If I tell you that I am designing a board game about pirates, you can probably imagine some of the things you might find inside the box. There will probably be ships, treasure, islands and cannons, perhaps a map of the Caribbean and, if the art director is feeling particularly traditional, a skull or two. Before I have explained a single rule, the theme has already given you a fairly detailed picture of the world in which the game takes place.
What it has not told you is what you will actually be doing there.
You might be sailing into unknown waters and discovering new islands, fighting other ships, trading goods between ports, following maps to buried treasure, or managing a crew whose loyalty depends on how successfully you divide the loot. You might even spend most of the game negotiating temporary alliances with other captains, knowing that every agreement will last only until someone has a good enough reason to break it. All of these could legitimately be described as pirate games, but the experience they create for the player would be completely different.
This distinction matters because we often use a game’s theme as though it were a description of the game itself. We say that a game is “about pirates”, “about zombies”, “about building an empire” or “about evolution”, when in fact we have only described the world the designer has chosen to work with. Every one of those worlds contains far more ideas, relationships and possible actions than a board game could ever represent, which means that choosing the theme is only the beginning of the design process. The much more interesting decision is choosing what, within that theme, the game will consider important.
Theme is not narrative, and neither is the game itself
Part of the confusion comes from the tendency to use theme and narrative almost interchangeably, even though they describe different things. Theme gives the game a context: it tells us where we are, who we are and what kind of world we are operating in. Narrative, when a game has one, is concerned with what happens within that world, and can involve events, relationships, consequences and some form of change over time.
A game can therefore have a very clear theme without having much narrative at all. Splendor, for example, places its players in the role of Renaissance merchants collecting gems, acquiring developments and attracting nobles, but very little actually happens in a narrative sense. There is no protagonist whose story develops over the course of the game and no dramatic sequence of events that transforms the world. The theme gives meaning to the game’s economic system, and that is enough; a board game does not need to tell a story in order to make good use of its theme.
There is, however, another distinction that interests me even more, because it exists whether or not the game has any narrative ambitions. Once I have chosen a theme, I still need to decide which parts of that theme will become mechanisms, resources, decisions and goals. In other words, I need to decide what the player will actually experience.
Take pirates again. If I decide that the interesting thing about pirates is exploration, I might build a game around movement, unknown information and the discovery of new locations. If I am interested in piracy as an economic activity, ports, cargo and fluctuating prices suddenly become much more important. If the fantasy I want to create is one of commanding a dangerous and unreliable crew, the same theme might lead me toward loyalty, morale and negotiation instead. None of these interpretations is inherently more “pirate” than the others; they simply select different elements from the same enormous collection of associations.
That selection is where theme starts becoming design.
Every theme contains more than one possible game
Empire building makes this particularly clear, because an empire contains almost everything a designer could possibly want to model: territorial expansion, military force, taxation, trade, administration, technology, diplomacy, infrastructure, religion, population, culture and political legitimacy, among many other things. A game that tried to give equal weight to all of them would probably collapse under its own weight, so every empire-building game has to make choices about what an empire means within its particular system.
One game might make territorial expansion the centre of the experience, so that the growth of the empire is represented primarily by occupying more of the map. Another might care much more about technological development and allow a relatively small territory to become increasingly powerful through investment. A third could build most of its interaction around trade and diplomacy, while a fourth might be less interested in expansion than in the difficulty of keeping a large, unstable political system together. They are all capable of producing a convincing fantasy of empire, but they do so by emphasizing very different relationships.
The same thing happens with evolution. Calling something an “evolution game” sounds surprisingly specific until we ask what evolution actually means in play. Are players adapting species to changing environmental conditions, competing over food, developing predators and prey, reproducing, passing on traits, avoiding extinction, or creating increasingly specialized organisms? Evolution contains all of these processes, but the game does not need to contain all of them. It needs to decide which ones create the experience it is interested in.
This is not merely a practical concession to the limitations of board games. Any game that represents a real or fictional subject is creating a model, and models are useful precisely because they leave things out. A designer chooses a handful of relationships, makes those relationships visible and gives players the ability to manipulate them. The resulting game inevitably says, in mechanical terms, “these are the things that matter here.”
That becomes especially interesting when two games use almost exactly the same theme and still produce radically different experiences.
Zombies are only interesting once we decide what they do to people
Zombies are among the easiest themes to recognize and, because of that familiarity, they are also a useful example. If I tell you that we are playing a zombie game, you probably expect danger, survival and a large number of undead people trying to eat us. What remains open is the question of where the game places its attention.
One obvious answer is combat. Zombies can be enemies whose primary function is to create tactical problems: they move toward the players, become increasingly numerous, restrict movement and need to be killed before they overwhelm the group. A game built around that interpretation naturally cares about weapons, positioning, character abilities and the management of increasingly dangerous encounters.
But zombie fiction has never been only about killing zombies. It can just as easily be about scarcity, because food, ammunition and medicine become valuable when the systems that normally provide them disappear. It can be about trust, because a group of survivors has to decide who should be allowed into the shelter and whether everyone is acting in the group’s interest. It can be about the collapse of social order, in which case the zombies themselves are almost environmental pressure: their real purpose is to force human beings into difficult decisions.
This is part of what makes the difference between games such as Zombicide and Dead of Winter interesting. Both clearly belong to the same broad thematic world, but Zombicide leans heavily into the tactical fantasy of fighting through large numbers of zombies, acquiring equipment and using character abilities to survive increasingly dangerous situations. Dead of Winter uses the undead as only one source of pressure among several; the colony has needs, resources are scarce, players have personal objectives and the possibility of conflicting interests changes how everyone interprets everyone else’s behaviour.
Neither game needs to be judged by how completely it represents the zombie genre, because completeness is not the goal. What matters is that each game has chosen a different answer to the question: what is interesting about being in a zombie apocalypse?
Once that question has been answered, the mechanisms begin to make much more sense.
The picture on the card is not the theme doing its job
This also explains why a collection of thematic objects does not necessarily create a thematic experience. Imagine a game about inventions containing cards for the printing press, the steam engine, the telephone and the light bulb. The subject is immediately recognizable, but we still know almost nothing about what invention means in the game.
If players combine existing technologies to create new ones, invention might be represented as experimentation and recombination. If they develop products and bring them to market, the game could instead focus on investment, production and demand. A game covering centuries of scientific development might treat individual inventions as nodes in a technological network, where each discovery creates the conditions for discoveries that follow. Another game could use exactly the same historical inventions but focus on prestige, asking players to compete over who receives recognition for changing the world.
In each case the artwork could depict the same objects, while the mechanisms make a completely different statement about what those objects mean.
This is why the common discussion about “pasted-on themes” is useful, but only up to a point. We often ask whether the theme could be replaced without substantially changing the mechanics, and when the answer is yes, we describe it as pasted on. That is a reasonable test of the relationship between mechanism and theme, but even a deeply integrated theme still requires selection. A pirate game might decide that wind direction is enormously important while ignoring crew morale entirely, while another could ignore wind and build its entire system around morale. Both may be thematically coherent because coherence does not require modelling everything; it requires the things we choose to model to support the experience we are trying to create.
The question, then, is not simply whether the mechanics “match” the theme. It is whether the designer has identified an interesting part of that theme and found mechanisms that allow players to experience it.
Familiar themes help us, but they also make decisions for us
One of the great advantages of a familiar theme is that players arrive at the table carrying information the designer did not have to teach them. If food is scarce in a survival game, players immediately understand why that is a problem. If a dragon appears, we do not need several paragraphs of rules to establish that approaching it is probably dangerous. Pirates, zombies, medieval kingdoms and space exploration all come with a vocabulary of expected objects and actions, which can make a complicated system much easier to understand.
The problem is that the same expectations can quietly narrow the design space. If I decide to make a pirate game, naval combat, treasure and exploration are so readily available that it is very easy to reach for them before asking whether they are actually the most interesting things I could do with the subject. A familiar theme can therefore become a shortcut not only for the player, but also for the designer.
This is one reason I find unusual themes interesting. Wingspan did not simply put birds on top of a conventional war or trading game; its subject naturally suggests a different vocabulary of actions and relationships. Players attract birds to habitats, collect food and lay eggs, and the absence of the usual thematic verbs forces different design questions. What does progress look like when nobody is conquering territory? What does competition mean when the players are not attacking one another? What kinds of resources and relationships make intuitive sense in this world?
An unusual theme does not automatically make a game original, just as a familiar theme does not automatically make one derivative. What it can do is prevent some of the answers from arriving too easily. When the subject does not come with a well-established package of expected mechanics, the designer has to think more carefully about what people actually do in that world and which parts of it are worth turning into play.
The reverse is also true: sometimes a familiar theme becomes interesting precisely because the designer refuses its most obvious interpretation. A zombie game that concentrates on trust rather than combat, an empire game about maintaining stability rather than expanding, or a pirate game about managing an unruly crew can feel fresh without needing a completely new mechanical language. The novelty comes from looking at a familiar world and choosing a different part of it.
What is the game actually about?
When players first encounter a game, the theme functions almost like a promise. It gives them a world they recognize, or at least one they can imagine, and allows them to start forming expectations before they have read the rules. That makes theme an extremely powerful design tool, because it can explain abstract systems, make actions intuitive and give emotional meaning to decisions that would otherwise be purely mathematical.
But the promise still has to be interpreted.
A pirate theme tells me that I am entering a world of pirates, but the design decides whether piracy means exploration, trade, combat, treasure hunting or managing a crew that may turn against me. A zombie theme establishes an apocalypse, but the design decides whether that apocalypse is fundamentally about tactical survival, scarcity or trust. Evolution provides an enormous biological process, but the design chooses whether I will experience it primarily as adaptation, competition or specialization.
That is why, when I begin thinking about a theme, I find “What is this game about?” much more useful than “What is the theme?”
The first question forces us to make choices. It asks what the players will spend their time thinking about, what relationships the system will make important and what kind of experience should emerge from their decisions. It moves us away from the collection of objects we expect to see on cards and boards, and toward the particular part of the subject that we actually want people to play with.
The theme tells us where the game takes place and gives us the vocabulary with which to describe that world. It can create expectations, make rules easier to understand and give abstract mechanisms a meaning they would not otherwise have. But it cannot decide what matters.
That is the designer’s job.