The Teardown
Let’s start with an analogy. Let’s say you’ve just written a short story for class in college. You hand it in to your professor, and get a B. There are plenty of editor’s marks on it: spelling, grammar, some minor organizational stuff. Then there are the overall comments, like “doesn’t flow well” or “theme isn’t well developed enough.”
Now, you are given the chance to revise the paper for a higher grade. You could just revise the former: it’s easy enough to correct grammar mistakes when the professor tells you what they are. If you just change all those in Word and reprint it out, you might get a B+.
The other stuff is harder. It’d effectively take a rewrite to fix. You know the overall structure now that it’s been written out, but you’re basically starting over. You know you can fix those problems, and if you did, you’d get an A, but it’s going to be a lot of work.
I prefer the latter, in every kind of design I do. And I especially recommend it in games. [Read the rest of this article]
Design a Bad Game Exercise
(This is a guest article by Stephen Glenn, designer of You Must Be An Idiot! and the Spiel Des Jahres nominated Balloon Cup. Stephen was responding to Jacob’s article about game design exercises, and gave us his own.)
I have had game design ideas wake me up in the middle of the night. I’m constantly thinking “what could be a new game idea” and I go to sleep, literally, almost every night with bits of design swirling in my head. In fact, I had a breakthrough last night doing exactly that. I have a game that I’m convinced would work GREAT with the Euphrat & Tigris scoring. Unfortunately, it’s the Euphrat & Tigris scoring… an idea so friggin’ wonderful that I couldn’t live with myself if I borrowed it. So I lay awake thinking “how do I reach those ends in a *different* way”. And something occurred to me! I got up, wrote it down, and went back to bed satisfied.
I do something from time to time called the DESIGN A BAD GAME EXERCISE. The concept is that I am under contract to design a game in ONE DAY. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be particularly original. It doesn’t even have to be fun. It just has to be a game that works. Game = a system wherein players compete by making choices. For example, LCR would not qualify as a game even by these minimal standards. Another restriction is that the game can’t be the same as any other game I’m aware of (including those created in previous DESIGN A BAD GAME exercises).
This idea has several things going for it: [Read the rest of this article]
Game Design Exercises
(This is a guest article by Jacob Davenport, designer of Covert Action and owner of Play Again Games. You can read more of his excellent articles about games and game design at his site.)
Every designer has to design in his or her own way. For me, game designs don’t spring from nothing, I have to be thinking about it and working on it. I don’t wake up from sleeping with a good design in my head, I don’t gather them as I am paying attention to other things. I need to work at designing, and here’s a bunch of exercises to get my mind working. I do these with a time limit, because I find that a deadline, even an artificial one, pushed me forward and prevents me from doing any self-editing. I sit with a two-minute sand timer and my notebook. This is how I work.
Most of these exercises follow the same pattern: brainstorm, churn, brainstorm, design. None of these exercises is supposed to get in the way of good design. If a promising game idea brews up in the middle of an exercise then ignore the exercise, ignore the timer, and let the ideas flow. [Read the rest of this article]
Game Doctors: Tales of the Arabian Nights
A friend and member of my design group Jacob started a series of articles under the heading of “Game Doctors” to try and fix published games under our watchful eye. There are a few games that we’ve started playing quite often, but being the perfectionist game designers we are, have made a few changes. So you can think of these as being both a look into how we analyze game design problems and a collection of house rules for specific games.
Today’s Patient:
Tales of the Arabian Nights by Eric Goldburg. [Read the rest of this article]
The Perfect Game
I was talking to a fellow designer a few weeks back, and we were discussing the designing a game for a specific audience. While we both agreed that it’s very important when marketing to someone, he didn’t think it was as important when designing. I felt that in any kind of creative design, it’s important to know who the final product is intended for. He felt that he would rather design something that taps into the essence of fun, the very core of what it means to have fun, when designing a game. I said this was impossible.
We both agreed the perfect game, that is fun for all, has not yet been designed yet.
But with this in mind, and based on recent conversations, I have been mentally preparing a list of games that are close to perfect. These tend to fall into three camps:
- Great after a few tweaks to the rules as written
- Great except for an untweakable flaw
- Just plain great.
These are just my opinion of games that fit into these categories. [Read the rest of this article]
What… is your quest?
When it gets right down to it, there are three main reasons I design games:
- I look at a design and say “I can do that better.”
- I have not yet achieved all of my “Holy Grails” of game design.
- My brain won’t let me stop.
It’s the second that I’m mostly concerned with today. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the question posed if there are any games that I consider to be without flaws or problems. (Posed to me by a knowledgeable source, no less. I only assume he asked it to torture me, and in fact knows the answers already!) The answer(s) will come, in some fashion, next week.
But for now, let me just tell you some games that exist in my head in a Platonic ideal, and have not yet come into this world in a playable fashion. [Read the rest of this article]
Plot Arcs and Themes: The Stories that Games Tell
There are two (and sometimes three) ways that games tell stories.
There’s the theme, which is the conceptual framework given to us by the game to understand it and give us motivation. For example, in my game Get Bit!, you’re told that you are swimming away from a voracious shark. This gives you the prime motivation: don’t let the shark bite you. The theme and the mechanics work together to give tangible results to your actions: don’t play the right card, and you lose a limb. If the theme were removed, and you were just losing points to an abstract threat, it wouldn’t be as compelling. [Read the rest of this article]
Negotiation and Wacky Futures
Nearly every multi-player game has some aspect of negotiation, whether overt or implied. Many games boil down to “attack the leader” which is a form of negotiation. You give up something- your turn- to gain something in return. This is the essence of negotiating.
However, some people object to these kinds of negotiations, and in some games, such behavior is out-right banned. For example, in a poker tournament, any kind of overt negotiation is considered collusion and banned. “Checking it down” to eliminate a player is a form of implied negotiation that is allowed… as long as nobody says outloud that’s what you’re doing. And there are plenty of games where the players have their own meta-rule about table talk that prevents these deals, because they feel that it’s not within the spirit of the game. (I personally think a game that breaks down when the players can’t talk has a problem… but then again, I still play poker, where this is almost always a rule.) [Read the rest of this article]
Fantasy! Adventure! Boardgames!
It’s one of the most frequent requests, debates, and lists on Boardgamegeek, behind “what can I get my girlfriend/wife to play?” It’s fantasy adventure boardgaming, and it’s coming to a shelf near you.
Why is this so popular? Many, many people play or played D&D. Unfortunately, as we grow up and get out of college, it becomes more and more difficult to arrange a group, buy the books, meet regularly, plan the games, and so on. A board game means little to no prep time, and can easily be strictly one off affairs. It’s also more friendly to new players, since the rules are much smaller than the Player’s Handbook. Board games don’t have to account for every situation that comes up, since there is a limited number of actions that players can perform.
So, that said, there are many, many titles with what I would call a “D&D theme.” It’s vaguely Tolkien-esque, but clearly inspired directly from D&D monsters and tropes. Not all of these games are fantasy adventure boardgames, however. They may just be using the theme for other types of game play.
Fantasy adventure board games can very loosely be defined by having a D&Dish theme where all the players pick a character. They then move this character around a board (often by moving individual spaces based on some statistic, but sometimes through dice rolling) and battle monsters. Battles are done through rolling dice to determine who gets hurt. Treasure and/or powers is gained from the monsters.
Here is a list of fantasy adventure boardgames that I have some familiarity with, and their characteristics. This is by no means a complete list. [Read the rest of this article]
From Screen to Board: Translating Properties into Boardgames
Here’s a pretty solid rule of game design: any game you design in your dreams is likely to be crap. (That’s not to say you can’t get inspiration from dreams, but you’re unlikely to get a good game out of one you made up in a dream.)
A friend of mine brought this up recently related to a game he designed in a dream. I told him there was only one time I remembered doing that, and it was a role playing game, not a board game.
Of course, that night, I had a dream where I designed a game. Through a combination of that talk, and reading an article on Boardgamegeek talking about adapting the movie 300 into a board game, I invented the 300 card game in my dreams that night. And of course, it was crap. (It was about playing numbered cards on each other, and yelling “This is Sparta!” a lot.)
But it did get me thinking about adapting properties such as movies and video games into board games, and how to approach it. I’ll say up front here that I have never had a game published based on a licensed property, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt. These, as always, are based on design style and personal preferences. And as someone who does have access to a few licensed properties, it’s something I am going to be doing in the future. [Read the rest of this article]
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