My Ideas on Successful Euro Game Design. Let me know what you think. Expand if you like.
The BIG 3 elements in game design
1) Clear Objective: Each player must have a good understanding of what they are trying to accomplish. Winning, or even “Points” are much too broad of terms to be useful. The task that the player wants to engage in to get the points and win must be clear. Also avoid real-world thinking that can’t be directly translated into an action. For example, instead of thinking of your objective as building a city (Real world term) as in the game “Advanced Civilization”, your actual game-term goal is moving enough settlers into one region to replace them with a city token.
2) Simple Game Core: This core is a simple activity that could almost work as a stand-alone game, and involves making choices. Bidding, trading, managing resources are a few simple game cores that appear in many Eurogames. There are many more cores and many subtypes of each that can be explored.
3) The Means: This is how the players may use the simple game core to reach the objective. This is usually where the real work is in designing, and where the individuality of your game will be created. For example, in “Medici”, your objective is to fill your boat with the best numbers and combination of goods that you can. The simple core “Game” aspect of this is bidding on lots of items. The means of doing this are the rules involved in how the bid items are selected, how many times players can bid, method of payment on the bids, etc.
Hints:
Avoid exceptions in the rules: Games start to lose their Euro dynamic once rules are added to avoid abuse or deal with unusual situations. This is what’s called a “fiddly” game. A good Eurogame should be fairly naturally balanced, welcoming creative use of the rules, while making the game very hard to “Break”.
I stuck with Eurogames, because that is what I like, and they tend to be the least simulation-like amongst boardgames.
1) Real-world thinking can really get in MY way of creating mechanics that are good for the game (see last sentence in this paragraph) rather than good for the theme. Practicing mental fluidity (which is very challenging) rather than using fixed ideas about something help me immensely, and I practice on letting certain "Self-evident" assumptions go. The theme can usually adjust, or the assumption may be less important that you imagined. For me player interaction is the first thing I strive for, the rest is icing on the cake.
2) Which is why I named my principles "Eurogame Principals".
Clearly, for some games theme IS the object of the game and everything else is secondary. I generally find these low on replayability, perhaps partly because I sadly have never found myself a "Fan" or "Into" something.