Is there a board game design practice exercise akin to playing scales on guitar or a doing a timed sketch to hone drawing skills? What short exercises can warm up those game design brain muscles? 🎲✂️
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What I always do in the 1st class of my elective course on boardgame design is the Pac-Man redesign exercise. We write down 5 rules of Pac-man, each duo gets a basic game (for example Ludo or Memory), and they get 30 minutes to make a boardgame version of Pac-Man incorporating that basic mechanic.
I challenged myself to design as many games as I could (just ideas, no prototypes) on the 12 hour flight to New Zealand a few years ago. I came up with 18 or so silly ideas.
Playing published games is like an author reading published books. Practicing your triangular numbers isn't right either. The closest thing I can come up with "board game design warm-ups" is freewriting with a focus on game ideas, which might be a lot of fun.
I did a bunch of activities! A few one-week challenges making a prototype every day. The list of alliterative game names (where Artichokes came from!) creative thinking challenges like sketching and mind mapping. It was tough to keep things very board game related, mostly just creativity practice.
The closest I can think of is how, slowly but surely I can more accurately sift through ideas & determine which ones have merit & which ones don't. Raw excitement on a project matters but also being able to visualize what a game will feel like to play without needing to go through all the next steps
Agreed—sometimes I can (kind of) "play" a game in my head because the core goals and tensions are obvious. Other times the idea is more abstract and requires a lot of tinkering during early design.
Yeah, it isn't exactly playing a game more like envisioning what the feelings & incentive structures I want along with what a turn should look like. I find practicing this helps me determine if my ideas are playtest table-ready or need more time to percolate/play with on my own.
For a while on the Button Shy discord server, we had a "Design Word of the Day" and we posted the Merriam Webster WOTD and people would take that word and riff off it to brainstorm game ideas, or even just pieces... sometimes just a mechanic, and it would spark some discussion. It was great!
It fizzled out due to low engagement, but anyone could take that word of the day and spend 10 minutes thinking about a design or mechanic. I have a folder full of game ideas due to this practice... and also a handful of finished games that came from it!
Make a just-for-yourself expansion for an existing game? Or try to make a roll-and-write or family version of an existing game? Capturing the essence of a game seems like an important skill.
Systems design madlibs? Like, pick materials (5 red cubes, 10 blue cubes, a d20) then pick a desired behavior (a player catches up from behind), and figure out a compact set of rules that produces the behavior
Deck of playing cards (or other generic component set like pile of dice, tiles, etc.), randomized list like Oscar-winning movies. Generate a mechanic for ten different themes with same components? I am spitballing.
I'd think design challenges. X minutes to design a game constrained by N of the following:
Must use [random theme]
Must use [random mechanic]
Must play at [random player count]
Must [not] include [random component type]
Must use X component types or less
Must use X components or less
Etc
I was thinking the same thing. Or trying to "redesign" a game you know well from scratch. Make a whole new base set for Dominion, maybe. Or just a single card.
I would say putting each of your designs through another lenses is a good warm up. Later tonight, I’m using @senfoonglim.bsky.social’s mablibs for pitching to assess some of my older games and see if that can spark some crunchy new ideas. There’s at least one game, I might revisiting cuz of this.
Design solo or duo modes for multiplayer games, mutiplayer modes for solo or duo games, cooperative for competitive, realtime for turn based, etc. Take a cool mechanism from a euro and make the smallest, simplest version of just that.
Lots of board game reviews have a formula: rules explanation --> reviewer thoughts. I'll watch such a review for a game I've not played. After the rules, I pause the video & try to imagine the emergent result of the rules I just heard. Then I unpause and see if the reviewer agrees with my prediction
The reason this feels like good practice is, other than just being persistent and iterating a lot, the only way I know of to get better/faster at designing games is refine your ability to project the impact of rulesets accurately based solely on description.
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https://www.routledge.com/The-Rapid-Prototyping-Game/Smith-Peterson/p/book/9780367639396
Placed my order on Amazon, it was sold out for my region at the moment so I'm hoping it'll be restocked soon. :)
https://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Prototyping-Game-Matthew-Smith/dp/0367639394
Must use [random theme]
Must use [random mechanic]
Must play at [random player count]
Must [not] include [random component type]
Must use X component types or less
Must use X components or less
Etc
Catan + Betrayal at House on the Hill - Victory Points = what do you get?
Or Yahtzee meets Boggle + Must Have Roll & Move = what do you get?
Etc.