First of all, I would like to apologize for failing to post a Game Design Showdown on 6/31 before leaving town for 2 weeks. I will be posting the July showdown in a few minutes, and we'll have through next Wednesday (7/20) to submit an entry. Voting will run through the following Wednesday (7/27), and then August's GDS will begin on 8/1.

Sorry for the delay, hopefully you're all itching to participate!

And for those interested, Seattle was beautiful last week, and Protospiel was a lot of fun (and very constructive I think).

- Seth

June 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Spring Cleaning"

Please Read: Details on entering the Game Design Showdown.

WINNER ANNOUNCED! 7 games have been posted - and in a very close race we have a winner!

1st place, with 12 votes: Busy Bees by Lokinervio.
2nd place, with 11 votes: Tulpen Mania by Richard James and Brad Phillips.
3rd place, with 8 votes: Diced Veggies by bhazzard.
4th place, with 6 votes: Birds of Pair O' Dice by Loonoly and Spring Planting by Chip Alexandra.
5th place, with 4 votes: Spring into Action by Empires and Springtime for Dinos by Ron Krause

Congrats to the winners, and thanks for playing! Watch for the next GDS to go up Thursday June 30th (I'm leaving town, and want to make sure I post it before I go).

And now, to the Critiques Thread!

I'd like to know which features of this website are being used, which are cool but unusable, and which are simply not useful. So please reply to this thread and let me know which features you use and like, which you would like to use if they were somehow different, and what you'd like to see as a feature of BGDF.

Right now I'm just gathering information, but I do hope to use this information before too long to greatly improve the BGDF experience!

Thanks,
Seth

February 2011 Game Design Showdown - "The Dice Gods Must Be Crazy"

Please Read: Details on entering the Game Design Showdown.

VOTING FOR THE FEBRUARY/MARCH GAME DESIGN SHOWDOWN IS NOW OPEN!

CHANGE TO VOTING FORMAT

Instead of the 30 votes thing I mentioned before, I think it will be better to do this in a 2-step voting process. I apologize to those who painstakingly assigned 30 votes already!

ROUND 1: Simply list your 10 favorite entries of the 38. Send me a PM with the subject "FEB GDS TOP 10" with that list. You don't need to put them in any particular order, just the 10 entries you think are best.

You have until Sunday to get me this (some people have expressed that Friday was too early to go over all the entries, and I expect some people would prefer to do so on the weekend). Sorry for the confusion!

The Entries have been broken up into 4 threads...

• #1-10 are in this thread below.
• #11-20 are in this thread
• #21-30 are in this thread

• 31-38 are in this thread

• Seth

Michael Mindes of Tasty Minstrel Games has expressed an interest in a quick playing, light game made primarily of dice. I thought it might be fun to expand this month's Showdown and incorporate his request to find out if the BGDF can produce something he'd be interested in publishing.

While the GDS is a competition, it's a friendly one, and I think it would be cool to see the critiques of these games aim at really trying to make one or more of them good enough to submit to a publisher. Even if your own entry does not win, you could contribute to one of your colleagues games getting published!

January 2011 Game Design Showdown - "Remember the Time"

Please Read: Details on entering the Game Design Showdown.

Voting for the January Game design Showdown is now closed!

Kind of a disappointing or anticlimactic month for the GDS - most likely due to the 1-page design contest at BGG. Only 2 entries this month, and each one got 2 votes, for a tie!

So congrats to both entrants this month, you're both winners :)

Hopefully next month the GDS will be more active.

Main Design Requirements:

• Theme Restriction: None! This month feel free to come up with whatever theme you'd like.

• Mechanics Restriction: Memory. For this showdown your game should have a memory element, but not the kind you might be used to - rather than the players needing to remember certain aspects of the game state, the GAME should have some kind of memory or some way to record the game state (or at least part of it), such that the game can be reset to that state on a future turn if need be.

• Mechanics Restriction: Rock-Paper-Scissors. This month's games must use a Rock-Paper-Scissors comparison in a non-trivial way. This does not mean that you must literally use "Rock," "Paper" and "Scissors" in your game, just things that have the kind of relationship. For example, the new Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game has a somewhat sophisticated RPS system for combat.