These are assorted thoughts and pieces of advice that I can't find a home for.
An elegant game gives you depth via the complex interaction of simple parts. This is where the depth should be, not in the internal complexity of the parts.
Try to represent the game state with pieces, which are either in play or not in play, or at a particular place. Try to use less abstractions like numbers and text (like attribute scores, and card types like "Warrior" or "Elf".)
Use very simple pieces, but more of them.
Imagine a car that has tiny text that says "Unique Creature — Minion Fire Shadow Berserker" and has five different attribute scores. They'd rather the same complexity be spread out over five simple cards. "My Wizard has three spell points, I have a goblin with a sword, and a horse."
The components are the game.
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.
A player should begin the game poor and weak, and become wealthy and powerful. Then, the game should end.
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 to make a functioning structure that serves the psychological objectives.
There may be restrictions on how you can use a card (or ability or object.) These may be costs, or maybe that the card must be untapped (turned upright), or that you must be near enough to move to a space.
The purpose you're using the card for is really a kind of a restriction too. You want to be doing something that's actually useful to you, not just doing anything.
Avoid putting more than one restriction on using something, or it will just be too hard to do anything. If you include the purpose restriction, it would be three or more restrictions, which is usually too much.
A friend's Wild West game had weapons. If they were untapped, you could use them to fight an outlaw, and then you tapped them. The game also had guns. These required that you used bullets, as well as being untapped. This was one restriction too many, and made the guns difficult to use, and feelbad. I suggested that guns don't tap, leaving only bullets as their restriction.
In my gangster game, there are locations you can go to, and they have costs. You want to go to a location that does something useful for you, and you also have to be able to afford the location's cost. However, you don't move around the board. You can just go anywhere. If you could only go to spaces you could move to, that would be a second usage restriction, which would be too many.
It's best to start the players as poor as possible, with the arc of the game being their path to wealth. However, players might not be able to do anything at all if they start with nothing. Or, they'll just do the same move every time.
Give each player enough starting resources that they have maybe five options, and no more.
It's fine to work within a constraint, but you need to know when to let go of that constraint.
My first game was a game where there were no rules. The first card basically told you to put ten specific cards on the table, and then take turns taking one. Those cards then told you the rules from that point on. This made for a game with almost no barrier to entry. The fact that I made a rules card, with the (very simple) rules on it later, didn't hurt the game.
Radlands was designed to be a game with nothing but cards. When Roxley later added water tokens, they were really only reminders, and not part of the game. So, the game retained its card-game feel.
There are things that players must be able to do in your game, to make it function. They must always be able to go somewhere. You can't have a state where they can't make any move. They must have access to the game's main currency. Resources should always be spendable.
Don't try to edit the random components of your game, like cards, to deal with these problems. That's not reliable. Make them a fundamental part of the game. Make them abilities that are part of the fundamental rules of the game, or spaces that the players can always take.
In my farming game, there's a space that any number of people can go to. It gives out a bundle of food, and other basic resources. This enables the player to do a wide variety of things on their next turn.
In my gangster game, I've just made sure that there are enough spaces to go to that it's impossible that they're all taken at once. Also, of the twenty locations, fifteen are random, but the other five are always the same. These locations contain everything that are important (or necessary) for the game to function, if the other fifteen cards are all similar, or you get a freak draw.
In a friend's Wild West game, you can pass your turn, and get two dollars, plus a tornado. The tornado is great here, as it resets a row of cards, which will give the player even more choices next turn.
In Radlands, you can always spend all your 3 water. You can always draw another card for 2 water, and you can use the Water Silo to save a water for a future turn.
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.
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.
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.
Goals are profoundly important in games. These tie the turns together, into a cohesive whole.
In my farming game, I created all kinds of things to do. However, the game was strangely aimless, despite its parts being interesting. There was no particular reason to do anything. I tried the simplest answer possible: goal cards, like in Wingspan. They just tell you to do achieve something by game end. If you do, you get points. Suddenly, the game had a direction.
It's also important to create goals of different sizes. Gathering the resources for something, and then paying for it, is a little goal. This is why having "money" or a spendable resource is great for games.
Small goals also tell the player what to do. Players don't want to just be given a million options. This is especially true for new players.
My farm game had end-of-game goals, but the small picture was still confusing. What did the player do in the meantime? I changed the goals, so they could be completed early, for far more points. Then, players knew exactly what to do, and wasted no time trying to complete a goal by the end of the first or second round.
Lords of Waterdeep has "quests". These are medium-sized goals. You gather the required adventurers, and cash in the quest for points.
Agricola has various all-or-nothing systems. If you want to get lots of food, you'll need to plow some fields, get some grain, sow the grain, get some resources, spend them to buy an oven, then bake the grain into bread. These are big goals.
Create goals by making things with high costs, multiple steps, or even just difficult conditional requirements. Or, just create literal goal cards.
decide what your game is not about article: don't just add everything. farm game weather, trade, battle, exploration etc.
Radlands has people in it, similar to Magic's creatures. However, I really like abilities and special powers, so the people in my game have lots of abilities, but I intentionally omitted numerical strength or life amounts. People in Radlands don't have a power or toughness number at all.
Players' time, comprehension, and money are all limited. You cannot make a game of unlimited scope. You shouldn't just take the game that's inspired you, and add stuff to
it.
You need to decide what your game isn't about.
These are things from the original game that will be absent, simplified or merged, in your game, to make space for the new stuff, and things that will be more important.
In Magic, creature combat is about two numbers — power
and toughness. Combat is a numerical tradeoff puzzle. Some creatures
have abilities that affect the combat, but most don't (some have simple
or ignorable abilities.)
Radlands has people in it, similar to Magic's creatures. However, I
really like abilities and special powers, so the people in my game have
lots of abilities, but I intentionally omitted numerical strength or
life amounts. People in Radlands don't have a power or toughness number
at all.
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.
Almost all games I design are medium-light (half way between medium and light). I can explain the game in a few minutes, and a game tends to last around 30 minutes. Medium-light gives me just enough design space. By fully mining this design space, I can create enough interesting things, though it can sometimes be a squeeze.
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.
When you're trying out a new card or option, make it intentionally overpowered, so people use it immediately.
This also removes the possibility that you remove the idea because it was disliked for being weak.
We were determining who should go first in Radlands. Roxley suggested flipping the water token, and if you won the flip, you'd get the choice of whether to go first or not. I told them the flipping was a good idea, but that if you won the flip, you should just go first. After the game was published like this, numerous people asked me why I wouldn't want the player to be able to choose. My response was "would you prefer to play 20 games of Radlands, and 20 games of 'work out whether you should go first or not', or 21 games of Radlands?" Everything you add to your game has a cost.
Make an elegant game, with few concepts in it, but lots of stuff inside those concepts. This makes these things inherently interact, because they're all doing the same kind of thing.
Radlands is loaded with combos. Why? Because the game is about very little. There are only people, events, and camps. The people and camps don't have all kinds of complex stuff going on. The only things you can really do are put people into play, and turn the opponent's people and camps sideways (damage them), and then remove them by doing it again. That's the design space. However, I managed to make all kinds of interesting cards within this space. This means that basically everything interacts, because it all does the same stuff.