My Bradley University sophomore game design majors did an outstanding job in the BoardGameGeek Mint Tin Game Design Challenge. That competition involved creating a board game that can fit inside an Altoid’s tin. Among the honors received was 1st place in the Best Theme category and 2nd place in the Best Overall [Game] Design category. The BU students also took home 1st place in the Best Rules category.

Becoming skilled at writing tabletop rules is good preparation for writing video game design documents. Game design documents (GDDs) are written by video game designers in order to provide programmers with a blueprint for building the game. A game designer who can write a good tabletop game rulebook, will probably be able to write outstanding video game GDDs. Rulebooks are more difficult to write than game design documents because they need to be polished and comprehensible to a wide spectrum of readers. In contrast, video game design documents are internal and for the development team. Whenever the document is unclear, the team members can simply ask the designer for an explanation (as opposed to having to puzzle it out for themselves).

See also: Rulebook Roundup