Tag Archives: randomness

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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

• Design Patterns: Random Loops

  Game designers often talk about two types of randomness, input randomness and output randomness. In this post, I’d like to critique this polar model of randomness and introduce some new thinking about it that designers should consider. First, a quick summary for those new to the concepts: The distinction between input and output randomness in »more