• Game Design

    Gimme Your Lunch Money

    Being mean to other people is actually really good and cool. Sorry, I meant in board games. I should have been more clear about that. Being mean – significantly and intentionally setting back other players – has developed an unfair reputation as being a universally bad thing in board games.…

  • Game Design

    Stacking Your Decks

    The concept of the deck of cards has benefitted tabletop gaming since before the invention of the printing press. Every game that has a deck of cards employs it differently; sometimes it’s the whole game in a tiny package and sometimes it’s only a minor part of an enormous set…

  • Game Design

    Incentives!!! On Ice

    Richard Garfield wrote an article in The Kobold Guide to Game Design advising game designers to play as many different games as they can – not even board games, but video games, traditional games like tag, and even sports, as well as watching things like game shows and analyzing them as…

  • Game Analysis - Game Design

    Balance, On Average

    When you think about game balance, you probably think about making all possible player options be as equitable as possible; about maintaining a fragile balance between each player’s starting position so everyone has an equal chance of winning every game. But what if I were to tell you that there…

  • Game Design

    Board Games and the Attention Economy

    The “attention economy” is a sociological and economic term that has gained increasing relevance as users gain near-constant access to media channels via smartphones. Herbert A. Simon summarized the concept as “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the…

  • Game Design

    Losing Is Fun

    It’s fairly easy to enjoy a game, even a bad one, if you’re winning really hard. Even in situations where your lead was determined by luck and it’s so unstoppable that you can do literally anything and coast to victory, there is something satisfying about smugly wishing the other players…

  • Game Analysis - Game Design

    The Agony of the Big-Box Game

    Jeremy Commandeur, a Bay Area game designer to whom I owe a great deal, once theorized that tabletop games would eventually split into two paths: Extremely simple and fast “casual games” and massive, big-box games that cost hundreds of dollars and are filled with miniatures for consumers to paint. (I…

  • Game Design

    The Pest-sistence of Memory

    While it’s entirely possible that what makes a game fun is 100% subjective, I’ve noticed that some things are almost universally regarded as “fun” or “good design”, and some are almost always considered “bad” or “unfun”. Having to do math beyond simple arithmetic is in the latter category, for instance;…