"The mechanism doesn't make sense."
"This description is poorly written."
"It would be more fun if it was set up that way."
"This expansion pack is also too weak."
"I designed the cards to be much stronger than the original cards."
-- Every board game player will have the idea to lift the table.
The urge to design your own board game naturally arises when you want to lift the table more often. But most players stay on impulse, and few of them can turn their ideas into board games. To help you turn your ideas into board games and create works that you are satisfied with. I have summarized some ideas for tabletop game design.
Step 1: Ideas, impulses jump off the page
The idea of optimizing a certain board game or creating an interesting board game is a flash of inspiration in your mind. Your brain can easily forget the inspiration if you don't record it in time or keep working on it. So when you have such an idea, you should record it first, so that you can process and advance it later.
But an interesting board game is difficult to support with just one inspiration. So after recording this inspiration, you must keep thinking about and processing this inspiration in your mind. At the same time, these processed thoughts will be recorded. When the designer has processed the inspiration to enough progress, it is easy to continue to harvest inspiration for this inspiration in life or the game. Yes, keep recording. After the designer has enough inspiration and ideas for a board game, he or she can systematically design this board game.
Step 2: Systematic design
In systematic design, the first thing to consider is the game flow: how many phases will the game have? How many things can each player do in each turn, what can be done and what cannot be done? If it is the first time to design a board game, then only the game flow must be considered, anything else is not recommended to be considered. Such as the type of game, the positioning of the game, and the audience of the game. This will greatly reduce the fun of designing your game.
If you have already designed tabletop games several times, then you must consider these factors. By including the board games you design in a genre, the design perspective will be clearer. Drawing on board games in the same genre can go a long way towards making fewer mistakes. After all, complex board game rules can "trigger the whole body".
Step 3: Production to hand
After the game flow is designed smoothly, you can start making cards. Although the board game is not fully formed, the feeling of holding the cards in your hands, but more "texture" than repeatedly rehearsed in the brain. As this is only a test deck, it does not need to be much refined, just cut to the right size, and with the necessary text can be. Of course, if you have strong art skills, draw some pictures better.
Step 4: Testing and optimization
The designed board game is already in your hands - all that's left is to keep optimizing it to make it more perfect, more fun, more playable.
All this is based on testing, because most of the problems can only be found in the game, such as "the designer is not sure if the cost of a card is too high", or "not sure if a certain part of the game will be too long and make players lose interest". During the testing process, we constantly collect players' opinions and misunderstandings and then record them.
In the game testing, the work to be done can be divided into.
1. Completing the missing game links.
2. Modifying unreasonable game mechanics.
3. Adding more interesting elements.
4. Adjusting the balance.
In terms of adjusting the balance: balance is different in different types of games, and the requirements are different.
In terms of adjusting the balance: different types of games have different balance and different requirements. In the abstract game, in addition to the successive hands, the advantages of different players must be equal, and there should be no remaining factors to affect the winning rate. In American games, which focus on background and sense of immersion, sometimes it is impossible to take into account the balance most of the time to highlight the characteristics of a certain faction's supernatural power. While the focus of American games should be on the sense of immersion and pleasure, as long as it does not affect the player's experience (for example, a certain supernatural power can cause a player's direct victory or defeat, or a player's hard-earned advantage collapses because of supernatural power), the balance should be behind the sense of immersion and pleasure.
Only in German games do you need to properly measure balance, for example, the addition of the "lag protection" mechanism can greatly affect the experience of such games. However, if there is no randomness in the German game, it is easy to generate the optimal solution of the game route, the player will not have the desire to repeat the game. It is recommended to add randomness appropriately to increase the playability of the game without affecting the balance of the game.
In addition to improving the details of the game, each test should also constantly improve the game manual. Because in the process of writing and modifying the manual, it is also equivalent to organizing the game system in your mind.
After numerous tests, you will tell everyone with confidence that "The board game I designed is good! It has been approved by many people! You deserve to try it!" If the test results show that the game still has some shortcomings, you need to think about how to solve these issues. There may be two ways to do so:
1) Adding new features to enhance its competitiveness;
2) Improving the rules of the existing game mechanisms.
Add new features to enhance its competitiveness in general, adding new features increases the complexity of the game. If the complex game becomes too complicated, the user may feel confused and bored. Therefore, before thinking about what kind of feature you want to add, firstly consider whether the added feature makes the game more difficult to understand, easier to master, or both. Then choose according to the purpose. For example, when designing a strategy game, you can use the rule of probability to introduce uncertainty into the gameplay. This way, players will know exactly what they expect from their opponent. The same thing applies to introducing nonlinearity into the game. Nonlinearity refers to the fact that the effect produced by one event depends on another event. Examples include dice rolls, where each number represents a specific outcome. Another type of Nonlinearity involves events whose outcomes depend upon multiple conditions being met simultaneously. As an example, the probability of rolling a seven using 3 six-sided die might vary depending upon what other numbers were rolled previously. Improve existing game mechanics By studying the existing game mechanic and analyzing the core principle of the current game, you will find out the main factor causing the problem.
