Assume there are two approaches to game delivery: Books and boxes. Actually there are other methods but these two methods of defining a game, which somebody can buy off of a shelf, encapsulate a good portion of the market. The difference is that a book is just text, and a box has everything in the box. A book is the source code of the game, while a boxed game provides physical material (if it's not in the box, you don't need it to play.) These delivery methods have been around for a long time and include early wargame rules and early Monopoly sets. Each one has advantages and disadvantages, depending on what the game designer is trying to achieve, and what the players want.
A book doesn't include dice, tokens, playing cards, or whatever gaming assets the author thinks could be used to make the game happen. It's up to the players to assemble all the pieces. It's up to the player to find them.
That limits the author somewhat. If you're delivering just a book to your players, it's difficult to come up with custom specialty dice, with shields on 2 sides and swords on 3 sides, and a blank on the sixth side. You can't do that, because you're not manufacturing dice. You're just printing a book.
What you can use is standard commodity hardware. You won't have specialized tokens, but you can tell your reader to find tokens that feel suitable for the game.
If your game requires cards, then you're basically limited to a standard deck of playing cards. I think most game designers agree that playing cards are a lot more flexible than many people realise, but it does require added mental effort to translate a 4 of diamonds to something relevant to an unrelated game. If you're adventurous enough to impose upon the player, you might require a tarot deck or something similar, but it's usually safest to rely just on the gaming essentials: 6-sided dice, playing cards, and any form of generic tokens (coins, beads, poker chips, or similar.)
On the other hand, there's a lot of flexibility in description. As a player, you can choose what to use for tokens. You could use Lego minifigs, 28mm wargaming miniatures, action figures, coins, or cardboard cutouts. You can make that decision based on your current financial ability, your interest in the game, aesthetic, or whatever you happen to have lying around. That's liberating and empowering for a certain type of player.
It's also sensible. Most people who identify as tabletop gamers probably already have a set of dice. In fact, I'd assume that if you bought my book that is a game with no gaming components included, then you're probably the type of person to even have polyhedral dice. Certainly you have several d6, and something to use as gaming tokens, and you'll have a deck of cards.
A book is a low-investment way of publishing a game. You write the rules and let everyone else figure out how to make the physical game on the tabletop happen.
It's also a sustainable way of making games. If you publish the rules, you have lots of publishing options. Some are digital, some are print, and basically you're using up paper, which is a renewable resource.
But to be fair, a book that just describes a game can be confusing and overwhelming to a reader who is unfamiliar with any concept in that book. As gamers and gaming authors, we often take for granted some concepts we think of as simple. Everyone jokes these days about the obligatory introductory "What is an RPG?" chapter that appears in every role-playing game book ever published. We joke about it and think everyone knows that by now, so why do we have to write the same chapter over and over again? But the reality is that not everybody does know it. Every day, someone picking up an RPG just isn't quite sure what an RPG is. Maybe they've heard of it, they know they want to try it, but they're just not 100% clear on everything about it.
Even with that obligatory introductory section, there are surprise terms sometimes thrown into a book. For example, the term "saving throw" is jargon for RPG players, so we assume everyone understands what it means. I often write it without a second thought. It seems intuitive: Saving Throw. You're saving yourself by throwing some dice. Simple, right?
But look again at the words "saving" and "throw." Saving could mean an investment, of money or power or any resource, or it could mean you're saving someone else, or you're saving yourself. It certainly doesn't inherently mean blocking an attack or resisting a spell or avoiding a trap. And I never say "throw some dice". I say "roll dice," but I've never said "throw dice." So why is it a saving throw? Shouldn't it be a saving roll or a defensive roll?
In real life, I work in an industry riddled with jargon and specialty terms. I don't begrudge jargon. It makes conversation and communication efficient, as long as both people definitely understand the terminology. But very often, not everyone does know the jargon.
My point is that books can make make a lot of assumptions both in language and in what resources the player is expected to have available. That's not a bad thing, but it's different to what a boxed game typically provides.
A boxed game is a game that has everything in the box. As a designer, you can expect to be able to design whatever you think is required for playing your game. You can include custom dice, player pieces, cardboard cutout tokens, plastic tokens, glass beads, whatever you need. You can make custom cards. Anything you can get manufactured, you can put into the box and then rely on that item for gameplay.
As a player, it's fun to open up a new game and discover special things you've never seen before. Maybe you shuffle through cards with rules that you don't understand yet. You get tokens you don't know what to do with yet. But you know that once you read the rulebook, all these cards, all the numbers and all the text, and the tokens, they're all going to make sense in context of the game eventually. It's part of the discovery of the game world. It's the equivalent of running around an open-world video game and discovering that alcove, or that cavern, or that building that nobody else has been talking about, but you found it. That's what it's like, opening up a game box and finding out all the secrets it contains, knowing that all of these things are going to make your game world. These are the components that are going to help you imagine your game world. It's all in the box.
This of course has a couple of disadvantages, as well. Compared to a book, it's relatively inflexible. A player that's been provided with player pieces is likely going to use those exact player pieces for the game. After all, that's why they're in the box, and that's why the player bought the box.
You can invite players, in the instruction booklet, to customise their game experience with custom characters or custom cards. You can even include blank cards and character sheets, but most people aren't going to do it. I think it's a psychological trick we players impose on ourselves. We bought this box, we paid for these components, so that's the game. If we have to add our own stuff to the game, then why did we pay for the box in the first place?
And besides, there are a lot of games out there. Why would I write my own scenario for HeroQuest when I still have yet to buy and play its expansions? Why come up with custom stats and rules for a character in Blackstone Fortress when I still have Cursed City to get through? It seems that every boxed game assumes it's going to be the only boxed game you ever play, and that you have infinite time to customise and expand the contents of the box because you just have no other boxed games to choose from. Most gamers don't have time to play through an entire boxed game, much less expand on it.
A boxed game can also be redundant. When populating a boxed game with components, it's probably safe to assume you're providing most people with things they already own. We all have plenty of 6-sided dice. We all have generic tokens, and maybe even bags and boxes of cardboard tokens with stuff printed on them. I use the Wound tokens I got with Blackstone Fortress and the resource tokens from Warhammer Conquest in lots of different games. They're technically specific to the game for which they were created, but the concepts they represent is universal, so I probably don't need any more Wound tokens in any other boxed game. But I bet I'll get some.
Generic components work across games. You don't have to worry about fitting them back into a box. You put them in a drawer or on a shelf, and grab them when you need them for any given game.
Finally, I think that sometimes gamers can outgrow the concept of a boxed game. I don't think many of us actually do, because you can own more than just one game, and games are fun. I love a boxed game. But personally I'm aware that I tend to gravitate toward games defined in a book over a game that comes along with a bunch more stuff, purely because I know that I enjoy the flexibility of reusing game assets I already own.
A book is also, as obvious a statement as this is, a book. It's a game, but it's also a book. A box is kind of just a box. That box only exists because there's a game inside. A book I can read as a book, and I get enjoyment out of how the rules are assembled and communicated. I can appreciate the design of a game as described by a book, without the burden of the physical components. It's a kind of gaming-centric reading experience.
With a box, you open it and you're meant to play the game inside. There's usually not that much material in there for you to sit down and sit by the fire, put your feet up, and leisurely read through the material. A box is, ideally, focused on getting you started playing the game. t
That's a difference between the purpose of these two delivery methods. One communicates ideas, the other delivers a physical experience.
Hybrid solutions do exist. You can put a book in a box, along with a bunch of components, and you've got a very valid starter set. I bought a starter set for Warhammer Horus Heresy. It's the primary source of my space marine collection. I use them in Warhammer 40,000, I use them in Horus Heresy. And the book in the box was the complete Horus Heresy rules manual. It's got lore in it, and all the rules. It was a big 300-page book that I got to read over the course of several days. It took me a while to get through it, and it was great. Then I got to build the models, and then I got to paint them over the course of several weeks, and that's my space marine army.
There are also boxes out there that have some items in them, and others intentionally left out. One of my favorite games is Dungeoneer, and it uses art cards as tiles. You can play it with little cardboard cutouts that do come in the box, but you must supply your own dice. Of all the decks available, no box of Dungeoneer has dice in it, and that's perfectly acceptable. I also don't use the cardboard cutouts. I bought some Wizkids miniatures and painted them up to look more or less like the people on the character cards in the box. I've got a little modular system for my Dungeoneer games, and it's a boxed game, but it didn't come with every component that you theoretically could use with it. I remember considering that unique when I purchased my first deck. I hadn't come across a game that decided you ought to already own a d6, but it was of course correct.
I think there is a third hybrid form, though.
This is my ideal: Treat every book as a box. If you're doing just the book, just the rules, then be very explicit about what exactly players need for the game to work. Up front, tell them exactly what they need to go out and collect.
Make it almost a shopping list. Tell the player that before playing your game, maybe even before you read the book, make sure you have access to these items. Don't wait until the middle of the book to surprise the reader with a requirement of a deck of cards, or an polyhedral. Tell the player early exactly what's required. Don't make it a puzzle, make it obvious.
It intrigues me to ponder the many forms a game can take. I recently browsed a book of Victorian-era parlour games, and I was surprised at how few of them were things I'd call a "game." Most of them were "activities," but very few of them read like a "game" to me. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it often catches me out when someone tells me they're a "gamer" and then I realise they only play video games, or just competitive trading card games. Obviously, games take many forms. The important thing is that the players of the game have fun, whether that fun is packaged in a box, in software code, or in a book.