First, I want to recommend some other game design blog reading that is not my own: The Importance of Being Elegant takes a good shot at attempting to define elegance in board games and providing means by which we can evaluate a game for elegance. Good stuff that I need to dive into further.
Sometimes, I refer to game designers as “professional slackers.” This is in jest of course… good game design is actually pretty difficult, and it’s hard to make money at it. If you’re like most designers, you’re freelance, which means that the pay is inconsistent. So it’s really not a good job for slackers after all. To the would-be professional slackers, I recommend marrying rich or filing frivolous lawsuits.
But there is a slacker impulse that translates well to game design:
If it’s too much work, it’s probably not worth it.
OK, that’s a gross oversimplification. What I actually mean is that if you have to write hundreds of cards with unique text on each one and then play thousands of times to achieve balance… you are doing too much work, and the game is probably too complicated.
On games where there is a need for variety in cards and effects like that, you can shortcut a bit by making a formula. If there are too many variables in the formula (like attack = A, defense = B, magic = C, and plantmastery = F, each card should ascribe to 2A + B^F – C = 15… there’s probably too many numbers.)
Also keep in mind that if you have to spend a lot of time coming up with rules (that also take a lot of time to write out and explain) you’ll have to explain those to your players, and they’re not as willing as you are to do a lot of work to play a game.
There are definitely exceptions. If the work is unrelated to actual game play- like if you have to do a lot of work to make a working prototype, or if you have to come up with a lot of flavor text to create interesting stories, then that’s still worthwhile. Good luck!
Adventure games often have this sort of thing, generally in the kind of scenario. The danger there is that you put a lot of work into making a number of interesting scenarios… and then once they’ve played all those scenarios, your game doesn’t have any replay value. It’s important to be sure that you have an interesting game that people are willing to replay. Betrayal at House on Hill is close to this ideal, but the game play isn’t quite good enough (and the scenarios don’t balance well depending on what has occurred in the game before the Haunt begins.) That was a game that was probably a lot of work, and needed a bunch more work before being released… and it was put out by Wizards of the Coast, who have the staff for that kind of work!
It’s sort of like you’re designing an RPG adventure, but you won’t be DMing it. Not only that, but you have to make it so that people are going to be challenged each time playing.
So really, what this all boils down to is another plea to simplify when possible: not just for your player’s sake, but for your own sanity, to avoid having to pour over a laptop to make 50 different unique items…
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