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.
A Theme Tells You the World. It Doesn’t Tell You What the Game Is About. Read More »
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
Information Is a Game Design Material Read More »
When we talk about board game components, it is easy to treat them as the physical layer that comes after the design. First we decide how the game works, then we decide whether a particular piece of information should be represented by a card, a token, a die, a miniature or a track. From that
Components Are Part of the Design Language Read More »
Most multiplayer games allow players to talk, and because conversation feels natural around a table, it is easy to treat it as something that happens around the game rather than inside it. The rules tell us which cards we can play, where pieces can move and how points are scored; meanwhile, players explain plans, warn
Communication Is a Game Mechanic Read More »
