Games that teach you design

I've met the whole HeroCard system recently and I think is neat. The designer (now owner of the firm, if I heard right) uses the same characters parameters in all his games, so you can use characters from one of his games in another one. So, every game you buy functions as an expansion of all the games you have bought. For example, he has a game of orcs vs elves, a game in medieval Japan and a game in distant future. You can have the orc and the ninja playing the starship comander hero! Plus, you can also pitch the HeroCard characters (any of them) in a one on one duel.

I think design-wise it's worth at least checking. Keep thinking!

It's very tough to name just three games. I like to think of my learning of game design as a kind of journey. In my childhood I played mostly abstract games and American games: Chess, Mastermind, Clue, Monopoly, Risk, Trivial Pursuit and when I was a little older: Axis & Allies, HeroQuest, Magic and Dungeons & Dragons. Then I discovered German games: Settlers, Carcassonne, Ra, Puerto Rico, Ticket To Ride. All those games (and many more) taught me something about game design.

If I had to pick just three I would say:
1) Chess - as a pure abstract game, simple rules, deep strategy
2) Magic the Gathering - the polar opposite of Chess, a fiddly, rules wise complex, multi-layered game with ever-changing rules
3) Ra - the penultimate Knizia game, a simple mechanic with complex scoring

At the beginning, I did not know much about board game. Most of my gaming experience came from role playing games. So At that time, I were developping more RPG than board games. Then I joined BGDF in 2005 and I did not even played settlers of catan yet.

1 yeat later, I met what I call the european trinity: Settlers of catan, Carcassone, and Puerto rico. 3 euro games which are totally different and that shows a different aspect of euro board games.

It changed completely they way I saw game and now I understood a bit better, by playing more and more games, how they were working behind.

But the problem is that I drifted too much. Pure euro game is not the kind of game I would have normally designed. I was starting to imitate too much euro games. I kind of stand in between ameritrash and euro design. With time I took back my place in between both styles in my design philosophy.

So if I could name 3 games, it would be the european trinity. It's also the first 3 games I recommend to non-gamers who wants to get in the world of board games.

I think this is different for each new game project. For my only completed/published game I didn't have any specific inspiration in mind, but after completing it I realized that there were some definite traces of Memoir44 and/or Starship Troopers Prepare for Battle in there. I think it ended up a bit more ameritrash than I would have guessed before I started working on it.

All sorts of games are interesting to play to learn about games anyway. In fact I rarely bother to play the same game more than once or twice, since the joy of trying something new is a big motivation. Besides, as a player, I could never be bothered to actually study a game to master it. The theme/simulation/rpg aspect of boardgames are important to me and if I look at the game as just a problem to master and play it over and over again to figure out all the details that will ruin it. It is also much more fun to see a completely new problem and improvise, compared to applying known-in-advanced best-practices. But that's a bit off-topic here, more related to how I like to play games than design them. If the game has different scenarios that are very different, or a variable setup that actually matters, then I might play the game many more times though. (Designing a game is a different kind of problem and obviously can't be done without replaying that game over and over and over...)