Cardboard Edison’s Favorite Tips & Resources - January 2018

/

This month's roundup of useful board game design links features interviews with masters of the social deduction and legacy game genres, notes for writing better rulebooks, lots of advice for working with publishers, and more.

 

theory:

rules:

playtesting:

licensing:

publishing:

Cardboard Edison is supported by our patrons on Patreon.

ADVISERS: 421 Creations, Peter C. Hayward, Kris Rees, Aaron Vanderbeek

SENIOR INVENTORS: Steven Cole, John du Bois, Chris and Kathy Keane (The Drs. Keane), Joshua J. Mills, Marcel Perro, Behrooz Shahriari, Shoot Again Games

JUNIOR INVENTORS: Ryan Abrams, Joshua Buergel, Luis Lara, Aidan Short, Jay Treat

ASSOCIATES: Stephen B Davies, Scot Duvall, Samuel Lees, Doug Levandowski, Nathan Miller, Tony Miller, Neil Roberts, Mike Sette, Kasper Esven Skovgaard, Isaias Vallejo, Matt Wolfe

APPRENTICES: Darren Broad, Cardboard Fortress Games, Kiva Fecteau, Guz Forster, Scott Gottreu, Aaron Lim, Scott Martel Jr., James Meyers, Debbie Moynihan, The Nerd Nighters, Matthew Nguyen, Marcus Ross, VickieGames, Lock Watson

/
“Make sure everyone knows that you’re playtesting to find problems, not solutions. Playtesters can easily get stuck on what is the best solution, when it’s up to you to decide and helps to not hurt feelings.”
— Carla Kopp
/
“I believe that the best possible skill you can develop as a designer is the ability to ‘read’ people well - to know if they’re having fun or not, regardless of what they may tell you.”
— Behrooz Shahriari
/
“You don’t have to know where a game will end up when you start designing. Leaping into a design with only minor preparation can lead to fantastic discoveries!”
— Emma Larkins
/
“Sit down and work out why people like a game that you hate. Try to make a game that taps into that reason, but solves your problems with the game.”
— Peter C. Hayward
/
“You probably have an idea of how you want players to play your game, and if you have good incentives, players should generally follow your plan. But be aware of other things players could do and if those things would be a dominant strategy.”
— Chris Anderson
/
“It’s not inherently a problem if your game involving doing the same thing each turn. It’s only a problem if it doesn’t feel different as the game progresses. You can accomplish this in a few ways; the two most common are escalation and a changing game state.”
— Peter C. Hayward