Hot answers tagged game-design
35
A hexagonal grid and a triangular grid are duals of each other; that is, if you put a dot in the center of each hexagon, and connect them to each adjacent one, then you get a triangular grid:
Thus, playing on the vertices of a triangular grid is equivalent to playing in the spaces on a hexagonal grid, and likewise playing on the vertices of a hexagonal ...
34
What is a game?
There's some argument about what exactly constitutes a "game" in academic and design circles. Going by Salen and Zimmerman's definition from Rules of Play:
A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.
Cooperative games still have rules and definite ...
18
Get some card sleeves and card-stock. Write/print whatever you need to on the card-stock and cut it down to size. After you sleeve it they will all be shuffle-able and readable, just like normal cards. Admittedly this isn't good for much beyond prototype testing, but it's definitely fast and cheap. :D
18
I'm no game designer, so this is just off the top of my head:
I'd try and tie it to a mechanic that already exists in the game and which the players can't avoid, or at least get a obvious (maybe short term) advantage from, so it's unlikely to for them to forget.
Examples:
Each player gets 5 cards at the start of the game and must play one each turn. ...
17
Kingmaking can be a desired feature in its own right
Particularly in games with a political or simulational bent, kingmaking can be a desired feature. The kingmaker gets to feel like he accomplished something even if he didn't win, and the tension and turnabout can contribute to a more exciting play experience.
Thesunneversets' answer addresses this much ...
16
The answer is no. I've played early and late prototypes from dozens of published boardgame designers including several who are successful enough to do it for a living and I've never been asked to sign an NDA by any of them. Boardgame ideas just aren't worth stealing.
The only time I've been asked to sign boardgame NDAs is by unpublished designers who were ...
14
There are a few popular ways.
Have a duplicate game board with a referee to validate things.
Have a map of the game board set aside with the secret locations marked.
Have numbered locations on the board where the hidden units can be and mark the number down secretly.
Use decoy markers. Place several markers on the board and treat them like a real unit. ...
13
One reason why the less natural hexagonal grid is so popular in wargames and other games where the board represents real-world terrain is that it measures distances much closer than the others. All six adjacent hexes are the same distance from the central hex, and the variations even out to four or five hexes are small. Both square and triangular grids ...
13
BoardGameGeek has 58627 games listed*, and 11132 of them are marked with the dice-rolling mechanic** . So that's 19% - but of course, there's no guarantee that all of the games were appropriately tagged, so treat it as a lower bound.
If you're curious about more specific categories, you can used the advanced search and limit it to games with or without dice ...
12
Another difference between the three grids is the following: for spaces that "touch", a square grid has two different relative positions: sharing an edge or touching diagonally. For hex grids, two spaces that "touch" can only share an edge. For a triangular grid, however, there are three options:
Consider the red triangle. It touches each of the three ...
12
My experience with people such as this is that they're impatient to start playing, and don't want to take the time to read lots of instructions. The best thing you can do, as @beam022 touched on, is improve the instructions. Make them non-threatening and as easily understandable as possible.
Game element formatting
Graphic symbols--used sparsely--can help. ...
12
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer
This answer* on startups.SE suggests (though doesn't completely confirm) that the mechanisms of a board game cannot be patented (which I suppose explains why we have so many deck-builders, for instance), but you may be at risk of copyright infringement if you go so far as to copy graphics, trademarked characters or names ...
11
As a game designer, I know I want the truth from people I show the game to.
I also know that most people just don't give critical feedback. By "critical," I mean a skilled judgment or analysis, as in "critical thinking." I've been involved in enough creative endeavors to know that most think only as far as, "I liked that," or, "That sucked." I've shown ...
11
There are different stages to testing.
You need to make sure the core idea and gameplay is workable. You can do some of this by playing through a few games with just you playing for each other player.
Then you need to start creating the game. This will be an iterative process. You get the game together, and draft some instructions, and get some friends ...
10
I have two different things I do for prototype cards. The first is just to use scraps of paper and sleeves, as outlined in the answer above (which I upvoted) - it's cheap, easy to swap in cards and stops you from over-investing time into half-baked ideas.
After I have confidence in a design enough to bring it to outside play groups, I usually use stickers ...
10
From the official rules (emphasis mine):
BANKER… Select as Banker a player who will also make a good
Auctioneer. A Banker who plays in the game must keep his/her
personal funds separate from those of the Bank. When more than five
persons play, the Banker may elect to act only as Banker and
Auctioneer.
As many people who play auctions in ...
10
You said:
I found no card with trigger effects when they are sacrificed to other cards
In a design article, Mark Rosewater said:
Originally, Perilous Myr dealt 1 damage when it was put into the
graveyard from play but 3 damage if it was sacrificed. And it wasn't
the only artifact creature with this rider. As I explained in parts 1
and 2, ...
10
Probably the simplest method would just be to add a turn marker. Have an area on the board with the numbers one through five printed out on it, with an "It's Brazening Time!" highlight around the the number five.
If you're playing a game with a definite number of turns, just print all turn numbers with a highlight around every fifth. If you have an ...
9
My tips:
Understand the expectations. Is your friend asking you to playtest, debug, and improve the game with critical feedback? Or does he think it's great already, and just wants to play it with you? Ask him what he wants from you before playing, even!
State your criticisms as opinions where possible. Instead of "this is a bad mechanic" try to go for ...
9
Are you up for a DIY Monte Carlo simulation?
I don't know of any specific applications, but if you're comfortable with coding I suggest you gin up a little Monte Carlo simulation.
In case you're not familiar with how that would work I'll explain (and can elaborate later if necessary):
Populate some sort of database or data structure with your cards.
...
9
You could use common card protectors like people use to protect cards from trading cards games (Magic, etc). What your stuff in there (printed cardboard, paper-glued-on-other-cards,...) then becomes pretty much irrelevant.
If not, what about photo printing services? Look for ones making postcards, you can probably easily fit 4 cards on a potcards and they ...
9
When trying to make something new, it is not a bad idea to see what award winning games have already done.
You may wish to see the game Dixit (Spiel Des Jahres 2010) which has a simple system to let 2 to 4 players simultaneously choose between 3 and 5 options. The 2 option variant is Oltarus's method. Dixit also has wonderful artwork.
The expansion Dixit ...
9
One reason comes to mind:
Keeping the game short.
Monopoly is noted as a long game; when played by the rules as written, it's not overly so — 1-4 hours.
there are points, especially on the first circle through, where the players will not have enough cash to buy everything at mortgage cost, especially Boardwalk and Park Place.
the auctions are to get as ...
9
According to this and this, the government has a role in labeling of products that can be used by children, and that 13 is the youngest recommended age you can put without doing additional testing (though sometimes even that is not sufficient). The lower the age, the more robust the testing required, particularly for things recommended under age 3. The rules ...
9
You have several options if you want to collect a large set of generic components so that you can throw your own prototype together.
Thrift Store games you buy just for the components
If you frequent thrift stores regularly, you can pick up cheap games ($2-$4 usually) specifially just to harvest the components from them. Some good examples from the list ...
8
To a certain extent, kingmaking is a desirable element in multiplayer games. Suppose that another player has been making my life a misery throughout a game, to the extent that I fall so far behind that I no longer have a chance of winning. Obviously it's not exactly fun for me to then have to spend the rest of the game taking my persecutor down with me, ...
8
I don't think you should be overly worrying about this "problem".
Boardgame people, who I assume will make up the majority of your target market, will be game-literate enough not to need patronisingly simple instructions on how to approach the basic mechanics of the game. Once they've bought the game, if they have less game-literate friends that they're in ...
7
Race for the Galaxy has this kind of randomness in the action selection phase, although it has a lot of luck of the draw in it as well. A typical early game example is the explore, settle, trade relationship in the early game. Often, you want to explore if other players trade, settle if they explore, and trade if they settle.
On the other hand, I disagree ...
7
A question to consider is whether diplomacy should even be something that is directly handled by the game mechanics, or something that happens purely through negotiation between players with game mechanics that encourage negotiation.
A great example of this is, of course, Diplomacy. There are no mechanics directly related to diplomacy (nothing that says ...
7
My first instinct was that Mark Rosewater, the head of Magic R&D and the writer of the weekly column "Making Magic" on the official site, must have written a definitive account of the Magic colour pie. And with ~50 columns a year under his belt for the past decade or so, I'm sure he's written a million things on subject, especially as the colour pie is ...
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