Highs & Lows: The simple genius of board game tracks

Board game design is a mystery to me, and I’m happy for it to stay that way. I don’t want to see the wizard behind the curtain. If I understand it too well, it’ll break the magic, in the same way I learned about the overuse of orange & teal being used in TV and films, and now I see it everywhere. Maybe you will too now, sorry about that.

What I want to talk about today is the yin and yang of progress along tracks in board games. The feeling of disappointment and the illusion of a wasted turn are juxtaposed with the miniature elation of getting a reward from one, and I love it. Designers know just how to tease my dopamine receptors.

If you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, let me expand a little. Partially by way of explanation, partially because even just talking about it makes me happy.

Step by step

Progress tracks are a mainstay of modern board game design. From elaborate, table-filling affairs such as Tapestry through to small roll-and-writes like Ganz Schön Clever, many games force you to make choices about how you advance during the game. Some, such as Revive use the track as an aside to the main game, whereas others like Marco Polo II or Orléans build it into the point-to-point movement that the entire game is built around.

Ganz Schön Clever - one of the very best

All of them have one thing in common. All of them offer some form of reward for making progress along them, and more often than not they also force you to progress with the knowledge that you’ll get nothing for it. Nada. Nil. Zilch.

I don’t know about you, but I hate those turns. I hate ticking a box when I’m playing Hadrian’s Wall when I can see that there’s nothing drawn inside that box. I fill it in and nothing happens. The immediate feeling generated by filling in a blank box is like taking a pistachio out of the bag only to find out the shell never opened and there’s no salty nut treat for you. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

However, I’m of the firm belief that this is not accidental. It’s not some by-product of the game’s design where one track needs to be longer than another just to make it fit correctly on the board. No, this is intentional. This is…

Delayed gratification

You there, reading this. Tell me with a straight face that you don’t love that moment when you cross out a box with something in it. Or when you move your piece onto a spot with an icon on it which gives you a reward. Go on, try to tell me you don’t love that feeling. You can’t, can you?

It’s by far my favourite thing in games, and I’m not alone in it. Whole games are developed now that hinge on this track + reward system, because of how satisfying it is for the person playing the game. I mentioned Hadrian’s Wall above, so let’s look at that as a good example. When you play it for the first time, what’s set in front of you is underwhelming. People have likened it to a spreadsheet, and you can see why. Two pages absolutely littered with small boxes to draw in with background art and design hidden away behind them. It looks incredibly dull.

The left page of a game of Hadrian’s Wall. Might not look that exciting, but the game is fantastic.

Playing it, however, is a different matter. Time after time after time the game rewards your act of scribbling in a box with allowing you to scribble in another box on another track. And that box allows you to scribble in another box, which in turn allows you to do another. It’s glorious.

Do you know the secret which makes this feel the way it does? Come closer, I’ll whisper. It’s the turn when you don’t get to do anything extra. Those dead turns, those are the secret.

Think about it. If the game gave you something on every turn, how quickly would that become boring? Taking a dead turn is what sets you up for the good stuff, and the anticipation of that good stuff is what makes it feel better. It’s like eating the Brussels sprouts before you dig into a fluffy roast potato soaked in gravy. I honestly feel a teeny bit of excitement before I take those turns where it feels like you finally get the good stuff.

The agony of choice

The flip side of all these feel-good, bonus-grabbing, good times are the choices made to keep us coming back. Some designers are great at doing this - making us make choices in the game which mean we’ll never get to explore all of the tracks in one go, and never play in the sandbox of making tracks work together. At least, not in the same game. So you come back, you play again, you tell yourself “This time I’m going to do things differently and see what happens”, and it’s that experimentation which is laced through so many aspects of board games which keeps them fun, interesting, and compelling.

The three temple tracks on the left of the image in Teotihuacan

Board&Dice’s games often do this well, and often make you choose between three different tracks to advance along. Tabannusi, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Origins, Books of Time and others all give you three tracks to choose from. It seems to be a magic number, as it’s present in other games too. I guess it negates the ‘either-or’ choice that two tracks would leave you with, without giving you so many that it becomes bewildering, although that can work too, can’t it Gaia Project?

The one thing that tracks in board games often guarantee though is player agency. More often than not it’s the one aspect of a game which is affected by your choices, and the way you decide to do things, rather than something which is forced upon by the actions of another player. It’s a detail which can get overlooked, but it’s important. it doesn’t matter if the game falls on either extreme side of the Euro vs Ameritrash divide, or whether it straddles both as so many games do now, it’s those little tracks which often elicit the most joy.

Time to make tracks

So there you have it. My take on why tracks in board games are so important, and so much fun to play with. I’ve name-checked some of my favourites, but I want to know which games you like which do it well.

Which games have advancement tracks that you love to play with?

Which games have tracks which fall short of the mark for you? Why?

Leave a comment or come find me on Facebook or Discord. I’d love to chat about it with you.