Welcome back! We’re going to cover the impacts of Kickstarter on the 3-tier system in this post. You can go back and read about the 3-tier system, and the impacts of online game stores and mass-market stores on the industry in our previous posts. Scaling Up When Kickstarter launched in 2009 nobody realized how much »more
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Drowning In Gold: The Mass Market Strikes Back
In previous installments we covered the basics of the 3-tier system, and how online game stores (OLGS) began to disrupt the traditional model. This time we’ll take a look at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and Target, and how they’ve changed the industry. Amazon: Mass Market, or The Largest OLGS? In the early 2000s, Amazon »more
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Drowning in Gold: The Rise of Online Game Stores
Welcome back. In our last post we covered the basics landscape of the three-tier system of retail distribution. This time, we’ll turn our attention to some of the early disruptions to this system. Online Game Stores (OLGS) In the early 2000s, brick-and-mortar (B&M) board game retailers everywhere started facing increasing competition from online stores. Various »more
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Drowning in Gold: How Too Many Games Are Breaking The Three-Tier System
As we turn over from one year to the next, and perhaps from one decade to the next, depending one who you ask, I wanted to share reflections on the tabletop industry itself, and how that will impact consumers, designers, publishers, and everyone involved in making and playing board games. This is the first in »more
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Design Patterns: Perpendicular Constraints
There’s a useful term in project management called the Critical Path, which is defined as the least amount of time needed to complete some multi-step operation. A project manager tries to figure out how to sequence tasks in a way that is most efficient and wastes the least amount of time. Eurogames offer a similar »more
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Design Patterns: Random Reactions
The recent boom in Yahtzee-style games, known as roll-and-writes (or RnW for short) got me thinking about the genre and its underlying mechanisms. One major design innovation, that distinguishes many games from Yahtzee, is having more than one player make use of a common set of random results. Sometimes this happens in the form of »more
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Playful Thoughts: The Hit List
Nick Bentley is one of the brightest minds in gaming, and I’ve often turned to his blog, or approached him personally, for his insights into game design, product marketing, and the tabletop games industry. From his perch at North Star Games, Nick sees a lot, and understands more, about how to be successful in gaming. »more
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Playful Thoughts: Meaningful Decisions
In brainstorming ideas for the Design Patterns series, I sometimes come up with topics that don’t really fit there. This new series, Playful Thoughts will be the home for design topics that aren’t examples of a pattern in game design, but also for posts about the tabletop industry as a business, and for thoughts about »more
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Design Patterns: This Is Bigger Than All Of Us
In their terrific new book, Meeples Together, Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline discuss”challenge systems” in cooperative games. Though they don’t explicitly offer a concise definition of a challenge system, we might distill one out of their extensive coverage of the topic and say that a Challenge System is a mechanism or set of mechanisms that »more
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Design Pattern: Winning and Goals
As the Women’s World Cup rolls forward, I though we’d talk a bit about goaaaaaaals! Or just goals, as English-speaking commentators call them. Reiner Knizia once said “When playing a game the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.” At first impression, Knizia appears to be saying »more