Essay: designing Quantum’s mechanics

In a few hours I am heading to the airport to the Essen Game Fair – the largest tabletop game event in the world – to launch my board game Quantum with its publisher FunForge.  As part of the pre-launch hype offensive, I wrote an essay for boardgamegeek.com about the design of the game.

Part of their Designer Diary series, the article details the evolution of the gameplay from my first playtest with game scholar Jesper Juul in my Brooklyn kitchen in 2010 to the final production push this past summer.  Along the way, I discuss design issues such as the way that the information elements on a playing card signify their meaning and the importance of testing the learnability of rules.

FYI, the picture above was taken during a recent preview event of the game in Europe. That’s boardgame design legend Bruno Faidutti playing my game! I wasn’t there but I heard he enjoyed it.

See you at Essen!

How I Teach Game Design. (Lesson 1: The Game Design Process)

how and why to iterate + a game modification exercise

Iterative design

In the syllabus I shared in my last How I Teach Game Design post, graded assignments are given out on one week, and then one or two or three weeks later, they are due. So what happens in-between, during the actual work time? The answer is: the iterative design process.

Iterative design means a process focused on playtesting. You produce a playable prototype of a game as quickly as possible, then playtest the prototype, and you decide how to evolve the game based on the experience of the playtest. One way of understanding iterative design would be its opposite: a designer who works out all of the details of a game in advance, and creates a final set of rules and other materials without ever actually playing the game.

Of course, this caricature is absurd: no game designer I know has ever released a game without playtesting it. But I do have a particularly strong emphasis on iterative design in my teaching and my creative practice as a designer. The game designer Kevin Cancienne once called me a “playtesting fundamentalist’ – and perhaps he’s right. (So much for my stance against fundamentalism.)

What’s the big deal about iteration? The behavior of complex, interactive systems – like games – is incredibly difficult to predict. You generally cannot know exactly what players are going to do once they start playing your game. The only way to find out is to actually build some primitive version of your game, have people play it, and see what happens. Each time you playtest, you find out what does and doesn’t work, make some adjustments, and then play again. That’s why it is called the iterative process – you create successive versions, or iterations, of your game as you go.