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…
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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…
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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;…
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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…
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I’m a very strong believer in the importance of a fitting, unique theme for your tabletop game. While some of this is personal preference, I also think that having a good theme will make your game much more memorable and exciting. However, some “bottom-up” games, which are designed with mechanics…
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A few months ago, I purchased the game Half Truth to play with my family. The game was designed by Richard Garfield, best known for Magic: The Gathering, alongside Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time winner Ken Jennings. I enjoyed it a lot, with my only complaint being about a scoring system that…
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The inspiration for my new game, A Perfectly Normal House!, came on the Monday before Halloween, when I was alerted to a buck-wild 3D real estate walkthrough that was making the rounds across the more online parts of Twitter. What struck me is that it was scary, not because it put…
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A while ago, I discovered the blog Illiteracy Has Downsides via a link tweeted by pro Magic player Matt Sperling. Despite being about a type of game I never play and possess only passing familiarity with (real-time strategy games, primarily Starcraft II), I found a lot of their work to…
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I’ve written before about the difference between strategic and experiential games – that is, games that are meant to challenge players intellectually versus games that are trying to generate an emotional experience. While I separated them into a binary for the sake of writing about it, every game has some…
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Asymmetric powers are a tried-and-true method to spice up a tabletop game design. I’ve already written about asymmetry in general in a previous article; the short of it is though I don’t think player powers make a game more “strategic”, they have many advantages that allow players to have more…