by Jasper de Lange

A Game with Something to Say

I'm in love with the way analog games can use metaphors. Games, through their rules and mechanisms, can offer powerful experiential metaphors to players without being explicit about it. They can present a model of the world that slowly precipitates and ferments in the player's brain, playfully bringing a theme to life in sometimes unexpected ways. Games are unlike any other art form in this sense, I believe.

Bohemians plays around with metaphors a lot. It is a "board game that tells stories". The most common remark from first-time players is "Wow, this game is so thematic!" The reason for that — in my mind — is the care I put into choosing mechanical metaphors that make the theme come to life.

The game's central theme can be summed up as a question: How do we find inspiration in life, and what are we willing to sacrifice in order to find it?

Part of the answer to this question is open, to be discovered by players every time they bring Bohemians to the table. Every choice made during the game, every card played, answers this question in one way or another. Part of the answer, however, is fixed; it's integrally built into the structure of the game by me, the designer. It's embedded in the game's core mechanisms, the trade-offs it presents, and its victory conditions.

In this article, I'll take you through the central design choices in Bohemians and uncover some of the metaphors built into the game.

Scenes of a Bohemian Life

Before I dive any deeper into the details of Bohemians's design, let's briefly talk about what the game is.

Imagine yourself on the streets of Paris, dirt poor but free, your mind filled with idealism and artistic dreams. Electric street lights have just been invented, and the spire of the new Eiffel Tower juts out from over the rooftops, but you're not interested in progress; you're interested in art! You live in a tiny room with paper-thin walls, five-high on a grimy street in Montmartre, but you don't care about money or social standing as long as you can meet your eccentric friends in the café downstairs and have discussions late into the night.

Bohemians invites you to live the life of a bohemian artist for a little while (45-60 minutes to be exact), and does so in the form of a puzzly deck-builder. Your deck represents your artist's habits, which gradually change over the course of the game. Every turn lets you build a little tableau showing a typical "day in the life" of your artist, including all the upswings and downturns.

A typical day in the life of a bohemian: rediscovering yourself through your art by the light of the moon, despite the heartache
I came up with the idea for this game during a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in the summer of 2020. I remember asking myself: Why is it that we collectively stand in line to engage with the life and work of someone like Van Gogh in a museum, while that kind of story is almost completely absent in board games? Is it that board games simply cannot tell these stories? Are these stories too "edgy" or serious to be touched by publishers, or do people not want to mix serious stories and fun times?

I longed to prove that board games can be "more" somehow, that they can be both entertaining and address deeper themes at the same time. Like cinema. Like literature. Why not? And so I set out to try exactly that: to design a fun board game that genuinely captures the life stories, inspiration, and atmosphere of the artists of Van Gogh's time. A bit ambitious for a first-time designer maybe, but you gotta start somewhere!

My visit to the Van Gogh Museum in 2020, where the idea for Bohemians was born
Core Mechanisms, or How to Find Inspiration

So what about those deeper layers in the design?

Bohemians has two core mechanisms: deck-building, which sets the game's overall structure; and a card-placement puzzle, which is what the players do to generate currency during each of their turns.

Each of these core mechanisms express the central theme of how to find inspiration in a different way.

The starting deck of an aspiring poet
Deck-building introduces a combination of two metaphors: repetition, as well as gradual (but mostly irreversible) change. In any deck-builder, you start with a basic deck that you cycle through again and again, while you add cards and sometimes remove them. Overall your deck normally gets stronger and more equipped for what you want it to do, but weaknesses and new challenges can be introduced as well. What a beautiful metaphor for a career story, for biographical drama!

I landed on this metaphor early on in the design process, and you could say it's the cornerstone that Bohemians was built around. Because the most common card type represents your artist's habits, the game's deck-building structure shows a slow but steady change in their life story, from dreamy amateur to creative genius — if you play your cards right. Each playthrough will let you combine cards in different ways, thus presenting ever new ways of leading an inspired life.

Similar to a game like Star Realms, the habit cards are divided into various colored suits. Brainstorming these was one of the first things I did when I started on the game as it allowed me to flesh out different facets of the bohemian life that I wanted to be present in the game: green stands for discipline, focus, and dedication to improving your artistic craft; blue represents freedom of spirit, adventure, audacity, and spontaneity; pink is about desire, romance, love, and intimacy. These facets were all there from the beginning.

The only change to the suits that happened in development was the switch between orange and white suits. We repurposed the previously "colorless" cards to become the orange suit, centered around companionship and camaraderie in the café. What used to be the orange suit — themed around revolution and artistic activism — became the white/multicolor suit because all of these cards' effects focus on interfering with other players, and we wanted to make that part optional for higher player counts only (3-4 players).

Every suit has its own mechanical identity, which reinforces the suit's theme. This way the cards within each suit combo well with each other, but they don't lock you in; there are also many viable strategies across colors. The specific abilities on each card went through many, many, MANY iterations, but were always strongly tied to the suit's theme.

Early brainstorm notes on the suits
The card-placement puzzle is a way to represent the search for inspiration in close-up, on an everyday, hour-to-hour level. How do you choose to spend your time on a given day? And does that inspire and fuel your artistic drive somehow, even in ways that sometimes surprise you?

This search is symbolized in the game by letting players link up partial icons across cards. The more icons a player manages to complete across all the cards they play, the more points of inspiration they gain; inspiration is the main currency of the game and lets players upgrade their decks. Inspiration comes not from singular habit cards that are simply "better" or "more productive" in isolation, but rather from the right flow of activities that gets your artist's creative fire going.

This system evolved over many iterations. In the first version of the game, it actually was each card by itself that awarded a specific amount of inspiration points, but over many playtests, I shifted the focus to connecting cards in the right way. "Better cards", in this system, are cards that provide more options to complete icons, but in a deck where those specific icons don't match, even a good card is not worth much.

How to get the most out of your day? Lining up inspiration icons can be quite the challenge!
The game has four inspiration icons, and each habit card has a unique combination of them. For gameplay purposes, these icons all have the same function: each provides 1 point of inspiration when completed (or 2 or 3 in the case of doubled icons).

However, they are not without meaning either — something that is not made explicit in the game. Each icon represents a "core need" that can be fulfilled to support the artist's creative flow: focus (eye), playfulness (heart), curiosity (lock), and expression (mask). Behind the icon placement on each card are countless hours of careful consideration, reflecting on which activity might benefit from which kind of attitude or "energy" an artist brings into it, and in turn what kind of needs/desires arise from doing that activity. The result of all this reflection is — hopefully — that players need to focus only on the puzzle of stringing together as many icons as they can, and that the narrative the game generates from this sounds like an appropriately inspiring day!

"Practice, practice, practice" clearly requires focus coming into it, and afterwards you might want to continue focusing on your creative craft (focus+expression) — or just let loose and relax with a friend or lover (playfulness+expression).
Jobs & Hardships: Dilemmas on the Artistic Path

Deciding how to place their habit cards is one dilemma players face each turn, but not the only one. They also get to decide: Do I live my creative dream this day, or do I try to make ends meet as well?

Any time a player fills their player board with only habit cards, they automatically gain a hardship card, which will complicate their life in the future. Dedicating your life fully to the arts sounds wonderful, but it will lead to gaining cards like "Abject Poverty", "Financial Debt", "Malnutrition", and "Anxiety". The only means the game gives players to avoid gaining hardships is their job tile. By playing your job as part of your day, you forgo the option to play a habit card in that time slot, but you also ensure you don't gain a hardship.

Will this artist spend their night sculpting and become homeless as a result? Or will they go to their job as a cabaret attendant, ignoring their calling to at least be able to pay the rent for another month?
I designed this dilemma into the game from the first prototype: needing a job to survive day-to-day, but thereby sacrificing valuable time that you could have spent on pursuing your creative craft.

The first version was a system akin to that of Marvel Champions in which players need to discard cards from their hands to "make ends meet", thus generating currency to play habits from their hand. I quickly became dissatisfied with this system because it put players in a "calculative" mindset, taking them out of the story.

The next version introduced time slots. Effectively, players were still paying the opportunity cost of playing some cards and not others, but it felt like a more simple and intuitive choice, with the added bonus that every turn created a small narrative of each artist's day.

However, I still wanted jobs in the game, both to reinforce the historical theme and to make players consider a difficult trade-off every turn. I also wanted some suffering and drama in the game to do the theme of the struggling artist justice (and because I love the emergent narratives that such negative cards can create when designed well, as in games like Arkham Horror or Robinson Crusoe).

This game needed existential fear, manic episodes, spiraling debt, syphilis, and opium addiction. I ended up marrying these two elements together: I can go to my job if I want to avoid hardship in the future.

I tried to make it as tempting as possible to just take the risk, ignore your job, and suck up the hardships. While the original hardship cards I designed had some crippling and terrifying effects, I soon learned that this was too punishing and locked players out of the game, so the final hardships — terrifying as they sometimes are — mostly create unique thematic challenges and complications to the card-placement puzzle. How many can you handle before you get overwhelmed? Can you become a respected artist while also suffering from shame, perfectionism, and alcoholism? It's up to you to try!

Together, the time slot limitation on the player board, the job tile, and the hardship cards bring forward the question: What am I willing to sacrifice in order to have an artistic and inspired life?

A selection of hardships players have to face during the game
How to Win at Being a Struggling Artist?

Designing a game about the lives of aspiring artists confronted me with one big question that I did not find an answer to for the longest time: How does one "win" at making art, exactly? Throughout my journey making Bohemians, I've found myself capable and inspired enough to find fitting mechanical metaphors for the artistic process — but what represents "victory" in art?

The first solution I came up with was straightforward: Artists make art! I gave each player a stack of personal art pieces to make, and the first one to make their final masterpiece would win the game. This allowed me to play around in fun ways with what art does.

In some iterations, the art pieces would provide healing, as well as bringing the player closer to victory; making art is a way to deal with trauma, to (re)gain self-confidence, and — in rare cases — to turn around poverty. This element is still in the game in the form of the Atelier board, which lets players "work in their atelier" in order to remove cards from their decks.

In another iteration, the art cards would cycle into other players' decks, functioning as a catch-up mechanism by providing inspiration bonuses. After all, art is a conversation in which great artworks inspire a reaction. This mechanism, however, made players draw an overwhelming amount of cards in the final turns of the game, and made victory very dependent on the luck of the draw.

Many earlier prototypes had players make art pieces that went into other players’ decks
Another solution was to make players vie for reaching milestones in their career, milestones available in a central market. We ended up going for a variant of this in the final version of the game as it created an intuitive and interesting racing dynamic between players, with tense and exciting endgames.

I had toyed with this idea before and couldn't get it to work — but my developer Ignacy Trzewiczek came up with the version we went for. The market has a stack of shared achievement cards that escalate in cost; the first player to gain five of these wins the game. What victory represents in this case is which artist will be most remembered by history.

Having a stack of central achievements allowed for some fun thematic framing of what a bohemian would call "success". This includes grand public exhibitions of their work, of course, but also things like Your family's quiet acceptance of your new life, or Dismayed reactions to your work by the establishment.

Designing the scenarios for solo play (which is included in the base game) allowed me to find new and different answers to the "victory question".

Solo mode pits the artists against time spirits, turning Bohemians into a symbolic boss battler. Each time spirit represents an aspect of mainstream culture that the bohemians were rebelling against in their art and in their lifestyle choices. How do you stop the advent of "The Wheels of Industry"? How do you break free from "The Chains of Decency"? How do you turn your back to "The Claws of Decadence"? The answer is different every time! And so the question of how to win at art remains open-ended, as it should...

Some of what defines success as a bohemian artist
Closing Thoughts

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of some of the metaphors that I purposefully put into Bohemians. As with any creative work, I'm sure there are more implicit symbols and assumptions in the game that hint at my views on the topic or that give away my history as a gamer and designer. Of course, all of the metaphors I chose to be part of this game offer only my limited interpretation of what it meant to live the life of a bohemian — and maybe there are parts where the game misses its mark. I'm curious what metaphors and messages you read into the game as you play it!

More importantly, I hope you — like me — find the lens of mechanical metaphors a fruitful one, and that it helps you look at games in a new light. How do the mechanisms of a game enable the players to experience and enact its theme? What new meaning is conveyed by choosing a certain theme for a set of mechanisms, and vice versa? And what examples do you know of for games that link theme and mechanism together in unexpected ways?

If you are a designer, please let me know: How do you deal with metaphors in your games? Is it something you design for consciously, or do you have a different approach?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Jasper de Lange

Me being unmetaphorically proud to show off the final product! (Image: Mads Fløe)