Messing around with graphic design Pt. 5 Layout
During the Shikoku 1889 Kickstarter, a handful of backers observed that the placement of the stock market was on the bottom of the board instead of on top. Lots of great reasoning was provided why they felt the market should be at the top of the board rather than its current positioning at the bottom. However, many of these players were only considering the viewing angle of the stock market. I thought this would be a good opportunity to show some other things to consider for usability and explain how we ended up with the current layout.
Not top vs bottom, but market orientation: When players say that the market should be on top, what they actually mean is that the bottom of the market should be facing the map. If the map is at the center of the play area and the bottom of the market is oriented toward the map, that often results in the most number of players seeing the market rightside-up.
The reality is that the best way to handle market and map orientation is to put them on separate boards, then leave it up to the players to figure out what configuration works best for their table. Sometimes players will be sitting on opposite sides, sometimes players will be sitting on adjacent sides (long side and short side of a table), sometimes there will be 6 players. One configuration won’t work perfectly for any possible seating arrangement, so modularize the boards and allow players to adapt the configuration to their current situation.
“Okay, then why is Shikoku 1889 on one board?”
The importance of the train yard: Before I can talk about that, I need to talk about the train yard. I expect Shikoku 1889 will be many players’ first foray into 18xx and thus many of the production decisions have been made to address any friction points with getting started (while also ensuring those decisions make sense for veteran players as well!) New players are learning what a train roster is, that trains have ranks, how many trains are in each rank, that trains must be purchased in order, and what are the phase effects that happen as a result of trains being purchased (like rusting).
I think experienced players are so used to a train roster as familiar as 1830’s that most of the time the trains could just be in a single stack and players could go by memory. However, this is certainly not the case for new players. For new players, it is challenging to learn the train roster without having that information being actively exposed to them. Therefore, I felt very strongly that a train yard was needed where players are instructed to splay out all trains in dedicated zones during setup.
So now, let’s return to why Shikoku 1889 uses only one board.
Why Shikoku 1889 has one board: When building a train yard with splayed trains, you are physically limited by the size of the cards and the amount you want to splay each of them. Take a look at the below image of how to set up the Shikoku 1889 board. We could probably splay the trains a little bit more compactly, but the train yard is going to be tall no matter what we do.
Given that I wanted all train ranks to be seen in order, this was the height that the train yard was going to be. Now in theory I could do a train yard, the stock market, and the map all on separate boards, but that is not ideal from a production standpoint. The train yard would be a long skinny strip prone to warping/bending — not to mention it would be more expensive to produce 3 smaller boards instead of 1 larger board.
So even though the ideal set up is to have separate boards where players can use them as modular pieces when configuring their play area, I still opted for one board that had its height set by the train yard.
“Okay, it’s one board. Then why is the market on bottom instead of on top?”
Deciding on board layout: Part of the reason we are discussing the market being on “top” or “bottom” is because the board layout we chose was portrait. I have played plenty of games where the board and market were upside-down for half the players, and rightside-up for the other half. Since the most common player counts for this game are 3p and 4p, we felt it would best to make it so up to 4 players could view the board from the side as shown below.
You actually interact with the stock market more often than you interact with the map. You move stock tokens during both Stock Rounds and Operating Rounds while you only interact with the map during Operating Rounds. Reaching over the map to adjust a token can sometimes have disastrous effects — think about trying to adjust stock tokens from the “wrong” side of the board in 1817. We felt that having players reaching from the sides would reduce the number of times a player reached over the map which would hopefully result in fewer scattered tiles, cards, and tokens.
When it comes to why the market is on bottom, that is more of an issue with how the board can be laid out. Let’s see what happens if we shift the stock market to the top.
Enclosing the open market: If we did move the stock market up, the open market would go with it as that’s the only space on the board where it would fit. What happens here is the map now encloses the open market as shown below rather than being next to the edge of the board when it was on the bottom.
That is hugely problematic and I am shocked no one has complained about how Avalon Hill did this for 1830’s board! When the open market gets filled up, you are trying to stuff potentially dozens of cards into a small box with nowhere to overflow. When it’s next to the edge of the board, the table can become open market space as well and stock certificates can overflow there.
We could keep the stock market on bottom and flip it upside-down such that the bottom of the market was pointed toward the map. This would give a better viewing angle to players and make the open market adjacent to the edge of the board, but candidly I think that would be really confusing to anyone who wasn’t sitting at the table looking at the board. Having multiple elements being viewable from different orientations on the same board might have its advantages, but now no player can see all elements rightside-up simultaneously. If I felt strongly enough that the market should be upside-down here, I would split out the boards and let players do that at their tables rather than print the market upside-down.
There’s another configuration we could do where the stock market is on top and the open market is adjacent to the edge of the board. However, there are issues with this configuration.
Board zones: Now is a good time to talk about board zones. There are different zones of the board with different types of hand movements/actions happening in each of those zones. Some zones are card picking, others are token movement, others are picking up and replacing tiles. One thing you generally want to avoid is having 2 zones with a lot of activity too close together as that increases the chances of knocking things out of place.
If you look at the original layout of the board, look at where the stock market sits. Notice how isolated the stock market is from other activity zones — particularly the left side of the stock market where stock tokens spend most of their time. In the above layout, the train yard is next to the left side of the stock market. While I don’t think it’s likely that a card shoots out from the train yard and hits several stock tokens, these two activity zones are not as isolated as they could be.
Perhaps we were being overly cautious, but we felt it was better to keep as many components away from this area of the stock market as possible. The stock market is somewhat “fragile” as a token knocked out of place could easily be mistaken for a different value. “Was that on 60 or 55?” Other components like trains, shares, or tiles knocked out of place are slightly more forgiving to put back in place.
Nothing is perfect: At the end of the day, I think any configuration would be mostly fine. We’re really debating small details that all have both advantages and disadvantages — details which have a mostly marginal impact on usability. I’ve played on plenty of distant upside-down boards and have had to reach over many components to adjust some token or replace some tile. That said, given that we have control over how the board is presented, it is still a worthwhile exercise to think through and address these use cases where possible.
Perhaps the solution we arrived at does not match your preferences and you do not agree with our logic. That is completely okay! I just wanted to share about the constraints we had to work with and how we approached addressing those constraints. Hope this was interesting!
