June 2011
1 post
5 tags
Rory's Story Cubes
As an aficionado of both dice and semiotics, I was very excited to find Rory’s Story Cubes in my FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) a few weeks ago. This set consists of nine six-sided dice featuring 54 different icons; every side of every die is unique.
Rory’s Story Cubes is presented as a storytelling game, and offers a few short ways of using them as such, all of which revolve...
October 2010
1 post
1 tag
Ludic Orders of Signification
As I have alluded to previously, one of the interesting facets of how objects operate as fiction-signs (that is, signs in the context of the game’s fiction) is how malleable and arbitrary they are. For example, the ever-popular board game Agricola recently saw a new quasi-expansion, Agricola: The Goodies. Among other things, this expansion includes replacement wooden bits that are meant to...
May 2010
2 posts
2 tags
There Is No Magic Circle (in Video Games)
Video games have no magic circle, but board games do.
The difference between these two media is, essentially, one of reaction and proaction. If I may be allowed to indulge in a McLuhan-esque theory for a moment, video games are a reactive medium. As a player, I am continually reacting to the game state as-defined by the computer. The computer communicates the current state to me (the means by...
1 tag
Resource Chits from Le Havre
One of my favorite board games is Uwe Rosenberg’s Le Havre, an economic game wherein the players are workers in a harbor (the titular French city).
[note: I have a lot to say about these but not necessarily in any systematic fashion. But hey, what do you expect from a blog?]
In the game players must manage sixteen different types of resources, which can be used to construct buildings or...
March 2010
2 posts
1 tag
The Book of Chess
I tend to be more interested in Chess sets themselves than actually playing, which is fortunate for this blog. I recently acquired a rather fascinating Chess set known as The Book of Chess, pictured below.
What I find so fascinating about this set is the enormous amount of information packed into the individual pieces, and the numerous codes in which they operate.
To begin with, each piece...
4 tags
Layered Codes: Settlers of Catan Viking Pieces
Board game bits are clearly interchangeable, as evidenced by the countless variants of Monopoly and Chess that can be found in any game or toy store. A related phenomenon more common in Euro games are replacement bits: these are pieces meant to replace the original pieces that shipped with a game, as opposed to an entire re-skin like Simpson’s Monopoly. An example are these Settlers of...
February 2010
4 posts
2 tags
1 tag
Rules-Signs and Fiction-Signs
To get at what and how game bits represent, it is useful to separate how they operate in the game’s fiction from how they operate in the game’s rules (a distinction inspired by Jesper Juul’s model of games as half-real). A good example is a standard rook from any given Chess set.
If we consider the rook as a fiction-sign, the signifier is the rook itself and the signified is...
In-Game vs Isolated
Most of the posts on this blog will be treating the game bits in an extra-game context; for example, sitting on a shelf as opposed to in the middle of the game.
The reason for this is that a piece in-game contains a wealth of state-related information on top of the representational information that I am interested in here. The Ace of Spades by itself means something quite different than during a...
Kick-Off
I will be using this blog to post pictures of and thoughts on interesting board game bits from a semiotic perspective.
Please note that I am more of a “weekend semiotician,” so if any actual semioticians happen across this I would love your feedback.