At last week’s gaming session, I had two games in my bag that had Roman themes: Fantasy Flight’s English language release of TRIBUNE, a game that received a lot of accolades at Essen 2008, and a dinky little card game with absolutely revolting amateur cartoon art packaged in a plastic tray called GLORY TO ROME. I let my friends decide which of the games they wanted to play since both were around the same complexity level and would take about the same amount of time—an hour and some change at most.

I had played both and knew what to expect and I knew which of the games I wanted to play more, but I also knew that Fantasy Flight’s outstanding production values would win out over the cheap, junky looking poker-chips-and-plastic-cards production values of the smaller game. It didn’t matter that GLORY TO ROME was the better game- TRIBUNE was simply more visually appealing, looked more interesting, and felt like much more of a game than GLORY TO ROME did. And of course, they chose TRIBUNE.

It all turned out fine; we had a decent enough time with TRIBUNE and its outstanding professional production values although we all agreed that it wasn’t something we’d likely want to play often enough to justify owning it and there was a certain sense of regret that we probably ought to have played the crappier looking game instead. But then I looked at the dime store production values of GLORY TO ROME and thought “Who would want to play something this ugly anyway?” I’ve been embarrassed to even show the game to people, its artwork is so garish and as a whole it’s just lazily and cheaply produced. Curb appeal: zero.

When talking about how games look it’s easy to fall back on the kinds of platitudes they use to make ugly people feel better about themselves, that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” or “don’t judge a book by its cover” but the fact of the matter is that hobby gaming, and board gaming in particular, is and always has been practically infested with hideous, amateurish, and sloppy graphic design, illustration, typography, layout, and other visual collateral despite the awesomeness of many games sadly festooned with such eye garbage. And ultimately, I think it’s one of the things that can often drive people away from the hobby. Sure, a beautifully painted Larry Elmore dragon is going to run off some folks, but a childishly drawn dragon executed in colored pencil by the wife/girlfriend of a game’s designer isn’t exactly going to attract the eyes and dollars of most people. Terribly drawn and laid out cards like those in the otherwise incredible ORIGINS: HOW WE BECAME HUMAN won’t even interest the anthropologists the game seems to be trying to entertain.

But I don’t completely disagree with the crowd that somehow has the wisdom and superior insight to see the inner pulchritude of ugly games through the haze of Windows-standard fonts and refrigerator door-quality “artwork”- a game can have incredible mechanics and be printed on Post-It Notes in off-brand crayon and still be a great game (provided that its theme is cheapness and the narrative is about Post-It Notes) but careless and cheap product design is not only a missed opportunity to provide the customer with a visually appealing and attractive game, it’s also inexcusable in an era when there are games out there like those from Fantasy Flight Games that have raised the bar for physical presentation of board gaming products sky high.

If video games still had boxes like those old Activision Atari 2600 titles had, do you think they’d be selling to the tune of billions of dollars a year? There’s a very distinct reason why a 15 year old consumer will pick up a Fantasy Flight game over pretty much anything published by Rio Grande Games- a crude, brown-and-darker-brown portrait of some European burgomeister doesn’t exactly have the same appeal as a game that has modern looking graphics that are on par with what we see in marketing and visual collateral in video games and film. Sometimes the subject matter is as off-putting as the execution- a picture of some burly guys and semi-nude gals facing off against a troll is always going to be more interesting to most modern consumers than anything like that picture of the slave driver on the cover of PUERTO RICO.