Theme In Board Gaming

I like board/card games with a strong sense of theme. I was reminded of that tonight while trying a few unfamiliar games and one I'd played before. First was "Splendor", in which you're collecting gems. Somehow you use gems to buy identical gems, and your hoard counts as free gems toward buying more. In "Bohnanza", you try to collect sets of identical cartoon beans ("Red bean! Stink bean! Coffee bean!") and trade them for points while swapping them with other people. In "Alhambra", you try to build a garden by buying tiles and placing them next to each other.

Trouble is, you could replace the specific names for things and it wouldn't change the feel of the games, because the theme is basically just slapped on there. As an exercise, I imagine "Sentinels of the Universe" with all the art and flavor text removed and the damage type names changed to random words. I could still tell you that Legacy does healing and buffing, Haka just hits people for one damage type, Absolute Zero hits himself for two damage types and bounces both around, The Dreamer is an enemy you have to protect as opposed to Plague Rat who makes heroes hurt each other, and so on. The gameplay is strongly linked to the story/premise. Same for "Buck: Legacy", in which clerics heal people, Hot-Blooded heroes have no limit to their power, armor saves your hide, and being a pegasus lets you avoid certain threats. Same for "Tiny Epic Kingdoms" in which dwarves go for the infrastructure victory and one terrain type, elves benefit from another terrain type, undead get resources from killing enemies, and so on. Strip away the fiction, and the mechanics of the various parts are still distinctive. The opposite extreme is getting one of those chess sets where the pieces are Civil War figures or something and calling that a "Civil War wargame".

In other words, I lean strongly toward the "narrativist" school of gaming ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_theo… ) that says "give me a game that lets me pretend to be a spell-flinging kitsune or something; I don't want a 200-page rulebook or to play with purely abstract symbol manipulation!" And yes, that means chess kinda bores me. And pure math.

(Semi-related comment about PC gaming: check out "The Long Dark".)