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: 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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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