Producing Fun is a podcast about making tabletop games from a product perspective.Matthew Dunstan is a Prague-based game designer with more than 30 published titles to his name, including Elysium, Monumental, and the Adventure Games series from Kosmos. In this episode, we talk about how Matthew uses product thinking to make better games, the power of long-term collaborations, and the rise of “detailed familiar” themes. Listen on Youtube: https://youtu.be/3_qBVGJBXiA Listen on podcasting platforms:https://anchor.fm/naylorgames/episodes/Matthew-Dunstan---Game-Designer-e1hpvij Transcription James 00:00Hi I'm James, and this is producing fun, a podcast about making games from a product perspective. Welcome to Producing fun. My guest this week is Matthew Dunston, a product based Australian Game Designer with more than 30 published titles to his name. Believe it or...
The MDA framework is now well known in design circles. Here I take it a step further putting forward my own riff on the model for tabletop games specifically; incorporating the notion of access and mapping out some critical detail. Why build a model? I have always had a penchant for systems and frameworks. Huge geek that I am, I’ve always enjoyed a good railway network diagram or process map. In my professional life I’m the person who took on the job of mapping out my company’s technology stack’s to give us a comprehensive picture of how it’s 38 distinct components interacted (or over-interacted in many cases!). Such frameworks or models aren’t just fun for people like me though. They...
It’s time for Magnate, a project I've been working on for nearly 7 years, to become a reality What if there was a game that felt like what you imagined Monopoly was going to be, when you were a child? Not the crushing disappointment of what Monopoly actually is: a very random, overlong and mean-spirited game of simplistic and brutal zero-sum logic. But a game the captures the magic of Monopoly in the imagination: the feel of money in your hands, of the scramble to get the best property, dropping huge piles of cash on big risks each turn, the application of your cunning and critical thinking to make the best bet and sitting back to admire the empire you...
Applying a cost-benefit framework to a specific mechanic in a TTR expansion, I explore if we can create a more objective way of weighing-up design decisions; at least as far as set-up goes. Ticket to Ride: Pennsylvania is the “B side” of the United and Kingdom and Pennsylvania map pack and requires a base game to play. While the train ferries have been seen in previous outings (like the Europe base game I wrote about here), by far the most important special rule is the addition of share ownership to the game. As with most of the series’ expansions, it’s a pretty simple addition: when you place your trains as normal you can also take a company share of any...
In the last post I explored some possible reasons why Flashpoint's turn order is just so forgettable. In this post, I present the results of my little experiment and explore what it all means. A brief recap Flashpoint is a co-operative game about firefighting. Its turn order requires each player to undertake three steps: take their actions to fight fire / save people, advance the fire itself, and replenish potential victims. After seeing people frequently forget to advance the fire, I theorised that something about this turn order makes it forgettable and, further, that an order in which players advance fire first would be more memorable. Part I covers my three main working theories: first that the current turn order...
