A group of experienced games journalists are publishing a 250 page hardback boardgame yearbook and it looks very interesting. While books are not really my focus here, it seems like an interesting product of itself with a strong proposition; making it worthy of a closer look. UPDATE: "The Boardgame Book" Kickstarter campaign is now live. Essentially, it's a Britannica Book of the Year for tabletop games: mixing reviews of the 100+ biggest titles of the year and interviews with designers (including big names like Martin Wallace, Matt Leacock and Reiner Knizia). The goal appears to be to create a single compendium which will capture the essence of what was going on in the boardgame world over the past 12 months....
Many years and quite a few designs ago, I made a mini-expansion for Dominion. It's been sat in a drawer ever since. So as an experiment in criticism and self-reflection – and with the benefit of hindsight – I've decided to dissect it. I want to see what I did well… and not so well, and what lessons I can learn from it about design. What's the point of looking back? As part of the research for a blogpost about Dominion's design, I went turfing through my old cards. Amongst them, I found a mini-expansion I designed called By Decree that I had mostly forgotten about. As I looked at it, I remembered that I'd actually put a lot of...
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...
Flashpoint is a very well designed game but it has an oddly forgettable turn order. Can we use it to find out if certain design decisions will always result in a more memorable structure? UPDATE: Full results now available in Part II. A theme that does an awful lot of work Flashpoint: Fire Rescue is one of the best examples of theme-first design that I have ever seen. From beginning to end, its burly theme throws the player over its shoulder and carries them through its mechanics with confidence. The fire itself spreads logically in the way that you'd expect a house on fire to spread: sometimes randomly from a build-up of heat or an explosion, but always gradually and...
Note: If you’ve not played a Ticket to Ride game before, I recommend that you play Ticket to Ride: Europe first before reading. I'll be taking a lot of knowledge of the game for granted. I first discovered Ticket to Ride: Europe in 2008. It was not the first hobby game that I played, nor even the first train themed one; that honour goes to Martin Wallace's excellent Railroad Tycoon. But TtR: Europe's fantastic qualities were clear from the beginning. Simple enough to play with non hobbyists but challenging enough to keep even strategy game enthusiasts occupied, it was obviously a 'gateway game' before I learned the term. Since then, I've played lots of the different expansions and alternate base...
