected moments. And lastly, it should reward skill but not relentlessly.
Different games can sit in different places on this spectrum — for example chess is very much ‘on the left’ — where small mistakes have big consequences and the more skilled player will win the vast majority of times. On the flip-side, snakes and ladders is on the far right, there is very little way to play it well and most of it comes down to unpredictable luck.
Boardgames and strategy have a lot in common
But I believe games can teach us a lot about strategy. They all involve some combination of strategy and tactics, and can be quite instructional on the difference and connection between the two.
They also often teach us a lot about the nature of risk and how to operate with it. Play it too safe and you probably won’t win, but play too risky and that can be your undoing. But the important element is that of informed risk — the trade-offs you are making and the impact of compounding.
Beyond the functional game mechanics, there is the layer of creativity and story telling. What happens around the game — the metagame, the experience, the connection.
And lastly, games exist as metaphors and learning experiences for many different things.
The enduring power of games
Ultimately, there’s something primal about games. The earliest game on record is the Royal Game of Ur, which resembles games found in the tombs of Tutankhamun. Games can survive for millennia, transcending language. You could travel through time and find the only thing in common would be that you could both play chess. (In fact, Nigel Richard’s, a New Zealand scrabble star won the French scrabble championship despite not speaking a word of French!)
But also games and the strategy around them is something that evolves over time, representing the sum of human knowledge. In particular, something like chess, the strategies and practice around it evolves, with certain openings and approaches being built on and evolved by new players to the game. Different ‘lines’ have exotic names based on the origins of where it came from (such as the Saragossa opening, or Grob’s attack). Chess today is built on chess from great practitioners in the 1900s. It evolves, it grows, but it doesn’t forget.
Over the next four sections, we’re going to look at some strategic lessons we can learn from games.
- Strategy is emergent, tactics are essential
Ultimately, chess can teach us a lot about the nature of strategy and tactics. In particular, it is a great demonstration on how strategy works as an emergent practice, rather than a fixed deliverable or activity.
Firstly, the context in a game of chess is critical — the game breaks down into three widely accepted phases. It’s not about the perfect strategy, it’s about the right strategy for right now.
Openings are often the most daunting. Small positional advantages will make a difference further down the line, but it is broadly impossible* to accurately predict what they will be. So it is through practice, intuition and study that you learn what impact moves in the opening will make.
(* an exception to this is that through computers, chess has essentially been ‘solved’ — using a supercomputer it is possible to analyse and deconstruct every move and give it a score).
The analogy is that with early stage strategy, you need to build on best practice and make decisions on what will put you in the best position to benefit later on.
The mid-game is where the preparation in the opening is put into practice (and weaknesses are exposed). Through making tactical exchanges and pushes, you try to simplify the game down into a situation where you can find a route to victory.
The key principles of simplification and tactics are, again, about understanding how to make the best decisions in the heat of the moment.
Lastly, the end-game, is where you need precision to play out the final game. There are various positions that are winnable and unwinnable. But you still need to play them the right way to make it happen.
The link with strategy is of situational awareness and flexibility. Each phase requires different skills and a different mindset, but also a recognition about how they all connect. Something which we can transfer to broader strategy. Knowing where you are in the game changes how you play it. There are set phases and scenes — but it’s how they play out that determines whether it’s a success or not.
Chess is a fantastic demonstration of the difference between tactics and strategy — but also the importance of both!
A common misconception in chess is that you have a strategy at the start which you follow, and chess masters sit there calculating 25 moves ahead. But the fact of the matter is that strategy is a continual, gradual and emergent thing. At any stage, you want to have a general sense of what you aim to do. But that must evolve as the game pans out.
So for chess strategy the overall principles are far more important than specifics — the common things being control, tempo, development and space. Each move, you want to think:
- Control: does this help me exert more control over the board and my opponents pieces?
- Tempo: does this put me ahead of my opponent?
- Development: does this strengthen or weaken my position?
- Space: does this increase or strengthen the space that I control?
These high level principles are often the main strategy you need for chess up to a certain level — but the art is in making that happen. You can’t sit down at the start of a game of chess and write out your game plan and consider it done.
In a similar way, in business, marketing or comms strategy, we often make the mistake of sitting down and writing out a perfectly articulated and detailed strategy while missing the point that strategy is inherently emergent.
It changes, it evolves, it’s intuitive.
Another common misconception is that tactics is somehow inferior — being a ‘cheap tactic’ or just being a piece of tactical activity rather than a strategic plan.
But tactics are absolutely foundational in chess and the same is true in other situations. You need to be tactically strong enough that you are able to benefit from your strategy.
Tactics tend to be structured set pieces where there are correct ways to play and win. In chess these are learning to recognise common tactical concepts like forks, and pinning.
Strategy can put you into a position where you can benefit from tactics and vice versa. One without the other simply doesn’t work.
2. Understand the importance of risk and compounding
Another element is risk and reward in boardgames. Most boardgames have ‘compounding’ actions. The idea that a long-term action pays off for the rest of the game, whereas short-term actions cash-in but don’t compound over time. So a certain element of sacrifice or risk needs to be based on payback over time.
Ultimately, each turn you want to strengthen your position, to compound over time. Taking on informed short-term risk in exchange for reward.
An important lesson here for businesses is that while we obsess about the risk of doing something, we tend to overlook the risk of doing nothing.
Every turn where we don’t improve our position puts us behind — there is a very real cost to doing nothing which we need to make visible and consider. Putting a hard cost or downside on inaction can help make informed decisions around risk easier.
Ultimately, risk and luck are two sides of the same coin. The right kind of randomness in games can be fun, unpredictable and balancing. Understanding how to play with that risk is key to any games which are based on an element of randomness.
However, if a game has the wrong kind of luck in it, it just becomes a random and pointless affair. If risk isn’t rewarded then it can become impossible to play.
In addition, an understanding of risk can help make you philosophical about when things go the wrong way. If it was the right call at the time, then even if it doesn’t always pay-off, you can take it in your stride and stay on track.
Backgammon is an interesting example of this — over the course of multiple games, the better player will win more often. But the roll of the dice can introduce challenge and opportunity for any player.
Ultimately, a game without risk is quite limited. Managing risk and making informed choices around it is a key skill and part of being strategically strong.
The same is in business where a strategy can still be the right strategy, even if it doesn’t work. Sometimes the random luck just doesn’t go your way.
Importantly, the opposite is also true. Even if it all goes well, it doesn’t mean your strategy was perfect or you should aim to repeat it. Recognising the difference between luck and skill is important in boardgames and in life.
Equally, recognising and protecting the importance of compounding actions is critical. Investment today, that will reap benefits far into the future. We see a lot of short-termism leading to strategic blunders. This can be reframed with an understanding of compounding and the role of risk.
3. Don’t forget about the importance of creativity and play
The first two sections have focused more on the mechanics of games. However, that’s often only part of why we play. Games are also shared experiences and storytelling devices.
Most people don’t play games just to win — it’s for the fun and experience of doing it. It’s for the stories we tell around it. Games can set the stage for social interactions and experiences.
This is where experience design and aesthetic nuance come into the story. We’re not just designing the functional rules, we are building the world that it happens within.
Ultimately, it’s the players who make the game. This is also true of business strategy. The important part of the process is getting everyone on board, and getting alignment and a shared experience.
Having multiple different people come together and play is what creates the dynamic and rewarding experience of games. It’s not all about winning. It’s about the journey that gets you there.
The same is true for strategy. It’s not a deliverable, or a magic pill. It’s an ongoing process. The sign of a good strategy is that it gets people to play along with it and be part of it. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if it is not accessible and engaging it doesn’t work. A 140-page detailed deck might be more thorough, but if it’s undigestible or lacks a narrative, it’s not a strong strategy.
Which is why storytelling and experience design are more than just ‘window dressing’ in strategy. It is an all important part of the package.
Because ultimately…
4. Strategy and games act as a metaphor for bigger things
It’s a mistake to think that there’s any profound truth or importance in a game or a strategy itself. It’s what it relates to that matters the most. It’s an abstraction of the complex world it exists within. By creating rules and restrictions, it becomes playable in a way that can be enjoyable, instructional, informative.
So when designing a strategic process, think about what it’s supposed to elicit. Remember, it’s only a model or an approximation. Play around with it. Have fun. Tweak it. Throughout the process ask yourself ‘is this serving me well’.
There is no one way to play — there will be many valid approaches. Different approaches could suit your style or business better than others. What worked once may not work again.
Building a strategy, creating and playing games, are creative and fun exercises, as well as rigorous and structured ones.
Games can be fun, creative, challenging and rewarding. But they can also teach us more than we realise if we let them.
Hopefully you found something interesting or informative in that. Thanks for playing.
