Monday 21 January 2013

New and old

For the board game I'm creating for class I had designed a board yesterday night however after play-testing other people's games and taking a second look at mine I decided I really needed to go over and simplify what I had. So after some sketches I came up with something that's much simpler and what I hope turns out to be better. Something that I've found out after making several games over the past year is that when you're first designing a game it's easy to add a lot of rules that you think are fun. The board then tends to evolve in order to accommodate all those rules, however when other people play the game the rules are difficult to pick up and the board can sometimes be confusing since they other have the rules to explain everything. I find if you then pick out all the key concepts that you really want, and try make the board and rules as simple as you can while still keeping those key concepts, people can have fun playing the game without being bogged down by unneeded things.

One thing that I've found helps when you're making a game is to have every rule explained in detail with an example, all labeled with a title that allows players to find the rule they're looking for clarification on easily. You should also have a quick-start set of instructions that allows players to get right into playing without having to know all the rules. Then when the players have a question about the rules they can read the ones they need to in detail.



This is the older board


This is the newer board

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