The weight of narrative: on board game complexity

Board game complexity is measured through weight: a 1-5 scale popularised on Board Game Geek (BGG), with 1 being playable with little effort and 5 being obtuse even for dedicated players. In this article, I argue that previous discussions of weight focused solely on mechanical complexity are inadequate and the mental load of sustaining a narrative needs to be more carefully considered. Board games’ lusory status is primarily enforced through mental measures, and narrative requires players to not only internalise game rules, but also socially maintain its fiction. The top 100 board games on BGG were categorised across a 0-9 scale based on their narrative features. Based on this categorisation, the analysis then explores complexity across these games. Through this analysis, three findings were explored. Firstly, that lightweight games feature little to no narrative features to maintain their ease of playability. Secondly, certain board game features such as fantasy stories, multi-session games and transmedia fictions feature more often in narrative-heavy games, because they make loading narrative content in the game easier. Thirdly, certain narrative features are present in every non-lightweight game sampled, suggesting that these narrative features are non-incidental and could aid mechanical rule intake.