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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

Rulebook Roundup

August 20, 2015 by Ethan 1 Comment

In Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop, I recommend taking the time to make a formal, comparative study of how professional game publishers write their rules before attempting to write one yourself. Doing so helps you understand the level of detail required to properly explain game mechanics and gives you a toolbox of techniques for doing so.

Below are some links to tabletop game rulebooks. If you are inclined, you might try reading a few to see how the information is presented. As you read through a rulebook, you might want to pay attention to the special terminology it employs, how and where does the rulebook present the definitions of its terms (if at all), and the use of graphics for explaining and clarifying rules.

  • Flashpoint: Fire Rescue
  • Memoir ’44
  • Pandemic
  • The Settlers of Catan
  • Ticket to Ride Europe

A comment on this post pointed to a collection of rulebooks from games published by Z-Man Games. Most game publishers have their rulebooks available on their websites, so it is not hard to find more examples than the ones I link to above.

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