How experience-in-a-box-games change the value equation

One-time experiences in small boxes (such as Exit!, Unlock and MicroMacro) have paved the way for new people to enter into gaming. They shows us, among other things, how shorter experiences are sometimes more valuable. What can we learn from the innovation brought about by these one-time-experience-games?

This post is part of mini-series on the innovations that I find have changed the hobby board games space in the last decade. Why this topic is so interesting and important to me, you can read about here: Invention and innovation in board games. Part one was on the interface of roll-and-writes.

As always, English is not my mother’s tongue so please pardon any mistakes!

There was a time when no one had heard about an escape room. Then somewhere in the early 2010’s they started to take off and soon game designers started to bring these types of one-time mystery experiences to our tabletops. When I sat down to look at the innovations that have evolved and expanded the market in the last decade, they stood out as something definitely worth zooming in on.

These games have changed the value equation and targeted a need that was previously not served or ill-served by the existing alternatives.

I call these games experience in a box games, or EIAB for short. What are these games? Some of the more recognizable examples include:

Time Stories-series (started in 2015)
Exit-series (started in 2016)
Unlock! (started in 2017)
MicroMacro released in 2020 (winner of the Spiel in 2021).
Echoes-series, first released in 2021.

It seems like these games took off around 2015, and Escape the Room: Mystery at Stargazer’s Manor (2015) is the oldest entry I can find dated on BGG, but again this depends on how you define the category, but for this post they are EIAB games.

When games don’t primarily compete with other games

These EIAB-games may often be sold in board game stores, but in terms of competing for the customer’s money they compete less against the more traditional board games in that store and more against, say, watching to a movie or playing a card game with a traditional deck of cards. Why? Because the EIAB game and watching a movie adress similar needs.

This gets into the jobs-to-be-done-theory of innovation, which I have written about before. The super-short version most relevant to this discussion is that products and services never should be thought about in a vacuum compared only to similar looking products and services, but rather to all types of solutions that can adress the same need (or ”job” in the parlance of the theory). This is how customers choose, whether we like it or not, and it has a great effect on how you consider the cost of something versus the value provided, which we will get into more below.

What needs do they serve? What is it that these games do that makes them so great at providing value? I would need qualitative user research to really back my arguments up, but below I’ll dig into the 4 core aspects that I believe makes these experiences successful from what I’ve observed. Do you agree? Let’s get into it.

EIAB-games can often be started by simply drawing the first card, reading it and off we go.

1) Easy to get going and play

For starters, EIAB games are most often cooperative experiences, something that is more and more sought after, and also widely available – there are tons of co-ops these days. But: The EIAB’s are cooperative experiences with little to no rules load. If the need of the customer and the group she is representing is “We want something to do together that we can get going with easily”, that disqualifies a lot of co-ops in the vein of Pandemic.

I’m not saying Pandemic has a heavy rules load. But EIAB-games, well they can often be started by simply drawing the first card, reading it and off we go – let’s solve the riddle! Remember the comparison here of watching a movie, playing cards or doing a trivia challenge. That’s the bar we need to pass for this game group.

Sure, there might be need for discussions that are more meta: “Wait what are we doing again? What is allowed when solving the puzzle?” – but since the gameplay is actually solving puzzles and discussing things, such discussions aren’t interrupting the gameplay the same way they are if someone can’t take their turn in Pandemic because they need to have a rule explained.

Solving crimes in MicroMacro: Crime City. (Picture by Aldo Ojeda on BGG)

2) Super accessible interface

“Wait what, what is Samuel even talking about, the interface of an Unlock!-game or MicroMacro is like … nothing?”

Yes, close to nothing at least, and that is my point.

In my first post in this series, I wrote about roll-and-writes and how the interface the player interacts with relies on components super-familiar to anyone regardless of experience with gaming: pen and paper. Well, I need to make the same point again here; EIAB games are super-easy to interact with. They most often rely on cards to provide the prompts/clues/riddles or whatever it might be, and in some cases that’s it (like all or most Unlock games, at least that I know of). In others there is also a map (MicroMacro) or some other central component like a small board or dial (Exit!).

An exception to this is Time Stories, which on the table looks less friendly and more like a traditional hobby board game. Which is why I will use it to make my next point:

3) One player can run the game but everyone plays on the same level

Again, most EIAB games are co-ops, so even if the game is more “fiddly”, to use a popular term, it’s enough if one player knows how to keep track of all the moving parts: These cards go here, now we have to flip this, place a marker over there, etc. The above mentioned Time Stories is one popular example of this. The player doing all this upkeep can still play on the same level as everyone else, which I think is crucial. You don’t need a dungeon master or something to that effect.

EIAB games are about thinking, and everyone gets to participate.

This point is of course true for many co-ops, yes, but I believe it to be of special importance here. The actual gameplay, what you do as a player in these games, is to think, analyze, discuss and more verbs along those lines. In a co-op where the verbs are roll dice, play cards, move units etc. and another player has to actually do those things for you, well then you aren’t “really” playing and we get the so called alpha player problem.

EIAB games are about thinking, and everyone gets to participate. If just one person keeps track of all the moving parts, that’s fine because everyone can still be in on the discussion of how to advance.

4) When less is clearly more

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of these games. I think it is a ”feature not a bug” that they are one-time, fairly short experiences. This goes against a lot of the discussion online, within the nerdiest of hobby board games circles, where “MORE!” is often equated with added value. But EIAB games provide greater value to their target audience precisely because they are short. It is so much easier to get a group with mixed gaming experience to commit to one of these games because you will be done in one sitting. The asking price is lower than for most hobby board games on the shelf alongside it, and as a consumer you do not risk buying something that you will not play enough times to get your so called “money’s worth”.

One of the many Exit games. Image from publisher.

The end result: A better value equation for everyone?

Let’s take a step back and look at the whole picture here.

When you buy an EIAB game, you get a game that promises an experience that everyone in the group can participate in, that you can get going with in no time and that you will complete in one night. That pretty much sums up why I believe these games provide such great value in many situations and why they have further expanded the gaming market. Where a group of friends before maybe wouldn’t consider a game but instead would just sit around and talk or watch a movie as a shared activity, these games have opened up a space.

So: Let’s now finally talk about money and the business of it all.

At the end of the day, designing and producing board games is a business. The consumer must feel they are getting great value for their money, and on the publisher side the margins must be worth paying for the print runt and taking the risks involved, otherwise it doesn’t work and we cannot have nice things.

Because these games are so good at targeting a specific need and doing it with fairly cheap components, they seem to be able to create better than usual margins for publishers. Many of the examples I have used are long-running series where new adventures are released regularly, which I guess serves as proof that this is viable for publishers. It is great for designers as well, a point made for example by Matthew Dunstan (Guild of Merchant Explorers, Next Station: London and more) in this thread on X/Twitter. He has designed many games in the Echoes and Adventure series (both clearly belonging in my made-up EIAB category!) and points out how releasing new games in those series makes sense since they have a built-up fanbase plus new releases drive sales of the older games.

What can we learn from these games?

My intent with this series, as I said in my intro post on innovation in board games, is to gather questions that can open up new paths for game design. So what questions can we take away from this dive into the innovation provided by EIAB games?

For starters, I’m certainly thinking about this one: How might we design and publish games in more traditional genres, where shorter equals greater value? Could there be a one-time worker placement game?

Another one is: How might you design and publish games that has one person “run” the game but still provides the same game experience for everyone? How can this be done better in games with more classic verbs (roll dice, move units, play cards etc)?

And of course, if you are in the business of publishing EIAB games, how might you further evolve on the ways these games provide value to make them even more irresistible to the target audience?