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
Category Archives: Thoughts
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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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Guest Post, JR Honeycutt: Make Choices, Feel Things
JR Honeycutt is a developer and designer who is known throughout the industry for his work on legacy games from Seafall to Charterstone to the upcoming Betrayal Legacy. In the past, JR has worked with Dirk Knemeyer on the Tesla vs Edison franchise, and with Daryl Andrews on the Fantasy Fantasy sports franchise. JR, in »more
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Design Patterns: Asymmetry and Player Interaction
We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about various ways in which games start with asymmetry, or introduce it along the way, in order to reach the ultimate asymmetric outcome of winning and losing. Today, we’ll close our series on asymmetry by talking about player interaction. Broadly speaking, nearly every competitive game can be reduced »more
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Design Patterns: Asymmetry And Opacity
Welcome back! This is the third part of the asymmetry series. You can catch up here, or just keep reading. No prior knowledge required! Well… except this bit. Last week I said: I am not addressing the asymmetry that arises based on the natural outcome of non-mirrored gameplay. Players take turns and make decisions and »more
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Design Patterns: Asymmetry (Part 2)
Last week I introduced the topic of asymmetry, and wondered out loud about all the different ways we use the term. Is there any hope of putting some order to all the chaos we uncovered? Probably not. But we’ll try anyway! It might help to identify different categories of asymmetry. I’m going to try out »more
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Design Patterns: What ELSE Do You Know?
Every game should tests players’ skills in one way or another, or else it doesn’t have meaningful decisions baked into it. Skills that are common to many games include being able to gauge probabilities and calculate expected values, to be able to convert in-game currencies like money, goods and victory points, and to be able »more
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Design Pattern: We All Do The Same Thing But It Turns Out Different
Game designers struggle mightily with symmetry. Symmetry in what players can do helps ensure fairness, but it can also produce mirror-image play that’s boring. Besides, players love to identify with their in-game avatars, and having different abilities helps players do that. So do other asymmetries like having different setups, different units, and so forth. Some »more
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Design Pattern: It’s A Cover-up
No, I’m not talking about politics, or make-up. I’m talking about the design pattern of using tokens of different shapes to cover up an area, which has experienced a major surge in popularity lately. Based on the mathematical concept of tessellation, or how to completely cover a surface with geometric shapes, this design pattern offers »more
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Design Patterns: Everything You Do Is The Reason I Don’t Trust You
Distrust is a delicious ingredient in game design! What’s so fascinating about this design pattern is that it’s about the metagame, the game above the table, rather than the game that’s on the table. In a game featuring this pattern of stoking distrust, players typically have some shared goals and some opposing goals, and play »more
