Note: Regular articles are still on hiatus. Depending on what happens in the coming months, I may or may not be able to continue it. That said, enjoy this article! Last week, Magic: The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater wrote about a generic game design tool he termed “narrative equity” in…
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As most of you reading this know, I was accepted into the finals of Wizards of the Coast’s Great Designer Search. The first step towards doing that was writing some essays. Today, I was informed that WotC will not be posting the essays on their website and that it was…
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Recently, I’ve been watching the Food Network game show Cutthroat Kitchen, a sinister variation of Chopped where contestants bid on sabotages to give the other players during cooking. However, I get frustrated when I see contestants, much better cooks than I am with the ability to change their plans on…
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About a year ago, I purchased the game Nyet! from my local game store. I was interested in creating a trick-taking game that used a lot of the team communication strategies from Bridge in a more simple way, and noticed Nyet! did something similar to what I was looking into.…
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Anyone who’s played a video game in the last decade and a half can attest to how irritating frequent loading screens can be. Though the loading time is often necessary for the tiny people in the video game box to craft the next segment, loading screens detract – sometimes severely –…
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Modern game design operates on a set of assumptions that don’t work for every game. For example, asymmetric games are supposed to be balanced as closely as possible, but some Cosmic Encounter aliens shut down other aliens’ powers completely. Good games should have little to no luck involved, but Betrayal…
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Board game design teaches that a game should be fun for a number of repeated plays. A realistic high number for the average game and the average group is 3-5, but every designer dreams of creating a game so addictive that the audience keeps playing for years. This article isn’t…
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I’m a big fan of ketchup. I was raised by a Midwesterner and, for much of my childhood, ketchup was the only condiment I’d accept anywhere. Even to this day, when I go to gourmet burger establishments, I’ll dump a bunch of ketchup on everything after my carefully constructed order…
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I’m tired of going to the game store and seeing the same three themes over and over again. Here are 17 weird themes. Feel free to use them! Assembly Guide/Warning Label. Featureless human shapes assembling/being attacked by geometric shapes in a stark, right-angle-aplenty abstract space. Great for light games! Vegetable…
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(For those of you wondering what the title joke’s about) I spend a fair amount of my idle time reading/listening to the design philosophy of Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of Magic: The Gathering. One topic he expounds on frequently is the concept of design space: How many viable cards* can…