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
Graph Paper
Here’s a great site for customizing graph paper that you can download and print out.
Speaking of graph paper, you might want to check out Conway’s Game of Life.
Game Loops
Photo by A. Davey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Tabletop games are typically structured as a series of one round after another until the game concludes. A video game’s main game loop similarly repeats over and over throughout the game in order to drive the game’s core mechanics. Many games are actually programmed using a main game loop, but even when that is not the case, it is still often useful for the game designer to use a conceptual model of a game loop.
Robert Nystrom’s Game Programming Patterns is a book that’s available in print as well as online (for free). It provides a great overview of what constitutes a game loop. Definitely recommended reading!
Monster Hunter
Learning Video Game Design on the Tab
letop includes an outstanding essay by game designer Stone Librande, the lead designer at Riot Games (and previously a designer at Electronic Arts/Maxis and Blizzard).
In his essay, Stone talk about using spreadsheets to create a homemade tabletop game, and how those spreadsheets led to him breaking into the video game industry and getting hired by Blizzard.
For your own spreadsheeting pleasure, you can download and play with the Excel spreadsheets that Stone describes in his essay:
See also: “The World’s Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet” and “Comparable Basis“
Dice simulator
cropped from a photo by Patty Loof, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A good and varied set of dice is an invaluable tool for prototyping tabletop and video games. A Pound-o-Dice is a very worthwhile investment, but in a pinch you might want to use this dice simulator.
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.
Balance of Power
Balance of Power (1985) is a cold-war themed geopolitical video game from the mid-1980s in which the player takes on the role of either the President of the United States or General Secretary of the Soviet Union.
The game was created by Chris Crawford, among whose accomplishments was founding the Game Designers Conference. The year after the game came out, Crawford published a book by the same name. Balance of Power the book provides a rare insight into the inner workings of a video game’s design, algorithms, and intent. You can read the book in its entirety (and with recent annotations that puts some of the 1980s era design constraints into context) on Crawford’s website.
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 backgroun
d 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…]
Print & Play Games
Print-and-play games are tabletop games, usually free, that can be downloaded, printed out, and played. At the time of this writing, there are 3,580 print-and-play games available on BoardGameGeek, with more being added every day. [Read more…]