Have you ever wondered why there aren’t that many (any?) great airline-theme board games? In my first ever blog post, I discuss the differences between airline and railroad themes from the board game designer’s perspective. I describe my journey from identifying a market gap and an interesting challenge, and the process I went through to solve it.
The Beginnings
Airline management is a fairly successful theme when it comes to PC games, but I feel like we haven’t had a great airline board game yet. The airline theme deserves its own Ticket to Ride. After all, the challenge is similar – route building with a travel theme. Imagine a nice, medium-weight euro about maximising profit while flying around the world. Add beautiful art and I feel like it could be a hit. That’s the vision that got me started on the board game design journey.
The highest BGG rating for an airline management game is 7.42 (out of the 20 airline/airport related games that looked like they actually got published, but it could be that I missed some). In comparison, there are 10+ standalone (not counting expansions) railway games with ratings higher than the highest airline themed game. Why is that?
The problem
I don’t buy the argument that airline theme board games haven’t taken off (ha ha) because there is something wrong/boring about the theme. If general public can get excited about birds (Wingspan) or stained glass (Azul/Sagrada) then surely they can get excited about air travel management. I also don’t think that people haven’t thought about creating the next Ticket to Ride, except set in the skies – it is a pretty obvious theme to try out. In fact, I have seen people struggle with Airline themed board game design on Facebook groups and it feels like a bigger challenge than a railroad game, which may be one of the reasons why there are fewer airline-theme board games.
Think about Ticket to Ride, or any other railroad/airline game you have come across. Players build routes, which are indicated on the board. Usually, there are cities which you connect with routes. For example, if my counting is right, there are 34 cities on the original Ticket to Ride map, which provides enough complexity for the game to be fun. By my count, there are 70 connections between the cities, which seems reasonable for a railway network (at least to a layman like me).
The thing about planes though, is that they can fly between any two places. Sure, they are still confined to space corridors, but there is essentially no reason why a plane route could not be created between any two of the world’s major airports (okay, the really far away ones would require a refueling stop). So what if we adapted the original Ticket to Ride board to have connections between each and every city? It would have a total of 561 connections, almost 500 more than the already busy board. It just doesn’t work.
What may be happening is this: game creators realize that the “routes-shown-on-board” model simply works better for the railway theme so they go down that route instead of the airline theme. New games generate more buzz in the railway board game space and since people enjoy those games, that drives the train game demand up, leaving the airline theme sidelined.
The solutions
So how can we effectively visualize routes so that the visualization works with the airline theme? I did some research to see what other people were thinking and I came up with a couple ideas of my own, and these were the possible solutions to the problem:
1) Look for thematic justifications to limit the number of routes on the board (for example set the game in 1950s when planes had lower ranges, or force the players to fly in the hub and spoke model, which Airbus A380 designers bet on and lost). Sure, a perfectly valid option, but then we would end up with a design similar to the existing games railroad/airline games. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not a board game design breakthrough to write blogs about 🙂
2) Have few cities/airports: 12 airports would need 66 connections so comparable to the number of connections in Ticket to Ride. Again, this would be quite similar to existing railroad/airline games. Personally, I did not fancy this because I wanted the game to span 6 continents and picking top 12 airports in the world would be a headache – inevitably lots of the key ones would be missed out. Also, with only 12 airports I’m not sure if the complexity would be sufficient to make it fun for kids and geeks alike.
3) Use a some sort of pin and string system, players would tie strings between the airports they are flying between. It’s a really cool solution, but I did not fancy a complex manufacturing problem in my first serious project (but oh I dare you to design this, I would love to play a game like this). It feels like it would be super fiddly and not really suited for people with dexterity issues.
4) Use a washable board + crayons as in Empire Builder. Again, cool idea, not sure about the difficulties associated with manufacturing. Board aesthetics would also take a hit with this solution.
5) Accept that each player’s routes won’t be shown on the map, show them using cards instead.
As you can guess, I went with option number 5.
In the next blog post, I will describe the process I went through to choose the mechanics and how the childhood games of Monopoly (which I am not a fan of BTW) influenced my choices.
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