Board games are built out of mechanics: worker placement, deck building, area control, and hundreds more. The Game Mechanics Universe treats a large catalog of games as a network and asks what connects them.
It maps the mechanics and categories that define games, tracks how those mechanics rose and fell over three decades, weighs complexity against rating, and traces the collaboration network of the designers behind it all. Each figure below is interactive. Hover, zoom, and drag the nodes.
Figure 1. Board games as a network of the mechanics and categories that define them, with related ideas pulled together into clusters.
Figure 2. Three decades of game design, tracking when each mechanic rose and fell across the games published each year.
Figure 3. Every game placed by how complex it is against how highly it is rated, so you can see whether heavier games actually score better.
Figure 4. The people behind the games, linked by who has designed together, mapping the collaboration network of board-game designers.
Dataset
Built from a large catalog of board games, their mechanics, categories, complexity, ratings, and designers.
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