Many design disciplines have a history of neutrality and universality. Typography, industrial design, and so on value the designer being able to put aside their own biases and create things that communicate a similar message to as many people as possible. This is noble, especially for things like signage that really do need this sense of universality, but it can also be stifling to always put the needs of your audience ahead of what you want to create. Luckily, as low-budget tabletop game designers, we can fully give in to our preferences, and indeed, the games we produce that appeal to us will often be more fun and higher quality than those that don’t.

Discovering your game design biases will help you grow as a designer, whether that means sticking to your wheelhouse and refining your skills to make what you want or actively fighting against what you’re used to to leave your comfort zone and grow in a more well-rounded way. Here’s a few tools that you can use to gauge them.

What Do You Respect?

Everyone has games that they love, but most people don’t really put that much thought into the reasons why they like those games. After all, working too hard to define an undefinable feeling often feels like a pointless exercise, and at worst it can sap some of the delight away from the game. (It’s why explaining a joke ruins the joke.) That said, it’s an excellent first step towards discovering your game design biases, especially if you’re early in your game design journey and haven’t worked on that many projects.

There’s a couple of ways to figure out your biases in game preference. Pick whichever of these seems the most appealing to you.

• Make a top 10 list of your favorite board games. See if you can find things most or all of those games have in common. Play time? Player count? How complex or simple they are? How serious or silly the tone is? Are there particular emotional states common to these games that you might not feel in more mainstream games?
•  Pretend you have to convince a skeptic to get into board games by describing one game to them. Which game would you choose to talk about? What in particular would you describe about the game?
• Think about the best times you’ve ever had playing games with your friends. This doesn’t even have to be about games you like normally – perhaps the group you were with, or the atmosphere might have contributed. But what about the game triggered such fondness in you? Why does this playthrough stick out in your mind more than any of the numerous others you might have played up until that point.

What Kind of Games Do You Design?

I didn’t realize that I had game design biases at all until I overheard a friend who ran a monthly prototype night mention to someone else that he had never seen a prototype of mine that took over half an hour to play. It so happened that, unconsciously, I ended up creating short, relatively rules-light games over anything else.

It can help your process to define what your “regular” kind of game is. Look back over all of your previous prototypes and perhaps subject them to the same exercises you did in the above section.Perhaps talk to someone you work with a lot on games – a favorite playtester or similar – and see what they have to say about your games. It can be surprisingly hard to figure out your preferences and design biases when you’re on the inside looking out.

It’s also possible that you might have a fairly broad range to what you design. Some designers, like Vlaada Chvátil, seem to bounce from ultra-heavy strategy games to party games with relative ease, while others, like Uwe Rosenberg, find a niche and settle within it. If you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, identifying that rut is the first step towards climbing out of it. Perhaps consider making a game longer or shorter than you normally do, or with sillier or more serious mechanics.

What’s Your General Philosophy of Games?

Game design has a lot of big questions that don’t have one objectively correct answer. These include things like:

• What is a game? What makes it different from an activity, contest, or sport, or are those things subsets of games?
• What makes a game, or anything else, fun? Is there one answer to what fun is, multiple answers, or none at all?
• What emotions should a game generate? Excitement? Anger? Patient thought? Perhaps a combination of these, or all of them?

Sitting down and asking yourself these questions, possibly with examples of games that meet or don’t meet these criteria, is an excellent way to figure out your philosophy of game design.

What Else Do You Like?

Fantasy authors who only draw from other fantasy novels, directors who only draw from movies, and game designers who only draw from other games almost inevitably end up one step beyond mediocrity, because they don’t add more to the medium. The only way any creative field escapes stagnation is through people who are able to unite it with their other interests and passions.Thinking about your other interests and how they influence your games, both thematically and mechanically, is a great way to understand your game design biases.

To use myself as an example, I am personally heavily influenced by schlock and camp of all kinds. Happy Daggers is based off of the unrealistic but flashy swordfights you might see in classic swashbuckling movies, while my prototype The Monster Dimension is themed after low-budget, poorly acted monster movies. Your interests don’t even need to line up well with the medium – my very boring and mundane passion for hotels and convention spaces inspired my other prototype, Con Season.

Even other kinds of game can inform your design process. David Sirlin was a former professional Street Fighter player, and his tabletop work all relates to fighting games or related media like Puzzle Fighter – not just in its mechanical trappings, but also in the heavy emphasis placed on reading the opponent and asymmetric player powers. “Game” can also refer to things like bridge and other traditional games, sports (played, coached, or spectated), and even game shows and reality competition shows.

Conclusion

Knowing your game design biases has two broad benefits. The first is as I’ve mentioned previously – it gives you a sense of how you design, so you can refine it and/or try to break free of it for something you find more creative.

The second is that being “the X designer” can give you courage and strength, particularly if you’re a new designer. For the first year or so of my design work, I felt very unsure about what I was designing and if I was actually making something worthwhile. After defining myself as someone who makes shorter games with strong stories and emotional impact, I feel like I’m a legitimate member of the design community with something meaningful to say. If you struggle with the same issues, I greatly recommend this process.