Card and Board Games - iPhone Game Blueprints - page 100

Chapter 4. Card and Board Games
Do you ponder the fact that many modern video games (and even some forms of hu-
man activities) can be represented as board or card games? Of course, the rules usu-
ally are very complex and there are a lot of game pieces and conditions; nonetheless,
some similarities can be noticed. Let's take, for example, the famous game Plants vs.
Zombies created by PopCap . If you try to look at the gameplay from a different angle,
you can easily imagine that all plants in the game are virtual cards placed at the game
table by a player. The zombies in turn are some form of cards too; they have special
rules for moving and an invisible dice determines the conditions of random collisions.
Some game pieces portray shots fired by plants; sunflowers generate tokens in the
form of cartoonish suns. So yes, this is a board game, but very complex and highly
automated, so it can work in real time. No wonder that many game developers use
custom board games to prototype their future video games (or some of their func-
tions). The incredible power of board games is hidden in their flexible nature, which
lets them reconstruct a rich number of events and situations.
The ornament of life
It can be assumed that the appearance of board games in the ancient times was a
reaction to a complication of social structure, when one life paradigm was replaced
with a new one. For instance, the forest gathering was displaced by agriculture; it
taught humans that there could be orthogonal shapes (agriculture fields), regular, and
straight/parallel lines (the invention of the plow). Life became more complicated, full of
unpredictable factors and correlation and thus it was reflected in games with complex
rules. Moreover, mankind at that period of time began to use abstraction, for instance,
ornaments appeared. This illustrated not just a specific object, for example, a river,
but its abstract and simplified representation: its zigzag shape. This means more than
a graphic image because a little story was embedded: since the river flows in a zigzag
manner, it has many turns.
Abstraction, simplification, and toleration are the foundation of any board game be-
cause all the elements—game pieces, game board, and rules—are only symbols,
not real objects. Ancient Egypt was one of the first cultures that began to use or-
naments to decorate houses and utensils. It is not surprising that one of the oldest
known board games was created in ancient Egypt as well. It was called Senet ( ht-