Gamification Basics: A Lecture in Hebrew
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What’s the Catch? From a Social Dilemma to a Competitive Card Game
Would you accept something you really wanted if it came with an unexpected condition? And could the people around the table predict your answer? That was the starting point for What’s the Catch? (מה הקאץ׳), created by Shoam Ravit Dahan. Shoam brought the concept of wishes, conditions, and twists, along with an early prototype she
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A Game Isn’t Too Long While You’re Still Playing
When we look at the back of a board game box and see a playtime of sixty or ninety minutes, we tend to treat that number as a straightforward description of how demanding the game will be. A thirty-minute game is short, a three-hour game is long, and somewhere in between every player has a
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A Theme Tells You the World. It Doesn’t Tell You What the Game Is About.
If I tell you that I am designing a board game about pirates, you can probably imagine some of the things you might find inside the box. There will probably be ships, treasure, islands and cannons, perhaps a map of the Caribbean and, if the art director is feeling particularly traditional, a skull or two.
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Solved, Solvable, and Masterable Games
Why knowing that a solution exists is not the same as knowing what to do When we say that a game is “solved,” we often use the term loosely. Sometimes we mean that the outcome is already determined. Sometimes we mean that an optimal strategy exists. Sometimes we simply mean that an experienced player has
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What Kind of Resource Is This?
Resources are one of the most common building blocks in board games. We collect wood, stone, money, food, cards, workers, energy, actions and dozens of other things, and then use them to do something we could not have done without them. Because the idea is so familiar, it is easy to treat all of these
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The Real Cost of a Resource
When a game asks us to buy something, the price is usually easy to see. A building costs three wood and two stone. A card costs five coins. An action requires one worker. These are direct costs, and because they are printed on cards, boards and player aids, they are also the costs designers tend
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Randomness Is Not the Opposite of Strategy
Dice, decks, expected value and the mathematics of uncertainty in game design Randomness has a bad reputation in discussions about strategy. When a player loses because of a die roll or an unlucky card draw, it is easy to conclude that luck has replaced skill. But randomness and strategy are not opposites. Randomness is a
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Information Is a Game Design Material
When designers talk about the materials from which games are built, we usually mean rules, actions, resources, cards, dice, maps and objectives. Information is easy to overlook because it does not always have a physical component of its own. Yet every decision a player makes depends on information: what they know about the current state
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The End of the Game Starts Before the Game Ends
Every game has to end somehow, but the end condition does much more than tell players when to stop. It determines how much control they have over the remaining time, what kinds of risks become reasonable, when long-term investments stop making sense, and whether the final stages feel like a gradual acceleration or an abrupt
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