The goal of the SMeFT Decks is to support the design of hybrid digital boardgames for distanced play – that is, where one or more of the players is not in the same physical location as the others, but is still playing the game with the physical pieces of the game. We’ve found, though, that they work well for ideating other kinds of hybrid digital boardgames as well.

We designed the SMeFT Decks to enable great ideas, not to constrain them. So the first rule of the SMeFT Decks is that you only use them as much as you want to.

The best way to start using them is a draft. Each player, in turn, gets six random cards from one of the ‘core’ decks (with fewer than four players, make a ‘spare’ pile between you; with more than four, take a couple of extra cards in each pile). Look at the cards, choose one, then pass the leftover cards to the next player. After four rounds, you should have one card each from the four core decks:

  • Story
  • Mechanism
  • Function
  • Technology

Now you can introduce your game to the other players.

  • The Story deck gives the background story for your game. You can adopt it as is or modify it.
  • The Mechanism deck tells you something about the way the game is played. Is it a game where you roll dice, or collect sets of the same (or different) items?
  • The Function deck tells you about the role of the technology in the game. Does it support timing of game events? Randomise components or even player order? Calculate scores? You can read more about the function deck in our paper, where we detail all the different functions we’ve found in games1.
  • Finally, the Technology deck suggests a technology product that might be used to bridge the distance between players. A camera or microphone, or even a holographic cube. (What even is a holographic cube? We’re not sure, but you can imagine!)
  • After you have done a couple of drafts, you might want to work on one of your designs, or you might want to explore something different. You can use the cards in different ways to support that – perhaps choose three cards from each deck that might work with your design. What we don’t recommend is spreading the cards all over the table and trying to use all of them – these are design prompts, not a cookbook!

When we sent the SMeFT Decks to print, we included two bonus decks of cards which sit outside the SMeFT Deck process. These are particularly useful at the stage where you are refining your game concept (yellow) or in the pre-design stage (pink).

  • The yellow printed cards represent what we call “Guiding Principles” for designing hybrid digital boardgames. These are described in our 2021 paper “More than a Gimmick: Digital Tools for Boardgame Play”2.
  • And the pink printed cards represent the DHYE (or Distanced Hybrid plaY Experience) Framework from our 2023 paper “Lessons from Homebrewed Hybridity: Designing Hybrid Digital Boardgames for Distanced Play”. These seven concerns (which we *cough* call the Seven Cs of DHYE) address questions of “What kind of game should we design?” “How should the game be set up?” and “How do we make the game work?”

The paper describing their development and use is available open access here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3572921.3572933

It is cited as follows:

Melissa J. Rogerson, Lucy A. Sparrow, and Sophie O. Freeman. 2022. The SMeFT Decks: A Card-Based Ideation Tool for Designing Hybrid Digital Boardgames for Distanced Play. In Proceedings of the 34th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI ’22), November 29–December 02, 2022, Canberra, ACT, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3572933

  1. Published version (paywalled): https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3411764.3445077
    Open access submitted version: https://rest.neptune-prod.its.unimelb.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/caf3a899-1b11-56f3-bf08-da7b5cc33057/content ↩︎
  2. https://cdn.svc.asmodee.net/gil/uploads/2022/01/Rogerson-al-More-Than-a-Gimmick-2021.pdf ↩︎