Here are a couple sites that provide a compendium of traditional games with directions on how to put together what you need to play:
A Treasure Trove of Traditional Games
Button Men
Sanctum Button Men, artwork by Lee Moyer
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a set of Cheapass Game‘s Button Men, courtesy of James Ernest. The book’s Button Men fighters were inspired by Sanctum, an online game I helped create back in the late 1990s.
Button Men is a clever little game and definitely worth trying out. You can find information (rules, game materials, etc.) here… and as a bonus, here are two legacy Cheapass webpages about Buttonmen (here and here).
Zombie in my Pocket
ZimP artwork by Kwanchai Moriya
Zombie in my Pocket (2007), is a print-and-play solo game designed by Jeremiah Lee and winner of a 2010 BoardGameGeek “Golden Geek Award.” Zombie in my Pocket (or ZimP) has inspired dozens of “… in my Pocket” games by other designers who take ZimP‘s mechanics and re-skin them with a new theme.
You can download the original game here. ZimP and its variations can be found on BoardGameGeek in the “files” section of Zombie in my Pocket‘s entry. Among the variants is the well-received print-and-play Airborne in Your Pocket (though a retail version of the game that was sold on Kickstarter ran into some problems).
Hive
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a copy of Hive that readers can cut out (or photocopy) and play. As Hive‘s designer, John Yianni, explains in the book, the game grew out of a desire to create a Chess-like game that is played using only pieces and no game board.
Hive‘s design lends itself to expansion by way of adding new insect types to the game. In fact, the John Yianni has created Mosquito, Ladybug, and Pillbug expansion pieces that can be added to the core set of Beetles, Grasshoppers, Soldier Ants, Spiders, and Queen Bees. In addition to these official add-ons, the BoardGameGeek community have come up with several unofficial add-on insects, as well as rule variations.
If you want to take a gentle step into tabletop game design, a good way to do it is to experiment with creating an expansion to an existing game, such as a new insect type for Hive.
The World’s Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet
macro language can be used in digital prototyping. By way of example, here’s an Excel file that recreates the action of The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game. This means it can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game is a web-based “game” that I use to demonstrate to my students how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail.
You will need to enable macros in order to play the game (this mean it is unplayable in the Excel 2008 for Macs—that version of Excel does not allow Macros). If you run into trouble getting it to work, let me know—the code is a bit of a hack and I wouldn’t be surprised if it runs into problems in various versions of Excel.
In particular, the timer events that drive the sprite animation required jumping through some coding hoops. I wanted to use Excel’s VBA macro language’s “OnTime” event to cause the game sprite (the animated character) to move multiple times a second. Unfortunately, OnTime cannot respond faster than once per second in the Mac version of Excel. I got around this by using the Timer function, which returns the number of seconds since midnight. I use this to have the animation occur within a while-loop that pauses a specified number of milliseconds (more-or-less) as measured using Timer during each loop. Oddly, Microsoft’s documentation for Timer states that it will not return fractions of second on a Mac. But on my Mac it does, so I was able to get the animation to work. I’m not sure if the undocumented ability is due to a change in the Mac OS or in Excel itself, but it does work (at least, it does for me).
All that is to say, this Excel spreadsheet is a bit fragile and may not work for you. Caveat emptor!
Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game online
Download the Excel version of Boring TD
Sprouts (pencil & paper)
Sprouts is a nodal game invented by the mathematicians John Horton Conway and Michael S. Paterson that is referenced in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. What makes the game unusual is that instead of playing within an existing set of nodes and paths, the players create their own.
Hut (DIY)
Reiner Knizia describes this game in his classic book, Dice Games Properly Explained. The game’s core mechanic is used in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop as an example of a “negative feedback loop.” [Read more…]
Yut Nori (print & play)
Download a print & play version of Yut Nori.
Yut Nori is a Korean game that comes with Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. It is an elegant circle & cross game (a class of racing games that take place on circular or cruciform-shaped tracks). The best known cross & circle is the traditional Indian game Pachisi and its modern derivatives (Ludo, Parcheesi, Trouble, Sorry!).
Yut traditionally uses tossed sticks to determine the number of spaces the pieces can move, but this version of the game substitutes coins for the sticks. This does change the game’s dynamics a bit. The outcomes of a fair coin flip are identical in likelihood, whereas tossing a Yut stick results in flat side up approximately 60% of the time.
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game
For many years I struggled to teach my students how to make the leap from designing tabletop games to designing video games. In particular, students without a programming background would consistently have problems defining a video game design as a series of concrete steps that do not leave gaping holes in the game algorithms.
Then one semester I taught my students flowcharting and had them create a flowchart that could play a simple game theory style game that I had designed. As if by magic, these students had no problem creating video game designs. Ever since that semester, I have always introduced students to video game design by starting with flowcharting. It has become my magical “turn you into a game designer” wand.
All this is covered in detail in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop , but I wanted to share The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, which is one of the tools I use to demonstrate how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail (see The World Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet for a version of the game that runs inside of Excel).
The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).
Conway’s Game of Life provides another example of how “real time” is in actuality very a series of very rapidly occurring turns. As with The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, Conway’s Game of Life can have its “generations” (aka turns) advance either manually or automatically (using the “step” and “run” buttons, respectively).
ZZT, Town, & Twine
Sweeney’s ZZT
These days, Tim Sweeney and his company Epic Games are best known their Unreal and Gears of War franchises. But in the early 1990s Epic’s flagship game was a quirky ASCII adventure game called ZZT. [Read more…]