I studied a bunch of icons from various published board games while preparing a rule book for Cardboard Edison, with a particular focus on Ian O'Toole. For those who come after, this article captures what I learned 🎲✂️ rossongames.com/icons #BoardGameDesign

Galactic Cruise shares a design principle with Concordia in that there is almost no "upkeep" in the game. The silo and agenda cards are both restored by player actions, such that the game rarely has to stop to reset anything. It's a nice feature that I love to see whenever it works for a game. 🎲✂️

In most games, Analysis Paralysis increases exponentially as you give the player more actions on their turn. If instead of 2 actions in Pax Pamir, I had 4, my turns wouldn't take twice as long; they'd probably take 3+ times as long. This all depends on how integrated the actions are, however. 🎲✂️

Trading in competitive games is awkward, because theoretically some player is always getting a worse deal. The games that make trading work tend to "sweeten the pot" somehow, like how Zoo Vadis gives you 1 free laurel for helping an opponent out with a vote (on top of whatever they give you for it).

There's a point where a board game prototype becomes "fun enough" that play testing it is not a burden or a favor; it's just playing a fun but incomplete game. I think getting to that point should probably be the initial goal of #BoardGameDesign, well before content, balance, or aesthetics. 🎲✂️

This is the single most valuable thing I've learned about #BoardGameDesign so far, and it's not even close. When a player has to make a choice in a strategy game, the "best" option should depend on the state of the rest of the game. I wrote about this more at rossongames.com/choices 🎲✂️

#boardgamedesign If you have an Upkeep phase that should happen in-between rounds, put it at the end of the round, not the start. I read rulebooks that put it at the start, then say "Skip this phase on the first round." If it's supposed to go in-between, present it as going after the round.

🎲✂️ I've noticed that whenever a game really wants me to try and guess what another player has or has selected, the game will only give players 5 or fewer things to pick from: * Coup: 5 characters to have * Planet X: 4 theory tokens to place * Race for the Galaxy: 5 phases to pick

Whenever I start to get carried away with a theme idea I like to remind myself that one of the most popular board games is a racing game where the hook is that you have to manage your engine temperature. 🎲✂️ #boardgamedesign

A little while back I posted a picture of my spray painted custom dice. This is my process for making them, if anyone wanted to avoid a lot of the trial and error. rossongames.com/custom-dice #BoardgameDesign

Spirit Island is one of my favorite games, and what impresses me the most is how many distinct player characters it supports. I've spent a lot of time figuring out how it does this, and wrote it all down in an article. rossongames.com/spirit-islan... 🎲✂️ #boardgamedesign #boardgames

I noticed a really common pattern in co-op board games where players have to split their time between urgent tasks—which prevent a loss—and important tasks—which win the game. I wrote more about it in an article. 🎲 ✂️ #boardgamedesign #boardgames rossongames.com/urgent-impor...

🎲 ✂️ Does anyone know of a spray finish for chipboard game boards that will make cards slide well on it. Basically the exact same thing as published board games, where the game boards don't have too much friction. I have mod podge but I suspect there might be something closer.

Invented state is a useful board game mechanic to keep in the back pocket. It usually involves tokens placed on a card, but it goes: * You may like this post. * A like on this post is a Demeanor Charge. * You may spend the Demeanor Charge from this post to disappoint Ross 😕. #BoardGameDesign 🎲✂️

🎲✂️ I tried every method for producing custom dice that I could think of—hand drawn stickers, printer stickers, a label maker, iron on paper—but the best method by far has been spray painting with a silicone stencil. It was faster and produced much better results. I'll have to post my full process.

Something I've noticed about "positive" player interactions is that they tend to not invalidate a player's plan for a turn, which can reduce downtime. If someone takes my resources, my plan might become impossible, but if I gain a resource, that can't happen. #boardgames #boardgamedesign 🎲✂️🧵

How do you organize your icons so that they're synced across all of your #boardgamedesign assets? I use Affinity and I've cycled through separate documents linked, one document w/ symbols, one document linked, and now I'm considering artboards. It's a mess. 🎲✂️ #boardgames

I just noticed something weird. A hand of cards is easier to pick up than a single card, and I don't fully understand why. If I have a card on the table, it's easier for me to drop a stack of cards on it and to pick those up than it is to just pick up the one card on its own. 🎲✂️

I think a lot of new designers like myself would benefit from knowing about the Written Tone Problem—a term I just made up for a well documented effect. We tend to read messages in the harshest tone possible, even if the writer was intending the kindest tone possible. 🎲✂️ #boardgamedesign 🧵 (1/4)

🎲✂️ How do you do task tracking? As in, if you find out that you need to make a change to your prototype before the next play test, how do you document that and mark it as completed?

🎲✂️ I've noticed other #boardgamedesign 's occasionally have some ambiguous characters, like 1, I, or l being indistinguishable. The easiest way to ensure this doesn't happen is to default to the Atkinson's Hyperlegible Next font, which I always start with. www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

I've found that Hidden Rolls with Secret Info are a great way to keep from having one player be the Judge in your 🎲✂️. For example, Zendo (which I adore) has one player be the Master, who doesn't compete. Often times, however, you can replace a master with some sort of Imposter, like in Fake Artist.

When considering 🎲✂️ mechanics my mind keeps wondering back to the idea of a deck and tableau builder where your deck is the antagonist and your tableau is how you're dealing with it. Like the deck is a mutating virus and your tableau is your resources to deal with each upcoming hand from the deck.

A lot of 🎲✂️ add resource upkeep before any player actions, like drawing cards or collecting income. A lot of published board games, however, use player actions instead—like how in Concordia there's a collect resources action, or in Wingspan there's a draw cards action—which eliminates this admin.

I've noticed that a lot of games tune the player's "starting resources" to maximize the amount of viable first turn moves. If a player can choose between gaining money or spending money on their first turn, then the players is often given just enough money to make both options reasonable. 🎲✂️

What useful things do you have near you while prototyping or brainstorming board games? 🎲✂️ On my desk I have digital calipers, a thing called a Heckadeck, regular decks, dice, little wood cubes, pawns, and of course little scraps of paper, index cards, and blank business cards.

Does anyone else like custom d6s as much as I do? With custom faces, you can lower the expected output of rolls, which keeps numbers like health pools small, and if they're also color-coded with at least one unique face, you can use skeuomorphic icons to represent them, reducing terminology. 🎲✂️

🎲✂️ There needs to be a term for linear functions with a negative y-intercept, like 1, 3, 5, 7, or just 0, 1, 2, 3. Like Triangle Numbers, their first "tick" is less impactful than every follow up, (dis)incentivizing specialization, but with a simpler scale. My pitch is "Subnaught Ascenders".

I don't know who else finds this helpful but game state in 🎲 ✂️ board games is almost always tracked using the position or orientation of different components. Whenever someone asks "how do players track X" the answer is almost always to place a certain component somewhere or turn it some direction.

A lot of my early 🎲 ✂️ game balance is just based on making sure no player option is objectively better than another. Like "this option does the same thing, the same amount, but is cheaper." There always has to be some trade off, otherwise I already know the weaker option might as well not exist.

It's unreal to me how often I trust the "AI result" from Google despite knowing how bad it is. When I Google a subject I understand it seems to say something wrong about 50% of the time, but when I'm not familiar with the subject I still might accept its response as fact without thinking about it.

I'm constantly asking myself "Can I combine these two things into one?". This thinking can be applied to systems, resources, actions, anything. My biggest breakthroughs often come from looking for ways to solve two problems with a single change.

I'm curious how many board game designers 🎲✂️ have tips that they would consider "design theory" and what that term even means to them. Does anyone have any design theory that they can fit in 300 characters?

The Vale of Eternity has a mechanic which I hope catches on: Inconvenient Denominations. Coins of different sizes cannot be freely converted, and you can always overpay but you never get change back. It increases the design space of an engine builder without the need for additional resources.

Little lesson I learned at Protospiel Madison: If a component can be placed on a board or card, you shouldn't print a perfect depiction of the component on that space. If you do, it can be hard to tell if there's a component placed there or just the picture. Came up several times.