Miscellaneous Advice

These are assorted thoughts and pieces of advice that I can't find a home for.

Asymmetry

Asymmetry is where the players each have fundamentally different game rules. This can be because there are two different sides, or because each player is completely different.

In Root, each player has completely different objectives and rules.

Don't do asymmetry. You're just making things harder for yourself, unnecessarily. Any payoff will not be worth the reward.

Should you be creative?

If you're trying to design lighter games, your biggest problem is going to be finding something new, that works. There's not much design space down there, and it's been heavily mined. The games are so simple that they can't really be "fixed". They either work, or they don't. You'll need to just try all kinds of creative stuff, because you're really looking for something new.

If you're designing more complex games, it's easy to make something that's different enough. There is huge design space left, in established genres. It's more about the craft, and less about invention. It's my advice to be less creative here, and stick to the kinds of games that work.

Radlands is clearly in the same genre as Magic: the Gathering, and its design can reference or contrast against Magic constantly.

Logic & psychology

The technical and logical part of game design is easy. Balance, costs, ratios, and the like, are dead simple. The psychological part is really difficult. Why is something fun?

The psychological part is the more important one, and the logic is just there as a functioning structure that serves the psychological objectives.

Fixing problems is easy. Understanding what the problems are is hard.

Strategy, Fun & Surprise

What is a turn?

Why can't you just take three turns at once, or even all of them?

A turn is really an opportunity you're given, to respond to changes in the state of the game. If nothing has changed, there's nothing new to think about. You can just continue with your current plan, except you have to wait for all the other players. That's boring. If players are wanting to have their turns early, or skipping ahead, that's a sign of this problem.

Every turn should give the player some new information to consider. That will often be the actions of the opponents, but can also be things like random effects, or just drawing cards.

In my gangster game, players can move to different locations around a city, which let the player get various bonuses, and/or roll dice. However, I decided that locations cannot just give bonuses. They must roll at least one die. Why? Because the bonuses give no new information.

Make a good game

There is no substitute.

Radlands is still selling better than the vast majority of new games. Yet, no one is promoting Radlands. There is no marketing. The artwork and design certainly helped, as did the good name of Roxley. However, if the game had been mediocre, or even just reasonably good, it would be long forgotten by now.

People buy a game. They play it with others. Those others like it, and buy it. The game spreads. People talk about the game positively in posts, reviews, and videos. It's very meritocratic. This is what happened with Radlands, and I've seen it with the viral spread of Codenames.

Fundamentals

Add something fundamental to your game, not extraneous. Systems should not add extraneous qualities or objects. The fundamental qualities of games are things like cards, money/resources, health, victory points, and basic actions.

A fundamental is completely unrelated to any other system. Attempts to find an equivalent in another system are not necessarily impossible, but are difficult.

In a friend's Wild West game, there were rows of cards you could buy, take, and fight. He wanted to add something else to the game, but I convinced him to just add more things in the card rows, or add more card rows.

If you create a system, choose something that mechanically and thematically interacts with as many of your existing systems as possible.

My farming game has trees, crops, animals, and other things. I was thinking about adding ships to the game, but realised that ships don't really interact with any of those things, except maybe that the ships could cost wood from the trees. Instead, I added irrigation, as trees and crops use it, and animals need to drink.

I thought of having a horse, that would make some actions have bigger effects. Some actions can't be made bigger, however, so I'd have to go marking all the horse-relevant actions somehow. Instead, I created the Farmhand. This is a special token you can put on any space, and it lets you use that space again at the end of every round. It interacts with absolutely everything, and is very interesting in play.