New Here, New to Game Design

Hello conan,

thank for your first post, I like it a lot. Despite being a BGDF rookie greenhorn, I believe, that it basically represents everything most of us feel when they commence the creative process of game design. We struggle with the ideas in our head and try to form them into something material that makes sense.

For your questions, all I can offer are some basic notions and the (presumably obsolete) reminder, that in most cases, you shall have to find it out the hard way by play-testing it until you get satisfied with the result.

Player Choices:

Just avoid the idea that the game plays you by giving you a single obvious (even worse : random) choice, as Avianfoo said. I believe that 2-3 choices are fine, anything from 5-7 can cripple a game completely, because most people cannot come to terms with that many possibilities.

Randomness:

for me, a board / card game has to offer some chance of randomness. If it is too computable, like chess or go (which I do not play, because I horribly suck at them) then, a person who will do the math better than its opponent always will prevail. Like Mr.Spock mentions it in "The Corbomite Maneuver": "If in a game of chess, one person is superior, the result can only be a checkmate in his favor" (or sth like that :-) ). I like to believe that a game offers me a tiny chance even when I play against a much stronger opponent. Like Jesse Shell wrote it : "I would always lose against a world-class chess champion, but chances are, that I can win a single round of Texas Hold'Em poker against ANYBODY".

On the other hand, rolling a single die gives you extreme randomness. I do not like to see my Fellowship of the Ring being crippled by the first Moria orc just because the orc had some good rolls and the company failed all of theirs.
That said, in my game, I would not roll a single die, but rather several dice, so they at least give me some kind of predictability for the outcome. An extreme failure or success is still possible, but less probable.

Simplification:

I admire games which go the classic way of "easy to learn, difficult to master". This, for example, is my major problem with most FFG games, because they offer to little for the huge amount of rules one has to learn before actually playing the game (Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror, etc.). My problem is, that these games are still based on somewhat simple mechanics of bluffing or rock-paper-scissors - then why is there that huge amount of tokens, figures, special 13-sided dice, card decks, thick rulebooks, giant boards, etc. ? At the end, the game essence of space combat or pulp adventures is simulated, but at a price of time which I do not want to spend.

Avianfoo is so right - you must get more and more into gaming by actually playing other games, the more, the better.
This gives inspiration, and keeps you juggling with ideas and seeing things from new points of view. And yes, it is an extremely hard job to do. I started tinkering with some ideas half a year ago and I still could not manage even a short write-up of my games' Alpha rules :-( ...but playing more games and trying out new stuff keeps you in a kind of mood that definitely helps you on your long journey.

Welcome aboard !

Matthew is dead on about randomness. In the games I prefer, randomness never dictates the events of the game, players do. Randomness provides the framework in which players must execute their strategies. Examples of this are the random setup of Catan, random card sets in Dominion, the random Occupations and Minor Events of Agricola, and the random cube distribution in (Age of) Steam. I'd even argue that Steam is a more elegant design to AoS because the distribution is fixed at setup, and thereafter driven by player choices. YMMV.

Choices are the game, and it's the designer's job to shepherd those choices. This is a round table with Luke Crane (Burning Wheel) entitled "Game Design is Mind Control" (which includes lots of silliness and a bit of language, but a good analysis of Candyland, FYI), where he defines a game as a ruleset that influences a player to do something they otherwise wouldn't do. His first example is a race. Why would two people run in the same direction at the same time from a defined start to a defined finish unless there's food or money or something else they're willing to fight for at the end? Because it's a race, duh. But without the start and the finish and "Go!" and whatever, there is no race. Nobody runs. So game design is giving players choices that they have no real life motivation to make, in order to work towards a goal (winning) that is meaningless in the absence of those choices. Elegant game design gives a minimum number of exactly the right choices to force the player to have the desired experience.

How does a designer achieve that goal? First thing to do is carefully define the experience. My current design is a fast-playing, low downtime, highly interactive civilization builder. I want players to feel like they're building something they care about, under constant pressure from other players, but without feeling like failures will back them into a deadend. Those considerations underlie all my design decisions for the game. When in doubt I always ask myself, Will this design decision drive players towards my experience goal? Without a careful definition of the desired experience, elegant design will not happen.

What if I'm faced with multiple decisions that all would support my experience goal? Personally, I always err on the side of thematic gameplay. And thus we segue into simplicity. A simple game design is elegant, and vice versa. However, themes are not simple. Civilizations are not simple, neither is railroad engineering or farming. As a game designer, you should always pursue simplicity. Maybe "look for" is a better term. Simplicity is always present, but it hides under theme and must be sought. Occasionally it's worth digging for simplicity, but this means destroying the landscape, destroying theme. Personally, I have found it advantageous to build games entirely on theme -- make the biggest, most elaborate landscape possible -- then pare down for simplicity. To belabor the metaphor a bit, if you chisel a mountain, you'll still have a mountain left when you're done. If you chisel a boulder, there's a chance you'll have nothing but a few smooth stones. Mountains are cool. Smooth stones are dull.

If faced with a decision between experience and theme, go experience. If two decisions both support experience, choose the most thematic. If faced with a choice between theme and simplicity, look for the maximal choice, the one that gives you most simplicity for least compromise of theme, and vice versa.

So, the homework portion. If you haven't done so already, study the game designs of:

Martin Wallace
Vlaada Chvátil
Reiner Knizia
Uwe Rosenberg
Bruno Faidutti
Lewis Pulsipher

There are plenty of others I have studied and could mention, but the top four are, IMO, the most prolific, understandable, consistent, and successful designers active today. Faidutti is not as successful, but excels in the other categories. Pulsipher is a leading brain in our field, and I love his philosophy of likes and dislikes in gaming, even when I don't agree. Go learn to spot their rules without knowing the name of the game or anything outside of setup and victory conditions.