A Winning Hanabi Strategy

My favorite card game is Hanabi by Antoine Bauza. My friends and I have played it enough to learn a series of techniques that reliably boost our score. Some of these techniques were collected from the internet, but some are our own ideas. In this post, I’ll share what we’ve learned.

Design Exercise: Dejarik

One of my favorite moments from Star Wars is the ‘Let the Wookie win’ scene, where the protagonists play a futuristic version of chess. This game is called Dejarik, and canonical rules were never defined. In this post, I’ll propose a rule set for Dejarik that I created as a design exercise.

Challenge is not Difficulty

A common misconception among gamers and game designers is that challenge is equivalent to difficulty. In fact, the two terms are not interchangeable. In this brief post, we’ll look at some thoughts from game design experts on why these two concepts are different.

Respecting Time Investment

Time is a critically important resource. It’s hard to find uninterrupted chunks of time to put towards playing games. When players choose to play your game, you should do everything in your power to use their time respectfully. In this post, I’ll examine thoughts from several games-industry thinkers on the efficient use of time.

Games and Motivation

Good games have focus. Their designers have picked one idea, a core concept, and made it the thesis statement that guides the entire experience. Players often find that the most emotionally powerful games have a focus that resonates with their innate desires and motivations. In this post, I’ll examine the relationship between different types of games and human motivation.

Game Design Showdown: Sherlock Holmes

After watching the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, I’ve been on the lookout for any other media that riffs on the same source material. I’ve settled on two games: Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. In this post I will compare the two experiences, attempting to highlight what mystery games can learn from them in the future.

Ludum Dare 30 Post-Mortem

Last weekend, I participated in Ludum Dare 30, which was my first game jam. In this post, I’ll describe my team’s submission, as well as some of our thought processes during the competition.

Implicit Games

In the last few years, the indie game scene has produced an explosion of new games and ideas. This post will discuss some of these games and propose a new genre that I’m calling implicit games.

Working Within Working Memory

When designing games, it’s easy to add complexity. You can always come up with yet another feature to add to a game. However, some of the best game designers would argue that their craft is all about taking things out of their games. Indeed, most games that stand the test of time have elegant rule sets. These games are easy to learn because they have few rules, but hard to master because of what’s known as emergent gameplay—complexity that arises from the interplay of relatively simple rules.