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“When a game is broken, improving it is easy - you swap out bits that don’t work and stick in other mechanics, and see if it gets better. But when a game works, finding what you can adjust to make it better is nowhere near as simple.”
— Sebastian Bleasdale
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“If lots of players do something wrong in a game, like consistently misinterpreting how a particular mechanic works, then you either have to spend a lot of effort making it really obvious what they should be doing (by producing reminder cards or lots of rules examples), or you can change the game so that what they were doing is correct. The latter course of action is usually better - fighting human nature is not easy.”
— Sebastian Bleasdale
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“The key to a fun game is interesting meaningful decisions. If you’re making the same decision all the time, you work out the best answer, so to keep things interesting, you generally want a constantly changing situation. And the best way to do that is through interaction with other players.”
— Sebastian Bleasdale

Cardboard Edison's Favorite Tips & Resources - June 2014

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This month’s roundup of useful links and advice for board game designers features a list of what to look for in contracts, a new prototyping tool, reminders about getting started and continuing on, publishing mistakes to avoid and lots more…

#playtesting:

#process:

#prototyping:

#licensing:

#publishing:

#theory:

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“A theme should make sense with mechanisms and reduce the learning time. A novel theme for its own sake does neither.”
— Daniel Solis (@DanielSolis)