A board game designer can spend years refining a game. They know the game inside out and understand every rule intimately. Yet, when you open a game for the first time, you don't have access to their knowledge. Players have to learn how a game works all by themselves. A game design can be sound, yet it's still difficult to learn and teach. A clear rulebook certainly helps, but often it all begins with the design itself. Following on from my article about dealing with complexity as a board game designer, this article looks at how a good design can help with a game's teach.

The post Teaching Matters – designing games for the first play (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

There comes a time when you look at the rules for a new board game, when it suddenly stops feeling exciting and starts feeling intimidating. The rules are too long and convoluted, the main game board is cluttered, and every mechanism seems to have another exception. Complexity itself can be very appealing when it creates meaningful choices and rewards repeated play. However, complexity is also a kind of burden for the people playing the game. More complexity means more time to learn a game, more effort to remember everything, and more focus when playing it. In this article, I use episode 364 of Ludology as my starting point for examining where complexity adds interest to a game and where it simply makes it unnecessarily hard to play.

The post Costly Complexity – the limits of complexity in board games (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Designers don't like it when players criticise their board game, and the response often is that the game was intentionally designed that way. Players complain that a strategy feels unfair, a mechanism is frustrating, or a game simply isn't very clear. Designers reply that that just misses the point. Similar disagreements exist in films, novels, and art, yet board games seem to have them more often, and they are often more personal. Part of the reason may be that board games are not passive experiences. Players are not simply watching events unfold, but instead are interpreting rules and shaping the experience themselves every time the game hits the table.

The post Intentional Experience – designer intent and player experience (Topic Discussion) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.