Romantic Bits

I was looking at a board game book on Amazon, and noticed this cover of a related item. I'm a big fan of bits/pieces/tokens/components in a game - I liked the little gems in Niagara so much that I bought 7 bags of them in various colors for use in prototypes. I just wanna touch em.

For some reason, the little dice with an Anchor on it, in the top right of this picture, really appeals to me. I want to roll a dice and hope for an anchor.

It's strange. Suppose there's a game where you can take a number of actions, as determined by a dice roll, and one of these actions is to move your ship. I'm not that excited about a game where a standard dice is used, and a 6 corresponds to ship movement. But when I need to roll an anchor to move the ship, now I'm stoked.

This is tough to get past when I'm prototyping. You don't have time to do every little thing right in an exploratory prototype, and you certainly don't have the ability to get custom pawns/dice/etc made. So you make do. But sometimes when a game is missing some spark, I have to wonder if the spare physical composition is to blame. I feel like a Niagara prototype, without the canoes, waterfall effect and gems, would belie the appeal that the finished game ended up having.

I even let this problem impede me in the monster city game, where I wanted to use the Memoir 44 dice (depicting tanks, infantry, grenades, etc) so badly that I let it dictate some probabilities I might not have gone with otherwise. The effect wasn't all that profound, but I found myself drawn by the components in a strangely seductive way.

I suppose the answer is to learn to see past the components during a prototype, but that's tough. At very least I need to separate my emotional dissatisfaction with the feel of a game from whether or not its actually working. If its "working" in some sense, I might need to gussy it up a bit and see how it feels then. The more I think about it, I know of plenty of games that would have seemed pretty lame before a proper componenting out.