Highly Thematic Games with Omari Akil

Omari Akil is half of Board Game Brothas, the designer of Rap Godz, Hoop Godz, and Oh My Gourds!, plus he hosts the Break Down which is part of Tabletop Backer Party and he runs the Pathways Fellowship.

Watch the live chat below:

Your games always seem to be very thematic, so much so that I was able to learn more about basketball through playing Hoop Godz. Why do you think that this is?

Designers tend to make games that are fun for them. I attach to theme so much as that’s what I find fun. I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about theme, I love when theme can integrate well with mechanics.

Do your games start thematic or do you add in theme as you go?

I’m a theme first designer. If a theme doesn’t lend itself to a gameplay mechanic, you need a mechanic to start you down a path, and find a way to make the game work.

For Rap Godz, the theme didn’t initially give us any ideas with gameplay. No components came to mind so we got all of our ideas from the theme. We broke down ideas related to hip hop until it suggested a mechanic.

Hoop Godz was different, as the initial idea was a basketball game that was dependent on dice. It started with the dice centered concept, which then got streamlined.

When designing a thematic game, there’s flexibility to let theme drive or you can choose a mechanic and theme and then let theme drive.

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Making a Game More Thematic

As you iterate on the game design, ask yourself: How do we layer the theme on the mechanics?

Let the theme drive every decision and look for it in every playtest. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily change things every playtest, but you do have to have your thematic radar on. Be aware and notice if something feels out of theme for other players.

Playtesters

You should get playtesters that know nothing about your theme and also get playtesters that are experts in your theme. Omari generally doesn’t seek out one or the other unless they’re currently lacking in one group.

Before you start on the playtest, ask the playtesters: “How familiar are you with this theme?”

The answer to this question can change the way that Omari playtests. If the players don’t know much about the theme, he usually text his brother and they agree to not talk and let the playtesters drive the questions and see what they need to know. This is how you learn the things that that type of player needs.

If you need suggestions…

Twitter can be a great resource. After Omari posted about Hoop Godz, someone mentioned a real basketball coach that was really good at managing the game during the final seconds. They suggested having a special ability for clock management based on that coach, which made total sense, Omari had just never thought of it.

More Playtesting Tips

Try to sneak in elements of blind playtesting in different corners of the game. See if the cards tell the playtesters how to play. This will make the final rounds of blind playtesting a lot easier. .

How do you make sure you’re capturing the right mechanical parts of the theme?

This aspect is really hard! Omari struggles often in the beginning of the design process, as he wants to capture as much of the theme as possible. You can identify so much that feels like it should be added and part of the game, but you’ll take a lot of those things out. The most important thing is the player experience, so you should only keep aspects of the game that players have a good response to. You should only add in mechanical aspects that aren’t important to theme if they add to the player fun level.

Omari leans a lot on his brother’s opinions for knowing what is and what isn’t fun. He’s newer to board gaming and hasn’t spent as much time playing and designing games, so he has a much easier time of knowing if something is fun or not.

Knowledge of the Theme

In general you don’t need to be incredibly intimate with the theme of your game, but you do need to have a basis of knowledge. Ask someone else that knows a lot about the theme. Omari had real rappers play the Rap Godz, then he’d ask them: How well does this reflect things that you experience as a rapper, how does it reflect your life? The feedback he got was incredible.

Tying Mechanics More with Theme

The intuitiveness is what makes a game highly thematic; if the actions you take and the strategies you have make sense, that’s a great place to be at. Are the actions and strategy intuitive, do they feel like the right fit?

For example, in Hoop Godz, if you’re shooting the ball, you need to have two hands on the ball, so you need to get two hands on the dice to shoot. It could be anything for the game, but when you’re rolling dice real fast, your brain will make that connection, so Omari changed the dice needed to make the action make sense. The probabilities don’t matter as much if your players are responding in ways where the actions just feel right.

Playtesting

It’s sometimes really hard to know the right questions to ask to find out if things are feeling correct. One thing you can ask is: Do the actions match your idea of what should happen based on what you know of the theme?

There’s so much subtext in playtesting, but especially in a two player competitive game. The relationship dynamic of the two players can effect the playtest a great deal and this is something you need to keep in mind. Two people that don’t know each other are going to be a lot more conservative than two people that know each other well. It’s never easy to decipher all the things between players, but it’s something you need to take into consideration and to try to get both types of groups to play your game.

It should be easy to get people that know each other well to playtest together, but if you’re looking for people that don’t know each other, it’s fairly easy to find sets of people that don’t know each other at conventions.

Aspects that Don’t Fit the Theme

If you have to add something to the game to make it work from a balance or game standpoint, you should still put it in the game if it helps with the fun factor. This is especially true if the aspect is very necessary to gameplay. Ideally, you want to find a sneaky way to twist it into being thematic.

For example, at the beginning of Hoop Godz, the 1st and second player have a different amount of starting energy to be balanced. There’s no thematic reason for that, but we’re going to word it in a specific way in the rulebook. A lot of things you might end up explaining the thematic reasons for in the rulebook. It’s much better than not trying to fit theme in at all, you want to try to make everything be at least a little bit thematic.

Another example in Hoop Godz is the fact that you can only pass the ball from one player to another at the beginning of your turn. It’s something that players ask about all the time and it’s really hard to explain. It has to do with the fact that sports games are very fast paced and action oriented compared to board games where you have tiny increments of time and how long do actions actually take to happen? You wouldn’t be able to go through a series of actions without the opponent getting a chance to respond in the actual game of basketball, so things have to be different in the board game version. This meant that Omari forced passing in the beginning of the turn, so at the end of the turn, you have to position yourself in a way to pass the ball and the opponent gets to respond to that on their turn. .

Sometimes it’s frustrating and it boils down to trying to abstract something into a board game. You have to make it fun and intuitive, so you have to make concessions.

The Right Mechanic for a Theme

There’s no way to know that a theme will have a specific RIGHT mechanic, you can make a lot of mechanics work with a particular theme. You can help make the decisions,

The emotional connections can help you determine how right a particular mechanic is with a theme. Ask yourself, do you have an emotional response to this mechanic, as you would have with the theme? Does each aspect mechanically work, yes or no?

For Hoop Godz, Omari could have had cards or dice for the game, but the dice works well because it’s more physical so it lends itself to more of a sports theme. It’s real-time as then when you’re playing your energy is moving and your heart rate is going up, which ties in with the emotional connection with sports.

Starting to Design Thematically

When you’re starting out, you want to take your theme and break it down in a variety of ways. For example, with hip hop, what exactly is hip hop? It’s a form of storytelling, but how is storytelling used in hip hop? This is a very bottom to top approach, where you’re thinking about what the bottom looks like, what the top looks like, and constantly pulling these apart to find interesting aspects to add. You’ll end up throwing most of the content away, but it’s an important process to go through.

Break the theme down into the pieces, make a game, strip it down to the great parts.

Pathways Fellowship

The aim of the Pathways Fellowship is to provide assistance to board game designers through mentorship, guidance, and the practical means to attend conventions that would help further their career in the games industry. It tries to help them in meaningful and tangible ways, like paying for conventions, supporting people going to conventions, helping them with computers to run TTS and getting them training for TTS.

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You can find out more about Omari here:

• Twitter: Board Game Brothas, Omari Akil
• Twitch: Akilaverse
• Website: https://www.boardgamebrothas.com/
• The Break Down on Tabletop Backer Party
• Hoop Godz Launch Page
• Pathways Fellowship

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