Physical Fun, Digital Assistance: The Rise of Board Game Companion Apps

This article was originally written in April 2019.

On a recent board game night with friends, I pulled out a favorite card game of mine for the table to play: Fantasy Realms. Fantasy Realms has the unique honor of devoting more space in its rulebook to explaining how to score a hand, than how to play the game itself. The strategy in Fantasy Realms seems simple — gather an optimal set of cards to craft into your hand, and do so before giving your opponents the opportunity to create an equally high-scoring hand — but every card in Fantasy Realms has a unique combination of bonuses or penalties based on the other cards in your hand, creating a complex set of interdependencies that players have to unravel when making their decisions each turn. Given these interdependencies, calculating your final score is an arduous task after the game has ended.

However, on that night I never had to score a game of Fantasy Realms by hand. That’s because Fantasy Realms is part of a growing number of games that have a digital companion app — an application developed by either the game’s developer or a third party, meant to be downloaded to ease players through particularly unpleasant aspects of a physical game.

If you go to buy Fantasy Realms online, you’ll see this graphic prominently featuring the game’s companion app.

What makes a good companion app?

Companion apps are a relatively recent addition to board game play, and an even more recent addition to game design. What makes these apps particularly interesting, compared to other digital game apps, is that they exist specifically as extensions of the physical game. For example, the Fantasy Realms companion app doesn’t let you play Fantasy Realms on your phone, and without the app the game is still entirely playable out-of-the-box. Nearly all in-market companion apps were developed well after their corresponding games were published, and designed specifically to address existing pain points in the play experience. By their nature these problems weren’t ones that necessarily required a digital solution, and plenty of players still enjoy playing these games sans-technology. In general, companion apps are tasked with addressing one (or more) of the following pain points in game play:

Randomization. In general, humans are terrible at being random. Apps can be employed during game set-up or used during the game to speed through large randomization tasks.

• Games with randomized play boards, like Settlers of Catan, have apps that can generate new, computer-generated board layouts before the game begins.

• Warhammer 40K calls on players to roll upwards of one hundred dice to determine the success or failure of actions. Its third-party app lets players instantly roll and tabulate dice results, allowing for plenty of saved time.

Game management. These apps manage and update a list or timer, allowing players to focus on the game.

• In response to complaints that physically tracking character stats was burdensome, Betrayal at House on the Hill released an app which could do so with ease. Dungeons & Dragons has created a similar, but much more intricate, online app for tracking character stats and abilities.

• Multiple games which require a timer to play, such as Fuse or 5 Minute Dungeon, provide a very simple companion app that thematically counts time down for players.

Arithmetic/scoring. Apps here are used at the end of games when scoring is calculated only once certain criteria are met.

• Many games, including 7 Wonders, Agricola, and Carcassonne, use companion apps to walk players through each step of their complex scoring processes.

While these apps are certainly useful for solving a variety of problems that players experience when playing existing games, the fact that these were largely designed as a reaction to existing games shows that the current generation of companion apps is just scratching the surface of how technology can help further gaming experiences. Rather than simply addressing pain points, the next generation of companion apps will find ways to enhance gameplay in uniquely digital ways, and become indispensable for the games themselves.

Another challenge for board game companion apps, in particular, is that many board gamers play physical games specifically because they aren’t digital experiences. Board gaming is increasingly being used as a means of physical socialization, where interactions with other people don’t involve a screen, and the steady rise of board game cafes is reflective of this. As a result, any board game that necessitates the use of a companion app is going to be met with a fair bit of hesitation from gamers, and must show that the benefits of using the app during gameplay do not detract from the social experience of playing a game with friends. While many games won’t meet those requirements, we are beginning to see games that push the boundaries of what companion apps can do even when their audience is cautious to adopt them.]

The One Night Ultimate series of games, which focus on player deception and partial information they learn through a pre-game script, is one of the best current examples of how companion apps are evolving. While One Night Ultimate Werewolf uses an app to guide the players through this script in place of a player, One Night Ultimate Alien expands on this concept by adding in elements of randomness to the script that a player could not reasonably perform in a timely manner. As a result, the app for One Night Ultimate Alien moves beyond just easing the players through rough patches in gameplay, but actually creates a game that only reaches its full potential when paired with the app.

Above: Playthroughs of both One Night Ultimate Werewolf and One Night Ultimate Alien. Both begin with the app instructing the players through the pre-game script. Alien’s script involves elements of randomness that change the game between plays, while the Werewolf script is always the same.

What does this mean for app design?

Companion apps are a great reminder that users are often just looking for the most elegant solution to their problems, and not an entirely new way of handling tasks they’re already familiar with. The most successful companion apps are never made the focus of a board game, but rather act as functional replacements to tasks too unpleasant or difficult for people to execute without digital assistance. When digital apps ask users to relearn old tasks by trying to supplant (rather than support) prior methods, it can create an unnecessary tension between the app and the user. By instead finding the pain points along user journeys and determining where best technology can assist those users, new digital products can bear better adoption and usage rates than would have occurred by replacing the journey entirely.

This is not to say that the older, less technological systems are perfect, or even efficient, compared to newer technologies. For instance, physical board games are riddled with slow, manual actions --- shuffling cards, rolling dice, or moving pieces --- that an app could easily replace. However, an app that replaced all those things in a game would predictably fail, as many board gamers enjoy the physicality of manipulating game pieces. Other digital apps must similarly consider user behaviors when being designed, and not overstep by removing the enjoyable, human elements of physical processes.

Ultimately, finding this balance is one of the fundamental questions of contemporary game design, made more difficult by an ever-expanding wealth of technologies coming to market. And, just like in Fantasy Realms, we’ll only succeed by trying to craft the best selection of features for our users to hold in their hands.