So a while back I had a chat with Bez (who’s fantastic btw) and was asking how he’s done so well with In a Bind. Generally I was interested, but also I knew I was releasing Escape the Nightmare soon and wanted it to go well. There are some similarities between the games, they’re both party style games, they both try to do something interesting to break the mould, they’re both averaging a respectable 7.3 on BGG (and both having a lower ranking due to having few ratings). Among the things he mentioned that fell into the category of “Stuff Bez did that I did not do for my previous games” was that he’d personally called a lot of shops in the UK and asked them to stock the game. I figured I’d give that a go, so this post is about what went well and what went wrong.
Monthly Archives: August 2016
The Realism Excuse
Earlier I saw a question about whether a game should model gender dimorphism. The answer is “99.9% of the time it should not” but it got me thinking about different levels of simulationism and when a factor that exists in the real world is represented in a game.
Flexible Start and End Points
In most games the possibility space extends both before and after the actual start and end points of the game chosen by the designer. Take something like Settlers of Catan. You don’t have to stop at 10 victory points, you could ignore the rules and keep playing. You don’t have to start at the game start, with everyone having two villages and some resource cards, you could step backwards and start with just one and no resource cards.
Balancing Spending Options
A lot of games contain a resource that can be spent in multiple ways. For instance in Game of Thrones you might spend a power token to control an area after you leave it, to bid on an area of influence or to help defeat a Wildling invasion. Not being sure how best to spend a token is a source of tension and an opportunity to express skill – so from a game designer’s point of the view the question becomes: How can I make the player unsure of what manner in which to spend my multifaceted resource?