Basic game design principles apply to both video games and tabletop games. This article will discuss a range of things that are essential to successful game design. We will look at the most important person, core mechanic, game state and visibility, scoring and victory conditions, complexity, play time vs rules time, randomization, and the balance between chance and skill. We will also briefly discuss the value of narrative and iterative design. Once you have finished this article, you should have a basic understanding of what makes a game well designed or poorly designed.
Most Important Person
It is easy for the novice game designer to get so focused on himself or herself, and his or her personal enjoyment of the game or the game design process that the player of the game is forgotten. This generally results in a poorly designed game that is not very fun.
The most important person in game design is
the player. It is generally a good idea to identify the target audience of the game early in design, so you know who you are designing for. Often, the game designer is a member of the target audience, but that does not excuse neglecting to consider the player. The game designer is always biased, so it is essential to consider the target audience whether you are a member of it or not.
Core Mechanic
Choosing the Core Mechanic of a game should be the first step of the design process. The Core Mechanic is what the game is about. Some examples of Core Mechanics in popular games include world domination for Risk, colonization for Settlers of Catan, and bluffing in Poker. Tabletop games should generally only have a single Core Mechanic. Larger video games are often successful with several Core Mechanics, and done well, multiple Core Mechanics in a multi-player video game can result in a game that appeals to a broader range of players.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the Core Mechanic of a game and an implementation detail. For example, sneaking might be an implementation detail of a game that has stealth as it core mechanic. Another implementation of stealth could be hiding information. If you had not read the previous paragraph, you might have thought the Core Mechanic of Poker was gambling, but the gambling is just an implementation detail. The
real Core Mechanic of Poker is bluffing. The gambling element just adds motivation and reward to the game. Sometimes, the line between what is a Core Mechanic and what is implementation is very fuzzy. The thing to keep in mind is that the Core Mechanic is more general and does not limit or define how it will be implemented in the game.
The last important thing to keep in mind about the Core Mechanic is that it should be something that the player can influence. Randomness or a random process is a poor Core Mechanic, because the player cannot make meaningful choices that affect it. The Core Mechanic should be something that gives the player choices.
Game State
Any game needs to keep track of some kind of state. In Risk, game state is defined by the number and position of armies on the board, the cards each player holds, the number and order of cards in the deck, and which player's turn it is. In TicTacToe, the game state is defined by the position and number of Xs and Os on the board, and who's turn it currently is. In Poker, game state is defined by the cards in each player's hand, the order of cards in the deck, what cards may have been discarded, the amount currently in the pot, the current bet, how much each player has left, and who's turn it is. In video games, tracking game state can require storing a lot of data.
Players should be able to change game state in meaningful ways. Making choices is an essential part of a well designed game, and those choices should influence the outcome of the game. This adds an element of skill to the game. There are some successful games where players cannot make any meaningful choices at all, however, they are really only enjoyed by children, who don't know any better.
Candyland and Chutes and Ladders are the perfect example of games where players don't make meaningful choices. Candyland uses cards to randomize the outcome of the game, and once the deck is shuffled, the outcome of the game is already decided. Chutes and Ladders uses a spinner, but there are no meaningful choices associated with a spinner. The outcome of the game is still random.
Aside from young children, most people expect their games to require some element of skill. For a game to require skill, the players must be able to make choices that affect the outcome of the game in a reasonably predictable way.
Visibility of the System
Visibility is about game state. If the players cannot see at least some part of the game state, the players cannot make meaningful decisions. The amount of visibility necessary depends on the game though. A good rule of thumb is to make as much of the game state visible as possible without giving anyone an unfair advantage or otherwise interfering with the fun and fairness of the game.
There are three visibility levels of game state. The first is public information. Public information is visible to everyone. In Risk, who controls what territories is public information, and how many armies each player has on each territory is public information. In Poker, the only public information is how many cards each player has traded in and how much money each player has left, and in Texas Holdem, there is also one card that is visible to everyone. (One might argue that tells are also public information, but tells are not part of the game itself.)
The second level of visibility is private information. Private information is information that some players know but others do not. In Risk, the cards you have in your hand is private information (the number of cards you are holding is public though). In Poker, the cards you have in your hand is private information, and the cards you have traded in is private information. Private information has value in many games, where knowing what everyone has would ruin the strategy of the game.
The third level of visibility is hidden information. Hidden information is information that no one knows. In both Risk and Poker, the order of cards in the deck is hidden information. As a rule of thumb, hidden information in a game should be minimized, but there are some places where it is essential.
When deciding how visible information should be in your games, consider how making the information more or less visible will impact the game play and the strategy. If it does not make a lot of difference, make the information public. If it does make a lot of difference, choose based on what works best for you and for the player. Often the best choice is the one that keeps the game the most simple, but sometimes complexity is necessary or even good.
Scoring and Victory Conditions
This is, perhaps, the most important part of a game. Fairly early in the design of a game, you should be thinking about how scoring will work. What metric can players use to tell who is winning? In most games, players should at least be able to roughly estimate who is ahead, so they can focus on stopping or slowing down the leader. If nothing else, they should know who they need to keep up with. Scoring should usually be some kind of game state that is public information. Common scoring metrics are points, position on a game board, or lives. In Risk, the scoring metric is a combination of territories controlled, armies on the board, and some specific details on which territories are controlled (complete continents are more valuable than scattered territories, and some continents are more valuable than others). In Poker, the scoring metric is money or chips.
It is not always bad to have private scoring metrics, but they should be used sparingly. Settlers of Catan has some special cards that give victory points that are not visible to opponents. In most cases though, they will only make a significant difference if the game is close. This is a successful use of a private scoring metric that is used sparingly. There may be exceptions to this for certain Core Mechanics. For example, in Clue part of the strategy is to avoid letting your opponents know how close to winning you are.
Victory Conditions define what ends the game. Whoever satisfies the victory conditions first wins. The most important thing about victory conditions is that the game has them. Victory conditions should be fairly simple. It should be obvious when someone has won. In most games, the victory conditions are the same for all players, however there are some exceptions. Castle Risk is a variation of Risk where each player draws a card with victory conditions for that player, and each player's victory conditions are private information. Ankhmorpork, a game based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, has each player draw a "personality" card with a fairly unique victory condition (three personalities have the same victory conditions, the rest are unique). In Ankhmorpork, the victory conditions vary wildly. Part of the game strategy is to guess your opponents' victory conditions based on their behavior, and prevent them from winning before you. The cost of having different victory conditions for different players is that it is more difficult to balance the game.
Complexity
Complexity is a two edged sword. Too little complexity in a game minimizes the number of viable strategies. To much complexity limits your market. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, Cribbage, and even Chess are so complex that they only appeal to a limited market. Casual gamers tend to prefer games like Checkers and TicTacToe, because the rules are simple and the strategy is simple. Casual game players don't want to spend a lot of time learning rules. A very complex game will only appeal to a small market of gamers, however if your goal is to get into a niche market of gamers that like a particular kind of complexity, then complexity is necessary and valuable.
There are different facets to complexity that may affect the market for a complex game. Some games, like Cribbage and Dungeons and Dragons, have complex rules. Most people don't want to spend a lot of time memorizing complex rules. There are exceptions though. Some people prefer a high level of realism in their games, and high realism requires complex rules.
Games like Chess have very simple rules, but the
strategy of the game is complex. Many people don't want to work that hard when playing a game, but some people love complex strategy. One advantage of strategic complexity in a game is that it opens up more options. Strategically simple games tend to have only one effective strategy. Games like Chess have many strategies, and the player often has to adjust strategy dynamically to keep up with a skilled opponent. This can result in a more interesting game that constantly presents new surprises and challenges even after playing hundreds of games.
Complexity in a game should be tailored to the target audience. If you design a game for one audience but give it a complexity that appeals to a different audience, you may find that there is no market for your game. This is one place where the player is definitely the most important person.
Play Time versus Rules Time
To much complexity in rules can lead to another problem. One of the biggest offenders here is Dungeons and Dragons. One fight in this game can take 30 minutes to an hour, and most of that time is spent doing math and looking up rules. Each time a player moves, the distance has to be compared to the character speed. Each attack requires the roll of a die, adding some modifiers, then adding modifiers to the opponent's armor class, and then comparing the two results. Certain combat actions require both sides to roll, with additional math. In a combat scene that is supposed to be an action scene, most of the actions are interrupted with long breaks to do some math to figure out what happened. It can get pretty boring waiting for other players and the DM to do all of the math, and then you get your turn which consists of 2 seconds of action and 30 seconds or more of math, and this does not even count things like casting spells that require looking up a bunch of rules in a thick rule book. If the rules of a game are too complex, you can end up spending more time with the rules than playing the game.
To be clear, this is not about
learning the rules, and it is less about looking up rules than applying them. Games can reasonably take many hours to learn the rules and still be designed well enough to attract a lot of players. Games like Chess and Settlers of Katan take most players several games to learn all of the rules, but once a player knows the rules, very little time has to be spent on then afterwards, and they are simple enough to recall that those with experience never have to look anything up. Magic: The Gathering has a whole rules pamphlet, and new players can take years of playing the game before they fully understand the intricacies of the rules, but the rules time in the game is mostly spent on quick numerical comparisons during combat and tracking the order in which spells were played. The complex rules that take a long time to learn do not really interfere with the playability of the game, and the time spent during game play on applying rules is very low. A game can have rules that take significant time to learn without having much rules time during play.
Two metrics can be used to measure rules time in a game. The most important is how much time an expert, who has all of the rules memorized, spends applying rules. In Chess, Settlers of Katan, or Magic: The Gathering, a person who knows all the rules perfectly does not need to spend more than a small percentage of the game time applying rules. In D&D, even an expert who never has to look up a rule will spend 20 to 30 seconds per combat action taking measurements, rolling dice, and doing math, compared to only a few seconds to describe what the character is trying to do. The less important (but still important) metric is how much time is taken looking up rules. This is less important, because players can memorize rules, and rules that are looked up frequently will eventually be memorized, due to frequent use. In addition, in games like D&D, rules can be looked up before they are needed, eliminating most of the interruption. On the other hand, if even veterans frequently have to look up rules, this might be an indication that you have too many or too complex rules for your players to be expected to remember. This is not so much an issue of rules time, however, as just excessive complexity.
It can become a problem when players end up spending more time looking up rules and doing math than they do playing the game. Some games are designed like this on purpose, because the rules and math
are the game. Cribbage is great example of this. The Core Mechanic of Cribbage is pattern recognition, and most of the game is spent looking for patterns and counting up points for the patterns you find. Cribbage is not exactly a wildly popular game, because most people don't enjoy this. Like complexity, this can be valuable when targeting a niche market that enjoys this, but most people prefer games where most of the time is spent in the action instead of the rules.
Randomization
Randomization is a valuable tool in many games. Games that are purely skill based can be frustrating to get into, because initially everyone is better than you and consequently you always lose. This is actually fairly common with Chess. Many people give up when they realize that everyone else is better than them. Constantly losing does not motivate anyone to keep playing.
Randomization gives the less skilled player an advantage. Well designed randomization will still allow the more skilled player to win most of the time, but it will give the less skilled player a chance. Too little randomization will not allow newer players to win enough to keep them motivated. Too much randomization will eliminate the need for skill, which will reduce the motivation for people to continue playing the game. The ideal balance will depend on your audience though.
Tools commonly used for randomization in tabletop games include coins, dice, spinners, and shuffled decks of cards. The choice of which to use depends on many factors. Some are more readily available, others are easier to use, and some are cheaper than others. If you need a lot of options with a flat distribution, cards work well (though, distribution can be tailored by including multiple copies of some cards). Spinners work well when you need something other than numbers, but not so many options that you need cards. Dice and coins are easy to use, and using multiple dice or coins changes the probability of the results. A single die has a flat probability distribution, but multiple dice favor the average result. The more dice, the more the average result is favored and the less likely extreme results are. In video games, pseudorandom number generators are used, and they can be tailored to almost any distribution fairly easily.
Randomization can lead to complications. With cards, probabilities change dynamically as cards are removed from the deck. In games like Poker, where the specific cards removed from the deck is private knowledge, this can make strategy more complex. The problem is that this is not obvious to most people. Also, when doing things like rolling multiple dice or having players roll against each other, unexpected trends can result. For example, in Risk, in battles with small numbers of armies, the defender has a significant advantage. The attacker needs around twice the number of armies for good odds of success. In battles with large numbers of armies (more than 20 or 30), the attacker has enough of an advantage to have good odds of success with merely equal numbers of armies.
It is generally a good idea to play test and experiment a lot when working with non-trivial probability, because it is easy to end up with unexpected results.
Chance vs Skill
Balancing chance and skill in a game is complicated, but it is an important factor in making a good game. The reason it is difficult is that it depends on your target audience. Children tend to prefer more chance and less skill. Teens and adults are more likely to want a balance that favors skill more. It also turns out that culture has an impact.
Europeans seem to prefer more skill based games. They prefer not to rely as much on chance. Americans tend to prefer more chance. They seem care less about skill in games. It is important to know your target audience, because there are too many factors to easily guess.
The most important value of chance is as an equalizer. Chance gives players with low skills the chance to occasionally win against more skilled players. It also allows for variation in games between players with skills that are close to the same but not quite identical. Chance keeps the game challenging, even for skilled players, while keeping the game motivating for less skilled players.
Meaningful Decisions
Skill in a game requires the players to be able to make meaningful decisions. This encompasses many of the previous topics. There are several requirements for the player to make meaningful decisions. A meaningful decision must be able to influence the outcome of the game. For a player to make a meaningful decision, the changes caused by the decision must be visible. If the changes are not visible, then the decision cannot be meaningful, because the player cannot learn how the decision affected the outcome of the game. Skill in a game is gained by making decisions and seeing how they affect the game state and the outcome of the game.
Meaningful decisions add realism to the game. Just like a party photo on Facebook can ruin a job opportunity many years down the road, meaningful decisions in games can influence the state of the game many turns after they are made. Even when parts of the game state are not visible, the game can offer things like hints, foreshadowing, or warnings to help players see how their choices are affecting the game.
Narrative
Narrative is not so much a game design principle as it is a marketing tool. A game with a story is almost always more interesting than one without. Some people like games specifically
for the story. A narrative for a game does not have to be something complex. In Risk the narrative is that each player is a military leader trying to take over the world. Without the narrative, Risk is just a game where the objective is to get at least one game pieces on each region of the board. With the narrative, Risk is an epic war with massive battles between armies. The narrative makes the game interesting. Most games can be reduced to actions the players take to get points, control spaces, or get something to some location faster than anyone else. The thing that makes games unique and interesting is the explanation of
why the player wants to take the actions that will win the game.
Narrative can make or break a game. A game that is just claiming spots on a board sounds much less fun than a game where players are trying to capture resources or land from other players to win a war, even if the game mechanics are identical. Even Chess has a narrative (each side is an army trying to protect its king and capture the enemy king). A strong and motivating narrative is an important factor in convincing people that a game is worth their money.
Iterative Design
Iterative design is a cycle of designing, analyzing the design, and then redesigning based on the analysis. The first design for a game is almost never the best design, and often, it is not even that good. Don't become attached to the original design for a game, or you will have a hard time spotting the flaws and a harder time redesigning to eliminate them.
For tabletop game design, the iterative design process starts with design. The design process should be very collaborative. Don't be afraid to ask for the opinions of people outside the group. In the video game industry, many of the most successful games came from groups that asked
everyone for their opinions, from the janitor all the way to the CEO. This applies equally for tabletop games though. Just keep in mind that you do not have to implement every suggestion, but at least consider the value of each one. You might find that some minor suggestion from someone on the outside avoids or fixes a major flaw in your game.
Once a playable set of rules has been established, the next step is play testing. Play testing with other members of the group creating the game is good, but it will only uncover the most obvious flaws. Many game breaking problems are easy to miss when everyone playing is very familiar with the rules and the concept of the game. The ideal play testing session includes people who are not familiar with the game. The game creator or creators present should not be players. Instead, they should observe and take notes. They should not explain the rules unless asked (if the players are clearly struggling or if they start arguing, make an exception). As the play testers play the game, take notes. If the players have to ask for clarifications on the rules, or if you have to step in and explain, note that. If the players appear confused about something or even entirely misinterpret the rules, note that. You will almost certainly notice things that just don't work like you thought they would. Note those as well. Also, watch how the players respond to things. If something seems to bother or annoy them, or if they just don't seem to be having much fun, write a note.
After play testing, it is redesign time. If the game is irreparably flawed, it may be time to start over entirely. More often though, the flaws identified by play testing just need a little bit of tweaking and fixing. Be prepared to eliminate or significantly change things you thought were really good ideas. Remember, the player is the most important person. Your personal pride for your ideas won't fix a bad one, and it certainly won't make the game popular. Sometimes you just have to cut ideas that looked really good on paper. Also make sure to clarify the rules where necessary. Many times, apparent flaws are the result of ambiguous or unclear rules.
Once the redesign is done, it is time to play test again, with new play testers. It is important to go through this process as many times as it takes for the game to run smoothly and be enjoyable for the players. Each iteration will refine and hone the game.
This process can change your game significantly. It is not uncommon for the final product to be very different from the original idea. You may even find that the result of this process is nothing like what you originally imagined. If you followed the process correctly though, it will be much better than what you imagined. If you find yourself disappointed by this, remember that the game is designed for the players, not for you.
