Hey there seekers of vengeance, this is Gordon Calleja, the designer of Vengeance (and earlier Posthuman). I’m a games researcher and designer that’s worked on both digital and analogue titles. This article focuses on narrative in board games and details how I incorporated story elements into Vengeance’s mechanics to achieve the rich thematic feel of the revenge movies it aims to adapt.

It’s pretty obvious that the board game world is increasingly interested in games that contain story elements. We’ve had narrative-heavy board games for a while, but there’s increasingly more major titles that are focused on not just telling a story, but generating a story. The beauty of the intersection between board games and narrative is the ability to give players the basic components of narrative (world, characters and objects) to work with and let them generate a story by interacting with the world through mechanics. The interaction with a game’s mechanics, communication with other players, and game props create the equivalent of events in other media that are dictated by the author or director. We can also have the classic, pre-scripted narrative chunks in there as we find in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and T.I.M.E. Stories. However, in all these games, these pre-scripted aspects are supplemented, to varying degrees, by the story that is generated through players’ actions in the world.

When I came up with the idea to make a board game adaptation of revenge movies it was evident that, for the game to succeed, Vengeance had to convey the core emotions that we, as viewers, feel when watching such movies. It was also immediately clear that the starting point for designing the game had to be setting and story and overall feel. I find the use of the term “theme” to collapse too many disparate elements in it, so I’ll stick to more precise terms. The setting would need to be brought to life by having the right art: gritty and realistic enough for the gang members and bosses to feel like actual nasty antagonists players want to take revenge on, while having that edgy and carefully curated visual style we have come to associate (and appreciate) with the greats of the revenge movie genre: Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) and Chan Wook Park (Old Boy and the Vengeance trilogy).

The story would need to follow a similar arc to those found in revenge narratives through history: wronging, rising from the ashes, the switch between hunter and hunted, and the cathartic exacting of revenge. The latter needed to be the most emotionally charged part of the game. The story also needed to be personal to the player. While they’re merely playing, those characters still needed to be transparent enough for players to feel like the wronging was inflicted upon them, not some fictional entity. All this meant that the narrative elements of Vengeance had to (a) culminate in an exciting, fast-paced action sequence of revenge taking, and (b) the players are living their own story. This meant that the sort of narrative I was aiming to create would need to be able to cater for detailed, blow-by-blow action, not just a series of events over a period of time.

With the focus of the game being the fight sequences, and the genre of the game being so reliant on story generation, I developed the ‘fight’ system first. The goals of this system were: (a) to be fast and exciting, (b) to generate interesting images in the mind of the player, and (c) to have interesting choices that became more varied both mechanically and story wise as the game progressed.

First of all, there would be no book-keeping or number counting. Secondly, if the fight was going to generate blow-by-blow images in the mind of the player, the language, icons, and rules tied to the actions within the fight sequence needed to be iconic representations of the thing they are referring to, not abstract intermediaries to that image in the mind, such as numbers. Thus, I wanted a system where every action is represented by an icon on a die or on an ability tile. I also wanted those actions to be the events that players link together in their mind using their imagination. The basic fight actions would thus be reflected by icons on the melee die faces: a ‘hit’, a stronger version of the latter called a ‘double hit’, a ‘tactical move’ from one zone of the den they are fighting into another, a ‘shot’ which signifies the use of a projectile or ranged weapon of some sort, and a symbol indicated that enemies would ‘activate’. Players would have the interesting choice of organizing these in the order they wanted to make their way through the den, clearing gang minions and aiming to get to the boss.

This gave me a system to move both heroes and their enemies in one roll, an interesting choice in the order of dice, and a quick way of resolving fights. Enemy minions are removed after 1 hit, apart from Bosses who can take 2-4 hits in a single roll and special minions that can take 2. To add variables for the player to solve, the minions and Bosses each have a single ability that occurs either when they activate or passively.

All this was working fine, but the mental images the system generated were rather functional. To add “juice” (to borrow a term from video game design) I added ‘Upgrade Items’ and ‘Upgrade Abilities’. These have two functions: on the one hand they act as luck mitigators by allowing players to substitute one or more results into other results. For example, ‘Knife Throw’ allows players to exchange a Hit result for a Shot result. But, aside from the mechanical implementation, the Upgrades’ names and effects animate the simple die result into an imagined event. My Hit becomes a knife I’ve planted in my opponent’s chest. Things get even more interesting when several Upgrades are chained together in a combo. An ‘Arm Lopper’ changes the Hit into a Double Hit, while a ‘Reverse Blade’ changes a Double Hit into 2 separate Hits that can hit two targets. Suddenly, the sterile icons become a chain of images in the player’s mind and the glee of executing such an action makes it a memorable experience. And one cannot underestimate the importance of emotional impact when designing an emergent story.

To this end I needed to ratchet up the emotional impact. One way of doing this is to add more constraints on the player’s attentional resources and add challenge to the task. In order to achieve this, Vengeance gives players three rolls of 3-5 of these melee dice and 3-minutes to complete the den. The timer rule is optional, but highly recommended.

Excitement is crucial to generate a story. In a scripted narrative we are told what to focus on. When dealing with emergent or generated stories, the sequence of images in the player’s mind becomes story-like and memorable when that stream of imagination features characters acting in a world and the player experiences an emotional reaction to those events. Emotional affect triggers memory. If an emergent narrative doesn’t have emotional impact, it becomes general, forgettable thought. In fact, if players eliminate the timer from the game and sit quietly, strategizing and simulating every possible combination of dice and abilities, the narrative element of the game weakens considerably and it becomes more of a logical, strategic affair. That’s not to say that’s bad – I designed the game to be played both strategically and narratively – but, the narrative impact of such an experience will suffer.

I hope this gives you a glimpse into the logic that went behind Vengeance’s core sub-system: the Fight.