The Buss Speaks: The Beauty and Complexity of Small Box Games
With my recent move to Switzerland, I had to make a major decision of what board games I was going to bring with me on the plane. Lady Di and I had decided that we were going to bring everything over with us in our luggage and forgo shipping anything directly. This meant that the size and weight of what we brought was extremely important to consider.
As you all know, board games aren’t usually known as space savers and can also push the scale quite a bit. There were three games that I was determined to pack: Seasons, Above and Below, and Dice Forge. The first two are my top two games of all time so that was an easy decision and while Dice Forge did not make my top 10 list, but it is a special game for Lady Di and needed to come along. From that point, it came down to dissecting the rest of my modest collection.
This brings me to the main point of this post: small-box games can be deceptively complex. Due to the size of the box, games such as Harbour and Cthulhu Realms give the appearance of being simple games to learn and play. I have learned within these past 6 months that this is far from true as I will try to unfold here.
Harbour provides an interactive and ever-changing market that players have to use in order to achieve the goal of buying enough buildings to trigger the end-game. Sounds simple enough. The complexity is not derived from the amount of pieces or cards that are in play but from: the limited amount of actions the game provides, the rule limiting one player to a space at a time, and how a player gets their money in order to buy a building. Harbour does not allow for players to save money throughout the game, instead a player must be able to ship all of their goods and buy a building with the money earned with that shipment immediately. This is when the importance of the market value of these goods comes into play. Depending on what is being shipped and what building actions players have taken throughout the game, the market is in constant flux. Developing a strategy is a mix of what character card you randomly were provided with, what buildings/actions are available within the general pool, and what actions the other players end up taking. All of this is delivered in a 4”x2”x1” box.
I had mentioned Cthulhu Realms previously and it has complexity entirely different from Harbour. Within the same sized box comes a more expansive game. This game is a deck-builder which, of course, requires a large quantity of cards to work with. As more players are added, the larger the space the game requires due to how cards are laid out. Like Harbour, the goal of this game is simple: lower the sanity of your opponents to zero before your sanity is reduced to zero. Also like Harbour, achieving this goal is not as simple as it seems. Like most deck-builders, you start with a basic mix of income-providers and damage-dealers. Quickly, you discover that the game evolves into more than just buying and dealing damage. Similar to how a game of Legendary becomes finding the best combos in order to deal damage, there is also the mix of finding the right combo in order to protect your own sanity from the other players' attacks. The most common confusion comes from the iconography within the game but once this confusion is overcome, the mixture of combos can differ wildly from player to player. While this game is similar to other deck-builders, being able to find the pure satisfaction of this game type within such a small box is a beautiful thing.
When I used to think upon small-box games, I typically would think of party games such as Monikers, The Resistance, or Codenames. All great games with massive replayability but also a step below the strategy development that you want a lower player count type game to have. While those games typically come in larger footprint boxes, it is a delight when all of the complexity and design of a large container game can be squeezed into something as small as a 4" x 2" x 1" box.
THE BUSS