§ 1.4 - Key skills are clearly defined.
What skills will a player need in order to succeed at this game?
Guidelines for Strategy Game Design is a book written by D. Brad Talton Jr, designer of BattleCON, Millennium Blades, Pixel Tactics, Dead by Daylight™: The Board Game, Exceed, and many more.
Each week, a new article is posted containing additional game design advice. Once this blog is complete, a physical edition will be available.
What skills will a player need in order to succeed at this game?
As players pursue the activities you told them about in your pitch, it’s important to let them do those activities! Moves should engage with the activities, not stand between the player and the activities.
Most games consist of several different activities. However, all of those activities should thread through the game’s central mechanics and engage the game’s key skills.
What will you be doing in this game? A good game lets you know right up front what activities are going to occupy your time while you sit at the table.
A game is successful if it delivers on the promise that convinced players to sit down and give it a try.
In this post, you will find a diagnostic checklist which you can print and use to evaluate your own games, using the system described in this blog. Happy designing!
This is intended to be a manual you can use, on-the-go, as a tool to aid in your design. It attempts to be focused—we won’t go into press techniques, guidelines for working with contractors, tools for prototyping, or anything like that. There are a lot of great resources for these things, but we’re only talking about design.