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
Tag Archives: Karuba
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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
