Patented Mechanics Blog Notes

How Innovative Physical Components Benefit Board Gaming

When Board Gamers hear the word “patent,” they often reflexively think of game rules. Patent Mechanics, though, would love for Gamers to think of physical components when hearing the “p-word.”

Plenty of good ink has been spilled by Board Gamers clarifying the difference between patents and the other IP forms such as copyright, trademark, and even trade secret. Often when disparaging the role of patents in the industry, Gamers really mean patenting board game rules and other relatively abstract features. See the links at the bottom of the page. What Patented Mechanics does with its patents, though, is all about physical, tangible components, which frankly is what we believe patents were meant to protect.

Patented physical components can accomplish what conventional techniques such as dice and cards alone cannot. Innovative components can guide the progress of a game in an unburdened way, replicate an additional player, and/or create an overarching opponent or threat that one or more players in a game must face.

Solitaire board gaming, for example, is one area in which patented, physical components can go a long way in expanding the possibilities for board games. Rather than utilizing cumbersome bots and similar techniques, innovative physical components can do the work of replicating a threat or opponent for the solo player. That is, the solo player plays directly against the patented component. DEFEAT THE THREAT! provides an example of a patented assembly that provides a guided but unpredictable Threat that a solo player faces. In this game, the patented assembly manifests itself as a mysterious alien threat that increases in intensity over the course of a campaign, unpredictably attacking different city regions. Either one player alone, or multiple players, play directly against the patented variable threat assembly. DEFEAT THE THREAT! offers a rare case in which players can play a board game alone in the same way as playing it with multiple players by virtue of the patented assembly providing the overarching opponent. Players may do this, based on the patented physical assembly, without resorting to time-consuming techniques such as bots and other methods that attempt to replicate another player.

Further to DEFEAT THE THREAT!, Patented Mechanics will continue to expand the possibilities of solitaire and multi-player board gaming using innovative and patented physical components. Please try games from the DEFEAT THE THREAT! series for yourself, and stay tuned for future patented games!