Board Games 101: Terminology Grab-bag Part 1

Hi! It's Professor Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Board Game Terminology Grab-bag: today on Board Games 101! So i've collected a few board game terms that i'd like to define for you, and none of these individually warrants a full video. They're not meaty enough.

They're pretty quick to explain. So i've grouped them all together in one single video. If you're watching this video on Youtube, you can use the links in the description below the video to find a term that you're interested in, and then click and it'll jump right to the one that you want to know about.

So first up is the word "orthogonal." Your average Joe or Jane doesn't really have a lot of use for this term outside of board games or geometry class, but orthogonal just means upy/downy, lefty-righty, or vertically and horizontally. So you're almost assuredly familiar with "diagonal." Orthogonal is the other one.

So if a piece can move orthogonally, that means it can move left, right, up, down along those... those paths. i often hear the word mispronounced "orthAgonal"... that's probably because we say diAgonal, so they throw an "a" in there instead of an "o," but it's orthOgonal.

I also hear people say "orthoGONal," and that might just be because they've only ever seen it spelled, and never heard it pronounced, but it's orthogonal, and it's paired up with another concept, uh, called "adjacency." When something's adjacent, it just means it's next to, or beside, something else.

So, you get this concept of "orthogonal adjacency." So here you have a piece on a grid, and you want to see which spaces are orthogonally adjacent, it's these ones. They're the ones that are right next to it, and they're uppy-downy, lefty-righty, and the diagonally adjacent spaces are these ones.

Next: "analysis paralysis," shortened to AP very often. This is just when, uh, the decision space in a game is so complicated - there are so many different things, different levers to pull, and different wazoos to wiz-wang - that you just go into, like, a catatonic state, and you can't make up your mind, and you can't play your turn, and your fellow players get frustrated with you.

If you see certain written reviews, people might call a certain game "AP-prone," which means it lends itself to this kind of problem, this analysis paralysis problem. "Meeple." That is a word that describes a little humanoid, usually wooden, figure. It's kind of a word that's, like, replaced the word "pawn" in modern board games, and it's a portmanteau.

A portmanteau - a mashup of two words = the words "my," and "people." So generally, it describes this shape, this rounded humanoid shape, but - you know - you can get meeples that are little farmer meeples in games like Viticulture, and then if you're using stuff with farm animals, some people call those "animeeples," and specifically "sheeples," so - you know - people go crazy with that, and they call all kinds of things "meeples" are variants thereof.

The word "meeple" originally described the little humanoid figures in a game called Carcassonne. "Tapping." This is a concept where you have a playing card on the table, and it has a power or an ability, and in order to use that ability, to remind you that it is used, you turn it 90 degrees clockwise, and then you can't use that card's ability again unless something else causes you to tip that card back up vertically.

Now this is from the game Magic: The Gathering, which is an extremely popular card game, and they actually - you know - described tapping in a patent, because they wanted to protect the concept. And for many many, years board game manufacturers were very...

Litigation shy, and they didn't want to call the mechanic in their game "tapping," although that's really what they were telling you to do, is turn a card sideways to use its power, and turn it back up. And even though that patent expired in 2014, you'll still see board game publishers that are pretty gun-shy about calling something "tapping," calling that mechanic "tapping." So they'll...

They'll call it other things. They'll call it "exhaust a card," they'll say - you know - "turn it 90." They'll use other terms for it. But around the board game table, people who know games will almost always call that action "tapping." So if you want to know what they're talking about, that's what it is! And finally, "snake order." So we have this concept of turn order, which isn't too difficult to understand: the first player goes first, and the second player goes second, and on down through all the players in the game.

But in snake order, it goes in turn order, and then it goes in reverse turn order backwards from the player in the lowest rung of the totem pole back up to the top. And then sometimes it loops around again, and goes back down to the player in lowest turn order, and then back up to the player at the top.

So it sort of - you know - wends and winds itself like a snake. So if you're familiar with the game Catan, the initial setup phase where everybody's placing their settlements... that goes in snake order, around the table clockwise to the last player ,and then that player places another settlement, and go back around to the first player.

So i hope that helps! i plan to do a few of these terminology grab-bags in order to just clarify a few terms for newcomers to modern board games, in case you're wondering, or you're reading reviews and you have no idea what people are talking about, you can find the answers hopefully here! For my TAs in the room: if you can think of any of these pieces of terminology that you think would make good entries into this little grab-bag collection, please let me know in the comments below, or you can tell me in person by using that link at the bottom of your screen on the Discord server, where we all hang out and talk about board games every hour of the day! Please join us there.

Thanks so much for watching. We'll catch you next time on Board Games 101! Nights Around a Table is the only place where you can earn your phB... in board games. Disclaimer voice: Nights Around a Table is not an accredited educational institution. Ryan: Uggggh! To see a full course syllabus, visit nightsaroundatable.com.