An Important Announcement Before I begin today’s article, I just want to say that I will not be posting any new articles for the next two weeks, because I am getting married! Next week is my wedding, and the week after that is my honeymoon. After that, I will continue to post every Thursday as…
Read MoreDesigning The Ultimate Draft: Part 1
In today’s article, I am going to be examining card drafting, and how to design a set to draft well. Normally I try to make my articles applicable to as many different games as possible, but today I am going to try something a bit different. Today I am going to be focusing entirely on…
Read MoreA Re-Source of Pride: Designing Resource Systems in Collectible Games
Last week I started a new series of articles diving deep into various topics dealing with game design. Today’s topic continues this series with a look at designing resource systems. This article will be mostly focused on collectible games, especially trading card games. In this article I will be looking at why to include a…
Read MoreDigging Deep with Power Creep
This Time For Real! A few weeks back, I wrote a pair of articles where I gave my thoughts on the basic game design of Yu-Gi-Oh, which you can find here (part 1 and part 2). I originally wrote those articles with the intention of providing a comprehensive look at the positive and negative aspects…
Read MoreDeep Dive: Is Yu-Gi-Oh a Bad Game? Part 2
Last week I started talking about the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading card game, in order to figure out why it has grown and changed the way it has. Since it’s creation, Yu-Gi-Oh has steadily become more and more convoluted, difficult to learn, and less user-friendly. In this series, I hoped to uncover why this has happened –…
Read MoreDeep Dive: Is Yu-Gi-Oh A Bad Game? Part 1
For a huge portion of my childhood, Yu-Gi-Oh was my favorite game of all. I played it every day with my friends, spent way too much of my parents money on it, and even went to a couple of tournaments. However, in the past few years I have found it more and more difficult to…
Read MoreGame Design for All Ages
For many, board games were a constant feature of childhood. I remember many of the early board games that I played as a child, from Candyland to Chutes and Ladders. As I got older, however, I outgrew those childish games and moved on to new challenges – Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and many others. When you…
Read MoreHunting Whales: The Problem with “Free-to-play” Games
Before I begin, I just want to apologize for not posting recently. These last few weeks have been very busy with finals and projects due, so I haven’t had much time to work on the article. This article is also quite long, and required more research than usual. That being said, lets jump into it!…
Read MoreBreath of the Wild and Good Game Management, Part 3
For the last few weeks I have been giving my thoughts on the idea of game/series management, or the challenges of designing to an existing game property (You can find the previous parts here: Part 1 and Part 2) We started by talking about some of the requirements for good game management, and then last…
Read MoreBreath of the Wild and Good Game Management Pt 2.
Last week I took a look at some of the most important components of good Game/Series management, and if you haven’t read that part I highly recommend reading it before reading this part (Part 1 here ). Today is going to be quite a bit longer than my previous articles, and I am going to…
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