Monthly Archives: April 2015

Scaling Challenge

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I’ve been playing a lot of Legendary:Villains lately and have been having a good time with it. I really enjoy the feeling of progression in games, starting with something relatively weak that works poorly and building up towards having something epic. I definitely got a buzz out of dealing Graham’s number damage (though the legality of the move hinges on whether discarding a card, shuffling it back into your deck and reclaiming it and discarding it again counts as “discarding two cards” or “discarding the same card twice”) but that was met with a slight disappointment that there was no target that justified that quantity of firepower.

challenge

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My games are not for me

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In some of the discussions of the use of miniatures of Wizard’s Academy I mentioned that I don’t particularly value miniatures as part of a game, which seemed to cause a great deal of shock and alarm in some individuals. This is going to be a difficult article for such people to read because I’d like to talk about an aspect of game design that’s rarely discussed, but that I’m sure everyone does: I make decisions that mean that I find my games less enjoyable so often that I couldn’t begin to estimate the total number of such decisions.

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Room for Innovation

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So there’s this conversation I keep seeing on game design forums:
Enthusiastic_Newbie “I’ve come up with a great new mechanic for my game!”
Old_Hand “There are no such thing as new mechanics, what is it?”
EN “(Description)”
OH “That’s been done before in (Game) (Game) and (Game). Perhaps once in a generation someone comes up with a new mechanic, the odds that it’s you are millions to one.”
EN “Oh”
OH “Don’t try to invent new mechanics.”
Unenthusiastic_Newbie “Oh, okay. Thanks I guess.”

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Adaptation

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I was reading a thread on BGG the other week talking about designing a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) board game. It’s an interesting challenge for a number of reasons, the thread is interested in looking at one particular approach towards it so rather than derail there I thought that I’d tackle it here. I’ll try to stay away from genre specific terminology to keep the discussion open to everyone.

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