Core Loop

Mobile games and Board Games

For many players mobile games are the opposite of board games.

Success mobile games like Clash of Clans or Candy Crush are using the same formula for many years: an addictive gameplay and free to download, rankings of best players, integration with social media (facebook, twitter), dozens of contents available with real money and regular updates with more content you can buy with real money.  

On the other hand, you need to pay to play a board game, most of them don’t use the internet or integration with social media and updates of rules and mechanics in a new game are not well received by the players.

Nevertheless, we can find a point of connection between board games and mobile games: the importance of the core loop.

What is a core loop?   

To Kevin Wolstenholme, founder and director of Rising High Academy, “The core loop is essentially the very heartbeat of your game. It is a series or chain of actions that is repeated over and over as the primary flow of your players’ experience. It’s the core essence of why we return to play games over and over again”

In other words, the core loop is the axis that makes the wheel of the game round. 

In a mobile game it is very easy to see this concept: the satisfaction when the player connects three or more candies in Candy Crush; hit the pigs and destroy it with your bird in Angry Birds; capture a pokemon in Pokemon Go.

Board games and the core loop

Hardcore players use a special vocabulary to describe their favorite board games. In a chat with boardgamers you can hear things like: “Terraforming Mars is an engine building game with area control, card drafting and hand management” or “Orléans is a bag building game with worker placement and grid movement”.

You can use lots of mechanics to describe a modern board game, but which one is part of the core loop?

Answering this question is important to understand the secret behind the success.

Find the core loop

The core loop of Paper Dungeon, Leandro Pires’ game about medieval fantasy adventurers, can be divided in three steps: roll the dice poll; pick 3 of them; drawing the results of this selection in the player sheet.

Paper Dungeons has other mechanics like set collection and players with different powers, but the essence of the game is in the core loop. The player returns over and over to the game to roll the dice and execute the actions in the player sheet.

Another example is Luna Maris. Ricardo Amaral’s game about a lunar base has lots of mechanics, but the core loop is very simple: choose a scientist card; move the player’s meeple to a room; execute the action(s) in the place.

Finding the core loop in a board game is a good way to identify its strengths and weaknesses, understand the market collocation of the product and know which player can like it.