We’ve finally figured it out with years of study. The hardest part of designing a game is not coming up with the idea, or original mechanics, or balance, or any of that stuff. It’s figuring out how the darn game ends satisfactorily. This problem, by the way, is not left solely to boardgames. Movies, comics, […]
Set Collection
Sometimes… ok, most of the time… you won’t have a complete game. You’ll have a type of game, or a theme, or a mechanic. And sometimes with that mechanic, you’ll need some other mechanics to actually make a game. This happened to a game designer friend of mine recently who had a group of crazy-good […]
Too Busy Photoshopping Boardgames (Poorly)
Sorry, too busy to write a full column this week. But here’s one of the many projects I’ve been working on lately: (source) (source) (source) This all is for the Boardgamegeek/Mattel Photoshop Contest. If you have a BGG login you can check the other entries so far and whether you have a login or not […]
Departures / Some Playtesting Principles
I just got my Wii flown in, and boy are my arms tired! No seriously, I’m sore. It’s probably due to going a bit nuts with Wii Sports Baseball, and having done a lot of lifting yesterday, but my right arm really does hurt. Still, so far, a lot of fun with the games. Apparently […]
Finally, some IMPORTANT terminology!
I’ve been reading and digging (as in enjoying, not the web-verb) Jonathan Degann’s Journal of Boardgame Design. It’s a while between articles, but I find them consistently thorough and enjoyable. For someone else looking at boardgames from an academic stance, it’s a place to go. This week, though, as a break from the design stuff […]
Geekery Collision / Brainstorming from constraints
Not much of a column this week. Between a fast-approaching finals season and various events at home, I’ve been pretty busy. One piece of news: two of my favorite things are colliding. Alan Moore is going to appear on The Simpsons. The episode is going to feature competition between Android’s Dungeon and a new, “cool” […]
Dripping with Theme or Drowning in Theme?
Last week I talked about The Triangle of how to approach a game design. One of those points of the Triangle is “Theme.” But there are different ways of looking at what theme is, and if a game is well-themed or not. When people talk about theme, they’re generally talking about what is otherwise called […]
Halloween Boardgames / The Triangle
First, a shout out to Halloween games. If you’re in the Halloween gaming mood, here’s some tabletop games to check out: Mall of Horror Arkham Horror Betrayal at House on the Hill (and if you see it around, it’ll probably be out of print soon, so might not be a bad idea to snap it […]
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Game design is like many other creative fields in that there are many ways to approach the creative process that will eventually lead to a game. If it were a science, we’d have programmed a computer to do it, and it would be making all of our games for us. (Though some have theorized that […]
Let's talk about Elegance, baby (Part 1)
All games should strive to be elegant. All games should strive to be elegant. ALL GAMES SHOULD STRIVE TO BE ELEGANT. OK, so then what’s elegant, and why should games strive to be it? It’s a little complicated…
Recent Comments