I’ll never forget the first time I played Pandemic. After the very first outbreak, we performed the Intensify step, shuffled the discard pile and placed in on top of the draw deck. *Gulp.* We knew what was coming. Every turn going forward, we’d now draw the very same cities that had been infected in the »more
Tag Archives: design patterns
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Introducing Patterns in Game Design
I’m a fan of the Game Designers of North Carolina Podcast (GDoNC), which features conversations between game designers on design-related topics. In episode 33, Mark McGee spoke about how he designed his games around a central message, a kind of moral of the game. He mentioned a couple, like “teamwork is awesome or “you can have it now »more
