Game Weight

Weight is a game's complexity and difficulty of play, though there's no standard definition.

Weight tends to be classified as light, medium, or heavy. As an example, Bridge would be at the heavy end, while Dominoes would be at the light end.

Greater weight means a game is harder to learn and play, and will appeal to far less people.

Lighter games also tend to have less components. This appeals to more people, given financial and space constraints.

Given two otherwise-identical games, the lighter one is superior.

Less work

When developing larger games, each change or problem requires long periods of thought, and there are so many components to update, each revision. It's far less fun than designing a lighter game.

Heavier games are also much harder to design. When a big group of systems just isn't fun, it can be extraordinarily hard to analyse.

At the end of it all, there's no extra reward for designing a heavy game. Likely the opposite is true. Everyone will play a medium-light game. Only a minority of people will play a medium-heavy game.

Design space

Design space is the number of components you can create within the rules of your game. The more expansive your rules, the more things you can create.

In Chess, the rook moves vertically and horizontally, while the bishop moves diagonally. If you try to invent new chess pieces, you'll find it difficult. All the simple ones are taken, so your new pieces will have to be more complicated. Technically, you could just make infinite new pieces of increasing complexity. The design space of Chess is very limited, and most of it is used.

Radlands has won praise for being a very elegant and focused game, unencumbered by rules and procedures. However, the design space of this game is very small. The game has 34 camp cards. Why weren't there more? I couldn't think of any more.

Your design space should only be just big enough for you to create a great game. Don't create extra categories and concepts, unless you really need more design space.

Designing for medium-light

I almost always design medium-light games, but I don't mind if they end up closer to medium. Examples are Dominion, Catan, Star Realms, Race for the Galaxy. Almost everything I want to do can be done at medium-light. It's enough design space to build interesting things in, if I'm really careful to make everything simple. Also, for a game to be really good, it probably needs decent replayability, and that's very hard to do with a very light game.

Designing light games

It's also very valid to design light games. I've worked with designers who do this. The big difference here is that it's more about searching for something amazing, than working on something, to improve it. You need to be spitting out ideas and games at a rapid pace, looking for a gem. You can't really fix the game, because there's not much there, and it becomes something else. Design space is tiny, in these games.

Also, you'll constantly have to avoid doing things that have been done before. It's far more about novelty than craftsmanship.

The success curve is different here, as well. The lighter the game, the better, so if you find a great game in this space, it can be hugely successful, as almost everyone will play it. Codenames is one of the best games of all time, in my opinion.

If you find a reasonable game in this space, that's not a hit, it won't make that much money, because it's probably small, and doesn't sell for much.

Designing light games is far more of a winner-take-all lottery than designing heavier games. However, both are valid, and you should do what you like, and are good at.

Of course, light and medium are part of a spectrum, and you can design at any point on it.

Heavy games

Basically, don't design these at all (if you want to be successful, that is.)

If your game is heavier than medium, I'd be almost certain that it shouldn't be.

But I designed a medium-heavy game — my farm game. What's my excuse? Was it a good idea? No. I could've designed two other games in that time. I just wanted to make my magnum opus, on my favourite theme. I don't expect I'll do it again.