A taxonomy of narrative-centric board and card games

Narrative-centric analog games ¹ have emerged from a hybridization of genres: they borrow conventions from pen and paper-based role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, as well as the foundations of eurogames and war games. Historically, board game narratives and themes have primarily been imposed through design elements rather than mechanics: in his study of Eurogames, Woods noted that while players often value a "sense of narrative" that unifies theme and mechanics, this is rarely an emphasis of the genre [34]. However, modern narrative-centric board games demonstrate new levels of unity between play and story, integrating players into the narrative as meaningful actors and borrowing conventions from video games to build nonlinear play. In this paper, we examine and compare some exemplars of the narrative-centric board game genre, and use these games as a lens to propose a taxonomy of narrative-based physical games that builds from and extends Espen Aarseth's narrative theory of digital games [1] and suggest new possibilities for digital game narratives.