Cardboard Edison's Favorite Tips & Resources - February 2014

This month’s roundup of useful tips and resources for board game designers features advice for finding your place in the industry, detailed stats behind a Kickstarter campaign, lots of thought-provoking articles about the theory behind board games, and more. Enjoy!

#industry:

• “Don’t attend conventions just to sell games. Attend to network and sell yourself. Think long term. Build relationships.”–Ben Pinchback (@pinchback21)

#publishing:

• Hard numbers behind a “pay what you want” Kickstarter campaign

#process:

• “Designers. Expect rejection. Tempered expectations will induce persistence in seeking publication. Never give up on something you believe in.”–A.J. Porfirio (@VanRyderGames)
• Geoff Engelstein (@gengelstein) joins the Game Design Round Table to discuss real-time games, designing with family, learning to play new games, and more

#playtesting:

• “For a designer, honest feedback is a beautiful thing. You can’t overreact or underreact. It’s your job to digest and appropriately address.”–Ben Pinchback (@pinchback21)

#theory:

• “Remember: simple is not the same as shallow. Complex is not the same as deep.”–Grant Rodiek (@HerrohGrant)
• Reverse engineering gaming mechanisms
• How your scoring system distributes points, and how it encourages player behavior
• Replayability is more than variability
• Examining depth and emergent gameplay—finding the ideal ratio of depth to complexity
• Underused game formats that lie somewhere between competitive and cooperative

#rules:

• Grammatical pitfalls in rulebook writing