Campaign board games are shrinking, and it’s for the better

Back in May of 2023, I wrote this editorial sharing a frustration with the board gaming trend of adopting extremely lengthy multi-session campaigns. With the advent of crowdfunding and the explosion of big-box narrative-driven games, as well as the success of the legacy format, the exhausting 20-plus-hour campaign structure really took off. There are dozens and dozens of options now, and no one can hope to play them all. I pleaded with the industry to adapt and shift toward shorter narrative arcs with shallower requirements. By gum, the industry listened.

Sure, they were probably just responding to cultural trends and shifting demand, but the point is something changed. There has been a swell of titles that present new and innovative variations on the campaign format in board gaming. These creative approaches have proven satisfying and inspirational. Most importantly, they’ve resulted in games that players can actually complete given a busy schedule and limited hobby time.

The most simple approach is trimming down the number of required sessions. This has seen some meaningful success with two recent standouts. The first is Heat: Pedal to the Metal. This immensely popular release is a straightforward racing game driven by clever card play. It’s set in the golden age of the 1950s Formula 1 scene and features intense one-off races that take roughly 40 minutes to complete. The best the game has to offer, however, is found in its championship circuit mode.

This presents a three- or four-race tournament that is playable in a single evening. It hosts up to six players, and you can even substitute game-controlled bots to fill out a smaller player count. In between each race you can upgrade your vehicle by drafting various cards representing mechanical tweaks or new high-performance parts. These cards are added to your deck and affect every race going forward.

The multi-race championship mode is such a fantastic addition to the game. It feels like a whole expansion, offering a thrilling new way to play where your performance carries forward and the series culminates in a high-stakes final match. You also aren’t required to play the campaign in a single session, as the box itself allows you to store all of the various bits to save your championship in between races. Clocking in at just a three-hour total time commitment, this is exactly the type of modernized campaign play that facilitates actually completing the event.

2024 standout Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach is another recent attempt at a trimmed-down campaign. This is a science fiction epic where players compete for various ambitions in a war-torn galaxy. It’s evocative of the 4X video game genre, managing this broad scope with an unusually quirky card system reminiscent of classic trick-takers such as Euchre and Hearts. This is a brilliant and inventive game that can take two or three hours for up to four participants to battle it out and come to grips with their coexistence. But with the addition of the enormous Blighted Reach Campaign Expansion, you can play three linked sessions where the factions and galaxy evolve, ultimately producing an epic narrative that emerges through play.

While this is not quite as short as Heat: Pedal to the Metal’s campaign format, it’s still a relatively concise experience that captures something truly epic and exceptional. The magic is in how each player’s faction unfolds. These are called fates and provide their own suite of cards, tokens, and even overarching rules adjustments. At the conclusion of each session, you can either choose to stick with your current fate or ditch it for a new path. This leads to an ever-evolving game state where the wild third-session finale is markedly different from where everyone began in their first game.

Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach is among the best games of 2024. Best of all, its three-session campaign offers an unparalleled multi-game commitment that expertly balances brevity with compelling evolution. It’s unfathomable how this brief endeavor rivals the breadth and fulfillment of lengthy campaign games such as Gloomhaven and Pandemic: Legacy.

While the short multi-session approach is an excellent solution to the lengthy commitment of campaign games, a more interesting technique has recently emerged. Over the past year, there has been an influx of board games cleverly adapting the roguelite video game genre. This is most commonly employed through unlocking permanent additions to the game that typically result in additional content or variety. This expansion of gameplay is accomplished without requiring a consistent group or extended obligation.

The recently released Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game is the strongest example of this adaptation, taking the core elements of the video game and bringing them to life on the table. This cooperative adventure game is built around a dual purpose of gathering a resource called cells as well as defeating a final boss. This is an unusual design where the party moves in unison across a board, often choosing between branching pathways. As you land on encounters, tokens are flipped and either rewards are gained or foes are encountered. After pushing through two separate biomes, you collide with a boss in a multi-round battle of spectacle.

This is a relatively light game that eats up only an hour of time. A single play is dubbed a “run,” and while your ultimate objective is to defeat the boss, hoarding cells is the more meaningful task. These cells are spent at the conclusion of the game — win or lose — to purchase mysterious cards from one of several decks. These cards consist of a variety of rewards and consequences. Sometimes they add new enemies to biomes or new combat cards to player’s decks. Other times they provide tasks for future sessions or even tweak global rules to provide new abilities or bonuses. There’s a wide range of content that can be discovered, and often it’s met with shock and joy.

A similar approach is taken in Slay the Spire: The Board Game, another cardboard adaptation of a digital property. Players craft unique decks during play that are then used to defeat fantastical creatures in a bid to ultimately conquer the spire. Unlike Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game, this game closely mimics the actual structure and gameplay of its video game predecessor. The result, while familiar, is a compelling tabletop game full of rich tactical decision making.

The roguelite element found in Slay the Spire: The Board Game consists of unlocking new cards, which are added to the larger pool in future sessions. It’s more incremental progress and less varied than the Dead Cells board game, but it’s still a fantastic method of rewarding dedication by presenting new content.

The beauty of adapting the roguelite format to board games is that it divorces long-term incentives from the stranglehold of commitment. You don’t need a persistent group. You can take your copy of Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game to a friend’s house and play a run or two. Then you can bring the game to a family gathering and rattle off another few plays with a sibling. While everyone touching the game may not have a deep appreciation for the evolution of content and how the unlocked cards affect future play, that throughline will exist at minimum with the owner of the game, as well as with those who are able to play it in the future and witness the transition.

These roguelite elements also provide a meaningful incentive to keep returning to the game, offering a similar mechanical reward to long-form campaign play. This is important because it keeps play fresh and appealing. The spark that often exists with the shiny new product burns brighter for longer, and there’s a sense of excitement that is retained.

The appeal of campaign games is the transition of game states across multiple sessions. Constricting that growth to a shorter time frame is a fantastic compromise to harness some of that yield without requiring the hefty cost. Similarly, this new wave of roguelite board games extracts the reward cycle of campaign play and skillfully inserts it into the flexibility of the standard single-session game. Both methods have achieved resounding success in just a brief existence. It’s exciting to witness these changes in the tabletop hobby and imagine what they themselves will evolve into over time.