THE LEGEND OF ROBIN HOOD, a criminally underappreciated game published by Avalon Hill in 1979, has got to be one of the most thematic, narrative games I’ve ever played. It has pretty much everything you’d expect from a Robin Hood game and then some. From Merry Men committing highway robbery to the incognito archery tournament, from the dastardly deeds perpetrated by the Sheriff of Nottingham to the triumphant return of King Richard, it’s all there. The level of detail is outstanding (check out rule 13.1, “Bigamy Prohibition”) and there’s no way that the game was ever conceived of as anything other than a game based squarely on the Robin Hood stories.

It captures the finer points of the theme better than any other game about the subject and here’s the shocker: it does so without reams of excessive rules, expensive fantasy calendar-caliber artwork, mountains of cards crawling with flavor text, or elaborate mechanics. You could probably walk into a game store with your eyes closed and point to a game on the shelf and you probably wouldn’t be too far from a modern title that uses those very things as crutches to prop up its theme. But even with your eyes open, you’d be much harder pressed to find a modern game that does what LEGEND OF ROBIN HOOD does; it is a game that generates its theme from its very concept, not from any assortment of modern production conveniences or cobbled-together game elements.

After playing the game a couple of weeks ago I really got to thinking about what creates theme in a game and how I think a lot of game designers- even some very good ones- are getting it all wrong when it comes to producing board games that create genuine theme, narrative, and atmosphere. There’s a lot of very thematic games on the market right now, and some very good ones, but I still believe there is a stark shortage of games that have a real sense of idiosyncratic connection with source material.

There’s plenty of games like WORLD OF WARCRAFT or ANDROID that attempt to create theme with lots and lots of text and artwork, but very few like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA or DUNE where you play them and realize that the game couldn’t be about anything else but the theme around which the designer or designers built their concept. I think there’s a distinct difference between a game that creates theme with presentation (an executive level of theme) and one that is literally designed from the theme up (a conceptual level of theme).

There’s plenty of games that certainly look thematic, and some that even feel thematic. But how many of the games of today are really grounded in solid themes and how many of them are really not as thematic as they might appear? Today’s production values can make even the most abstract Eurogame look like it’s “dripping” with theme, but at the end of the day a numbered card with a title on it is still just a numbered card. Specific words keyed to thematic signifiers do not make theme, nor do pictures.

You could theoretically palette-swap TWILIGHT IMPERIUM, replacing its setting, artwork, and terminology for something more appropriate to a medieval European theme and turn the whole thing into a game set in the middle ages and it would be fundamentally the same game. The political, military, developmental, and exploratory elements would transfer almost on a 1:1 level. The fact is that there are no mechanics or systems of mechanics that specifically describe a science fiction 4x game. There’s nothing like the planetary movement in BUCK ROGERS AND THE 25th CENTURY or the insane three-dimensional physics of ATTACK VECTOR: TACTICAL that specifically and indelibly define TWILIGHT IMPERIUM as a science fiction-themed game. Its theme is almost entirely in art, presentation, text, and setting. Highly themed in execution, but not in concept- no matter if five thousand cards and a pile of plastic spaceships seem to tell you differently.

It isn’t that games with this executive level of theme are bad- that’s definitely not the case as I love TWILIGHT IMPERIUM and plenty of other games that have executive but not conceptual theming. TALISMAN and most adventure games would fall into this class- TALISMAN was originally designed to be about boarding school, believe it or not. The difference in games like THE LEGEND OF ROBIN HOOD, OGRE, FURY OF DRACULA, and WAR OF THE RING is that there are not only core mechanics that are uniquely connected to the source idea and conceptual materials that define the game’s subject matter, but there are critical points at which the descriptive mechanics simply can not be separated from theme.

Some would call those points “chrome” and may even consider such rules or mechanics to be minor or inessential, but I think they’re completely critical in identifying if a game successfully presents its subject matter. It would be impossible to re-skin a “chrome”-laden game like WAR OF THE RING as a generic fantasy wargame—the high wire act the game performs in balancing the journey of the Fellowship against the backdrop of the larger, epic-scale war could never be confused with any other story. THUNDER ROAD, with its simple car combat and its relentless forward velocity is very clearly intended at a rudimentary level to be based on the incredible action scenes in the MAD MAX films. These games combine that executive level of theme, the presentation and setting, with the conceptual level where theme and mechanics form a much stronger bond.