Daniel (@dungeondive) singles out a single virtue of Flying Frog Productions’ A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game — actually three virtues stacked into one: the game’s three boards, one for the base game and one for each expansion.
The first is size. A Touch of Evil’s boards are small. Square, compact, designed to fit comfortably on the kind of table actual people own rather than on a fully-cleared dining set. Daniel makes the case that more epic adventure games should aim for this footprint — that for most games the sprawl carries empty space rather than additional play, and the empty space costs table presence and setup-effort tolerance that publishers rarely pay back.
The second is the art. Each board is rendered in a sketchy pen-and-ink illustrative style that, in his reading, looks like the kind of hand-drawn map a character in an old Hammer Horror film would have unfolded on a wooden tavern table. The map is the setting. The Gothic-village feel that the whole game wants to evoke begins not in the cards or the rule book but on the play surface itself, the moment the board comes out of the box.
His broader argument: in a highly thematic game, the play-space is the player’s window into the world. Get the window right and the rest is easier.
Daniel’s argument is that table-size is part of a game’s theme, not just an ergonomic constraint. Does a smaller, denser map make a setting feel more present to you than a bigger sprawling one?