Jeremy Commandeur, a Bay Area game designer to whom I owe a great deal, once theorized that tabletop games would eventually split into two paths: Extremely simple and fast “casual games” and massive, big-box games that cost hundreds of dollars and are filled with miniatures for consumers to paint. (I personally found this distressing, as all my favorite games are about 90 minutes long.) While this split hasn’t yet happened, and may never happen, it is true that since the advent of Kickstarter and the high profile successes of games like Kingdom Death: Monster and Gloomhaven, the big-box miniatures game has gained an increasing market share in the tabletop games space.

However, while the popularity of these games may have gone up, many of them are plagued by severe issues that makes one question why it’s worth spending 10 times the price of an Agricola or Cosmic Encounter on them. In this article, I will be exploring the overarching issues from which many of these games suffer and theorizing ideas on how the “genre” can be streamlined and improved.

Promises and Deliveries

All games quietly promise something to their audience. Most Euro-style strategy games promise a fairly arbitrated battle of wits, unbound from confounding variables like “luck” or “politics”. Party games promise routine laughter and bonding as a group. Reality competition shows promise a fair, entertaining battle to the audience, who are the real target user. So what do big-box minis game promise?

It’s very easy if you think about it. Big-box minis games promise a) big cool miniatures and b) the ability to smash those big cool miniatures together in a fun way. If these games lived up to these promises, I don’t think there would be any real complaints about it; unfortunately, many of them don’t.

How, exactly, these games fail to live up to their promises depends on their genre. There’s two overarching genres of big-box minis game; the co-op campaign game, with games like Kingdom Death, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, and Tainted Grail, and the competitive territory control game, with games like Rising Sun, Cthulhu Wars, and Blood Rage.

Territory control games have a better track record with letting players regularly play with the big chunky minis, partially because it’s expected that every mini should be able to see play before the end of the game. Cthulhu Wars in particular makes it a relatively common part of the game to get your faction’s massive Lovecraftian monster on the board. The most common issue to befall these is that when it’s not strategically beneficial to use your big minis, you won’t, and in some games it’s hardly ever a good idea to use them. So far from the feeling of triumph that you want players to have when they finally plonk that enormous dragon mini onto the board, you have them feeling kind of guilty that they summoned that dragon when they could have done something better.

Meanwhile, campaign games have a much larger issue – the fact that the majority of players who start a campaign of your game are highly unlikely to make it to the end, where they can bust out the really cool minis. In fact, many people give up on campaign games like this because progression is so slow, and each individual session so long, that they don’t feel like they get the play experience with the huge scary “boss” miniatures that they were promised.

Both genres also have an issue with rules bloat. Whether it’s because of genre conventions or the feeling that players should “get their money’s worth” for dropping $450 on your game through Kickstarter, big-box minis games have large onboarding times that make it more daunting to bring them to the table. This exacerbates the issue of co-op games taking longer to break out the good stuff because you now also have to find other players who will agree to sit through 90 minutes of rules explanations.

Problems and Solutions

So now that we’ve defined the goals and problems, we can develop solutions that might lead to a big-box minis game that meets the genre’s unspoken promises more effectively.

Problem: Area control minis games may unintentionally discourage the use of minis through gameplay.

Solution: You could try to bias the game towards the huge minis, but there’s no guarantee that your ideas will hold up to testing by hundreds or thousands of gaming groups. Additionally, players who like swarm tactics or similar might be put off by how much you’re pushing a single strategy. The better solution is to make the huge, fun minis a mandatory part of gameplay, or else so ubiquitous that it’s essentially required. This follows the philosophy that the only way to ensure players have fun is to make them.

Problem: Most campaigns of co-op minis games don’t last long enough for players to get to the coolest minis.

Solution: The issue isn’t necessarily the campaign style of gameplay. Removing campaigns from co-op games in this genre would remove something fundamental that players love in the same way that removing the complexity of a MOBA game would make many MOBA players lose interest. The fundamental issue is that in many of these games, you have to fight all of the enemy miniatures in roughly weakest-to-strongest order. Naturally, the coolest minis are also the strongest, so the odds of you actually seeing them are lower.

A good possible solution comes from “roguelite” games like Hades or Rogue Legacy. In these games, you play through the entire game at once, empowering your character when you die; the game itself becomes harder as you become more capable. Translating that to a big-box minis game, whereas a traditional campaign might have you fight Boss 1, then Boss 2, then Boss 3, and so on, a campaign styled after roguelite games might have you fight Bosses 1, 5, and 8 at first, then in the next session fight Bosses 2, 6, and 9. That way, you’ll still have the gradual rollout of content that campaign games provide while still allowing players to bring out the big cool minis on session 1.

Problem: Many big-box minis games suffer from rules bloat.

Solution: We can maintain a certain level of complexity that games with high price tags command while reducing onboarding friction by having simple base rules with increasingly complex powers. While not perfect about this, Gloomhaven does a good job for its circumstances – the first six unlocked character classes are simpler than the others, giving players a chance to get a handle on how the game works in general before they have to manage mechanics for a specific character. The missions with weird additional rules are also, for the most part, added after players play a number of “conventional” missions so both setup and runthrough are faster.

Conclusion

I have no real intentions of making a big-box minis game of my own because I feel my talents as a game designer lie elsewhere. That said, exposing myself to, and writing about, games that lie in genres I generally don’t play can only benefit me as a designer because the lessons I learn can be brought along to any future design. When I go into my next project, understanding the unspoken promises my game creates and trying to deliver on them will be on the forefront of my mind.