Thinking about conventions for board games caused me to check out the Wikipedia entry for them. There they are defined as games “played with counters or pieces that are placed on, removed from, or moved across a “board” (a premarked surface, usually specific to that game).” It goes on to define games as either simulating aspects of real life (e.g. Monopoly, Clue, Risk) or not simulating any real life event (e.g. Chess, Checkers, and Scrabble). It’s interesting that this distinction doesn’t take into account the player’s relationship to the board or the relationship of the pieces to each other. I would like to develop a language that addresses the formal relationships of players to the tokens, as well as tokens to each other, in the space of gameplay. For example, what does it mean when a game allows two or more tokens to occupy the same space? Often the narrative of the game forces players to keep one piece on each designated space, but sometimes there is only physical room for one piece in a space. How are these different? How does the narrative enforce the physical design of the board?