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Making Games

Rulebooks & Game Design Documents

December 5, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Galva

Galva is the Bradley University student game that won Best Rulebook and 2nd Best Overall Game Design.

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

Button Men

August 21, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Artwork by Lee Moyer

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

August 20, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Artwork by Kwanchai Moriya

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).

 

Yut Nori (print & play)

January 21, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Yut Nori

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.

Download a print & play version of Yut Nori.

Print & Play Games

December 11, 2014 by Ethan Leave a Comment

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…]

Agon (print & play)

November 20, 2014 by Ethan Leave a Comment

agon-board-wpAgon (also known as Queen’s Guard) is a tabletop game that is mentioned in passing in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop. The game is notable for being the first known one to use hexagonal game spaces.

[Read more…]

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