Freytag's Pyramid and the importance of a game arc
Exploring how the idea of a story arc can help us understand change in games
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This week I’ve been thinking about story arcs and how they apply to tabletop board games and roleplaying games. What do we mean when we say a game has a good “arc” or that it has an exciting ending? Does this require narrative energy or can it come from purely the mechanisms of the game?
The importance of a story arc
A story arc (also known as a “narrative arc”) is a structured progression of events or plot points, usually ordered chronologically. It is a way of ordering and describing the change that takes place during the story. It describes the movement from one state to another. This change or peripeteia could be, as M. Allen Hall noted in Storytelling in TTRPG Design, a change in environment or a change in characters: an island sinks into the sea, a coward becomes a hero, or a pitched battle ends in victory.
To organize the change taking place, a simple story arc might follow the classic three-act structure:
Act 1: Setup / exposition/ inciting incident
Act 2: Rising action / confrontation / midpoint
Act 3: Resolution / climax / return / fall / dénouement
This rise-climax-fall sequence is sometimes visualized using Freytag’s Pyramid, borrowing from Aristotle and Horace, which creates a five-act structure:
Since Freytag’s Pyramid was published about 170 years ago, it has received criticism and countless other models have been proposed.2 In general, most models have a few things in common:
The purpose of the model is to create compelling stories
The model tracks the change of action, tension, and/or suspense
The story arc has a beginning, middle, and end
We want to see and experience change over the course of the story, watching characters struggle, grow, fail, and be transformed. This is true regardless of if the story is Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet or twenty-six episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The arc of a game
You may have heard board gamers describe a game as having a good “arc” or “lacking an arc” when reviewing a game. While not exactly the same thing as Freytag’s Pyramid, I do think calling it an arc is appropriate. The game arc (like a story arc) describes the rise and fall of action in the game, organizing the changes taking place into a beginning, middle and end.
To have a game arc, a game must create a sense of change or transformation during play, meaning the game feels different at the end than it did at the beginning.
Tony Farber of Two Wood for a Wheat argues that not only is a game arc important, it is necessary:
There is no greater insult one can deliver to a board game than to say 'I felt like I was doing exactly the same thing in the last round as I was doing in the first round'. A board game must move in order to be fun.
I would tend to agree with this assessment, having recently played a board game that felt like it was missing something. After some discussion, I think what it was missing was a game arc. The five rounds of the game all felt mostly the same. The last round felt unsatisfyingly similar to the first, in an otherwise mechanically interesting game.
How to build a game arc
That got me thinking about how to make sure a game has a good arc — ensuring that the end feels different from the beginning. This is something different from a story arc which focuses on narrative. A game arc results from the mechanisms of play.
If an arc describes and organizes the change that happens during play, how can we design games that create a satisfying sense of change and progression?
Here are a few ways:
1. Unlocking new abilities
One of the most obvious ways to add a sense of progression and change in a game is to allow players to unlock new abilities during play.
Massive Darkness 2: Hellscape (Olteanu & Portugal, 2022) is an example of a thematic and explicit leveling-up system. While this is usually associated with getting new equipment and spells in dungeon crawlers, it also shows up in other types of games.
In Troyes (Dujardin, Georges, et al., 2010), players unlock new activity cards that are revealed throughout the game — each with new actions to use. Carnegie (Georges, 2022) also has a mechanism to add departments to your business in the game — each giving you new actions and abilities. In both cases you begin the game with limited actions, and by the end you’ve customized your experience with new actions that (hopefully) work together.
Blood Rage (Lang, 2015) combines both giving the player more actions (in the form of drafted cards) but also more action points per round (in the form of increased rage).
2. Enabling late-game combos
A combo is a sequence of actions in a game triggered by a key starting action, often seen in really good turns in a trading card game.3 It might be hard to pull off a combo in the early part of a game, but might be available late game as a reward for good planning.
In Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016), the core mechanisms of the game don’t really change from the beginning to the end. Each card added to your tableau has a simple action or ability — gain two plants when an ocean tile is placed, add a microbe to a card, or add an animal to a card.
The sense of change and progression comes from how these cards start to organically work together over the course of the game. The Viral Enhancers card is a good example: “When you play a plant, microbe, or an animal tag, including this, gain 1 plant or add 1 resource to that card.” By the middle or end of the game, each action is triggering many other combo actions, all linked together.
3. Turning on the VP engine
In many euro-style games, the early game is all about gathering resources and getting an engine (tableau building) built.4 It’s usually a slow start, struggling to get that first few pieces of wood, berries, stone, or other resources. Eventually, however, the engine starts to work, giving you tons of resources… but not victory points. It’s victory points that win the game, not resources.
At some point, you have to “turn the engine on” and stop just collecting resources and start converting those resources into end-game victory points.
Geoff Engelstein talks about this in Phase Transitions:
Some games have more fluid fuzzy boundaries. Two examples of this are St Petersburg and Dominion. Both of these games have a pivot point – an inflection point – where the players need to transition between building up their engine and collecting victory points. You have to sense when the end is approaching and make that pivot at a key time to maximize your chances of victory.
In games with a fixed number of turns, there is pressure to both build a resource-gathering engine and to convert resources into victory points. That “inflection point” as Geoff calls it splits the game into two distinct halves — creating an ending that feels much different than the start of the game.
4. Stages and boss fights
Some games have very explicit, non-repeating phases or stages that create change and progression. The most notable one I can think of is Big Trouble in Little China: The Game (Ludvigsen & Polonsky, 2018). It uses a double-sided board with “Chinatown” on one side and “Lo Pan’s Lair” on the reverse. The game begins in Act I with the heroes in Chinatown and when the Big Trouble Track reaches the end, the entire board is flipped and reset for a showdown in Lo Pan’s Lair.
Hellboy: The Board Game (Hewitt & Williams, 2019) also has an explicit ending phase with a boss fight. During the final confrontation, the HQ board is flipped and set up with a boss health track and behavior deck. The elder god battle at the end of Cthulhu: Death May Die (Daviau & Lang, 2019) is similar as well.
5. Expansion and conflict
A game arc can exist without significantly changing the rules or mechanisms (e.g. giving players new powers) during the game. One way to do this often appears in area control games and 4X games, as players are forced to expand their territorial control as the game progresses.
During the early game, players (i.e. factions) might try to turtle in one area of the map and work on gathering resources and building infrastructure. The constant demand for resources will lead to expansion, which will force players to interact as actions begin to encroach on opposing borders. Eventually conflict is inevitable, beginning with small skirmishes and ending in large battles.
Games of Blood Rage often begin with little conflict, but the combination of need for expansion and the ever-shrinking map force players to battle each other. In each age, a section of the map is destroyed. The best games of Blood Rage usually conclude in a massive showdown in the centrally located Yggdrasil.5 It is the forced interaction of the players that creates a game arc.
Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (Tahkokallio, 2020) is a 4X game that can have a similar game arc, but without the final showdown. Players begin peacefully building up their factions, but there is only so much map available. Conflict and battles always happen in the mid to late game.
The special case of TTRPGs
Tabletop roleplaying games are an especially interesting case because they have a much more explicit story element than most board games.6 Beyond the mechanical design elements focused on above, the story itself can follow a classic story arc: the evil wizard has summoned a monster, heroes are sought to defend the town, and peace is restored to the kingdom.
This means that TTRPGs will often have two arcs:
An explicit story arc that follows one of the available models such as Freytag’s Pyramid with exposition, inciting incidents, reversals, and a conclusion.
An implicit game arc that gives players a sense of mechanical change and progression via new worlds, phases, abilities, powers, and/or actions.
Unlocking new abilities in the form of spells, actions, and feats as a character levels up is a fairly common game arc in classic TTRPGs. Similarly, new equipment, items, and armor can change how combat is executed or how problems are solved. All of these methods provide a sense of change and progression across game sessions.
Changes don’t always need to be positive. The curses, scars, weaknesses, and flaws that a character gathers during gameplay can provide a sense of progression and change as well. Having a broken character (mechanically and thematically) after many sessions can be a powerful transformation.
The range of TTRPG types is endless. Some are almost all story and others are quite mechanical, almost like a board game. How important the story arc and the game arc are depends on the type of TTRPG, the types of players, and the kinds of fun those players want to have.
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Understand story arcs: There’s a reason the idea of story arcs has been around for thousands of years, and perhaps significantly longer. Humans communicate through stories, and the most engaging stories involve progression, change, and transformation. Knowing how narrative arcs work can help game designers build more engaging games.
Many ways to build an arc: There are many ways to ensure your game has a good arc, and I’ve attempted to list just a few of the most common ones in this article. Unlocking abilities, building engines, flipping boards, and boss fights are all ways to make the end of the game feel different from the beginning. Legacy games (e.g. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1) use stickers, destroying cards, and other mechanisms to make the changes permanent.
TTRPGs have explicit and implicit arcs: In narrative-based, storytelling TTRPGs, there is an explicit story arc involving the characters, NPCs, and the world. There is also, however, an implicit game arc similar to the arc of a board game. It is worth thinking about both and how they interact.
What are your favorite ways to introduce a sense of change, progression, and transformation into tabletop games? Let me know in the comments!
— E.P. 💀
P.S. The first issue of TUMULUS, a Skeleton Code Machine quarterly, is shipping to readers all over. It’s been great seeing everyone post photos of their packages as they arrive. I’d expect the last few Founder packages to be gone soon, so if you’d like to get one… now is the time to subscribe.
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This is your periodic reminder to heed the words attributed to George E. P. Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”
I don’t think the black brie is even legal anymore.
It’s not just euro resource gathering games too. I’d argue that competitive deck-builders like Ascension (Florillo, Gary, et al., 2010) and Shards of Infinity (Arant & Gary, 2018) have a similar feel. At some point you need to switch from buying cards and building your deck to using those cards and winning the game.
Not uncommonly accompanied by players shouting “Blood rage! Blood rage!” trying to goad others to join the battle.
I’m careful to say “most” here and not “all” because there are so many board games with amazing stories to tell — Sleeping Gods (Laukat, 2021), Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin (Bielski, Dzikowski, et al., 2024), Arkham Horror: The Card Game (French & Newman, 2016), and This War of Mine: The Board Game (Oracz & Wiśniewski, 2017), just to name a few.
Somehow I made it through an entire article about game arcs without mentioning the game Arcs. ;)
Even traditional wargames have such arcs. In Russian Campaign there is the initial German onslaught, followed by the mid game attrition to the eventual Russian counter attack. Another example is 4x games, explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. You begin small and build your resources till the end game battles.