What is the Tabletop Designers Association? Currently in the process of being established, the Tabletop Designers Association is a non-profit organisation found with the single purpose of bringing together and supporting designers of tabletop games*. This support, much like Chandler’s time in the box, is threefold: With the help of sponsors and donations, we will…
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Been a while, huh? Welcome to another Sidequest, the show where we do whatever the hell we want under the guise of research and documentation—essentially, Mythbusters. This is gonna be another ‘things that don’t really deserve their own article’ edition, which is always fun to write since it takes all pretenses of cohesion and thematic…
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Win-more also winmore/ ˈwɪn ˌmɔːr / adjective Win-more mechanics and/or effects are ones that provide bigger benefits the stronger you are, or the closer you are to winning. In a way, these mechanics create a positive feedback loop, simultaneously speeding up the player’s progress towards victory, and increasing their chances of winning. This is generally…
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Hi, and welcome to the beginning of a(nother) new series of articles. As the title suggests, this one’s going to focus on the absolute basics of game design, and is meant to be both a good starting point for beginners, as well as a generally useful review of some of the more key concepts in…
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It’s part 3 of 5 for the MOPED principles, and today we’ll be looking at that old crowd favorite: Parameterization. Just the word itself is a mouthful, and considering the amount of things that can go wrong (or right) when it comes to parameterization, we’d best start dismantling this mechanical monstrosity. Definition Parameterization – The…
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Time for some more MOPED. This time, however, we’re not doing a deep dive into a specific principle (the MOPED Lessons series handles that). Instead, we’ll talk about specific techniques and/or details related to Optimization. These are techniques learned from experience that help smooth the flow of gameplay and reduce overhead for the players. Local…
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In this article, I want to take a step back from the details of game design and instead look at the bigger picture of our games as projects. And where there are projects, there’s project management. This is an article that is very likely to be updated multiple times in the future, mostly because these…
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Swingy also swinginess/ ˈswɪŋi / adjective A swingy effect is any effect whose power varies wildly depending on some factors (e.g. current state of the game board or resources, number of players etc.) With swingy effects, the power levels for the best case and the worst case are too far apart, and because of that,…
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narrative mechanics[ˈnær ə tɪv məˈkæn ɪks], [nar-uh-tiv muh-kan-iks] noun A bridge between the events that characters within the game are experiencing and the narration of said events by the players. Narrative mechanics are definitions for triggers that get activated when something happens in the narrative being described, linking that event to concrete game mechanics that…
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design space\ dɪˈzʌɪn speɪs \ noun Design space is a measure of how many meaningful* variations of a mechanic or effect can exist within a game. When applied to a game, it also describes the amount of mechanics that the rules can support. Often, testing out the different variations of a mechanic/effect is referred to as…
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Welcome again to another Sidequest, which is consequently the first article of 2021 for me. And boy oh boy, after what an absolute shitshow of a year 2020 was, it’s only fair to start off with a Sidequest. I’ve touched upon a few different topics with the articles I’ve written so far, and as always,…
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