Devlog 12- Inner workings of Mosaic

Soren Johnson’s notion of consistent grammar transparency for board games can be seen throughout Mosaic: A Story of Civilization. Most of the cards and game board have similar logo designs that correspond from one another with the same meaning. The directions have all the logos in one place with the corresponding meaning, so players will need to memorize these before fully understanding the game. In the How Board Games Matter video, Johnson says, “...[if] you want to play this game, you now need to learn this language before starting,” (Johnson, 11:05-11:09). In the example Johnson gave, Race for the Galaxy card game had many different logos on the cards themselves, but had all of the clarifications on them in the directions. Also, specifically on the “money pieces” and other action cards, all the coins had the value and the action cards included the amounts of bonuses that the card provided when played. This is another example of the transparency that games can provide, because they are all individualized. 

Transparent abstraction focuses players on the inner game and how the game works. Before Mosaic begins, players each take 5 technology cards, pull one from their deck, and then pass the remaining around until each player has gotten a chance to pull a card from all the decks. Johnson describes this similar gameplay involved in Magic and calls it “drafting and deck building” (Johnson, 16:59).  As far as pre and post luck, Johnson describes the two very differently. Pre-luck is when a “random event happens in the game and then the player makes a decision or chooses an action based on that result,” (Johnson, 22:52). He further explains this idea by sharing an example of when a player rolls the dice, they get to decide the outcome of how they wish to use that roll outcome. Pre-luck is typically “more engaging because the player gets to think and adapt to make the best of a bad roll,” (Johnson, 24:17). In Mosaic, although it has a different approach to the example previously mentioned, most of the game has pre-luck. Players have different amounts of resources throughout the game and can use those to gather more perks and advantages in the game. Although there is no dice used, this would still be an example of pre-luck since players have the options in front of them, and they get to choose what to do with the pieces they have.