Nice video 🙌 Writing the rules for 40+ games in the GEMJI Game System - I can confirm that the topic of writing OK rules (not great, but OK) is underrated and underestimated. I'm currently rewriting most of our rules and the ones that I wrote 4 years ago are definitely showing immaturity. It may be a good practice for every game designer to revise his/her rules every five years. There's always something to improve-not only with the texts but also with the diagrams.

What about one win condition being to meet all the other players on the board?

Thank you! This was so inspiring!

@NewBoardGameDesign Please update to let us know how you're doing

Just finding your videos now but doesn't seem like uploads have continued the past few years :( what happened?

Your videos are edited so well do you make them?

You are such an underrated channel. Please come back and make more videos!

I enjoy your videos very much. Hope to see you post again.

Should the rule sheet include a QR code to a video explaining the game?

I'm working on a TTRPG with a focus on befriending mystical creatures that transform into enchanted weapons and armor, which you wield during battle. I'm still in the early stages of brainstorming the battle and roleplay mechanics. Though my intention is to make the battles snappy "theater of the mind" affairs with dynamic player-driven turn order and an emphasis on cooperation

the gdrive didn't want to download. I'll share with you one thing - I will never buy a game with a sans serif font style.

Thank you very much for some great game ideas. Congratulations on reaching your milestones.

Dude, make an update, pls

Awesome video Jesse, thanks !

if it's just walk around using a static deck of cards that would not entice many. Ideally there should be ways to add cards to the deck depending on what you did before. Benefits feel tacked on. It seems you bought only one game or just read on Root, but for wander-game types of games you should do your homework properly. Study what is out there. Some suggestions: Forests of Adrimon, Carcassonne Mists, Albion's Legacy, and various OSR RPGs, showcased by DungeonDive or Geek Gamers. And most of all Earthborne Rangers. Malhya has a good weather / event system, so does Arydia - even though the games aren't out yet, their rulebooks are and the rulebooks are what you need. There's also journeys to the overland, and barbarian prince. Looking at games is also useful to avoid the various pitfalls, for example Legends Untold series has a plethora of icons, while it looks cool it's distracting when reasoning over the game state.

This knowledge is illegal

Helpful! Thank you

Are you still alive bro?

I don't really care if a similar game has been created before. We all sit on top of giants. For that walkie talkie using nav, the person helping the hiker should receive IOU markers (say karma tokens from the owner). It's unclear if the game will be coop or competitive or semi, or you want to postpone the decision. Don't cling too much on 7th con, look at Eila and chapter 3, the mines, that's how you make a replayable grid done right.

Your video doesn't explain how, only what. - difficulty levels and game modes should have a default setting and not ask the reader who's new to your game to decide, all that produces is choice stress. Make the choice for them, and it should always be the easiest level. - difficulty levels and game modes should be in the front of the rulebook, immediately below Victory conditions. The first things that present choice should not be in the back of the book. - every game (except snakes and ladders) should have difficulty levels. Order those in increasing difficulty. The designer should be able to win 100% while drunk on easiest difficulty. - use active grammar. Avoid "We consider situation x where y has been shuffled". - bullets where order is optional, - numbered sequence where the numbered sequence is mandatory. You can't present the rice without first cooking it. - rule variants should be in the back of the rulebook but EVERY combination should have an unique code, maybe a few letters. So on your savesheet you can unambiguously identify the exact variant played. - rulebook should have a version number. Version history should be available to inform how worthwhile it would be to deal with an outdated book or print a new one. - Latest version should be in a free online drive and NOT on bgg. You should not force people to make accounts on bgg. - NAME EVERYTHING. Be like the proverbial Noah, name things uniquely, no synonyms, whenever possible terms in singular, never plural. It should be clear without a doubt whether natural text is Key game terms or just natural text. A clear example of violating this is Arkham horror, which uses key game terms like normal text. Use capitalization, boldface or some distinct font.

I'm working on a hex-based tile adventure game too. I'm using catan-sized hexes. I'm taking inspiration from Betrayal: House on the Hill for the deck drawing (i.e. a city tile draws a city card when you first reveal it). Additionally, there are 3 types of roads: stone, dirt, and bridge. When you explore a new tile, you draw tiles until you find one with a matching path. Then you play the matching path and shuffle the rest back to the bottom of the tile stack. It also uses the "legacy" mechanic of a non-shuffled deck that you draw certain cards from in certain cases (like the demon lord or legendary sword, which have special conditions to show up)

It was crazy how tricky it was writing the rules down for my game... It is truly an art form. To be clear, concise and short is an incredibly tricky task to perform. I tip my hat to the games that have great rulebooks, The Manhatten Project comes to mind as one that does it really well.

Hi, I'm designing a tactical game with an open world for Exploration. My idea was to have cards that show you where you are, what is there and where you can go from there. When you leave the area in one direction you put the Card back and search for the card which represents the area that is connected in the choosen direction. That is done by searching for a abstract code in a Deck, which gives no clue one which areas are connected two each other. For my exploration was always about not seeing what lies ahead but the possibility to explore it and find things you would never have Expected.

Is this entire video an intro?

The process of writing a doc is something that anyone with minimal literacy should be able to do. Consultants, engineers, salesmen and many others very often have to write proposals. These docs demand clarity. In the case of lawyers, it requires absolute accuracy. In a way, the law is a rulebook. Very often it was poorly written. One good example was that 60 years ago, women were bad and men were good. Then legal culture changed to think men are bad and women are good. And the real world has good and bad men and women. So the final result is a facepalm.

Many rulebooks are messy. It should start with setup and character creation if applicable, then the procedure to play a turn or round or phase. Add examples. Being proficient in expressing ideas is key. If many rules can be replaced by an image, do so.

You should come back to KZbin

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Started designing my own version of a Game of thrones board game. Rather than being based on one specific thing, I'd like to have a blend of factors such as strategy, intrigue etc.

Really hoping you’re still working on that game, your story has been an inspiration and I’ve enjoyed using it to start my own game design process

Extremely helpful! Thank you!

Too close to the camera. Get out of my personal space dude.

thank you!

Hey there! I was wanting to make sure you are doing ok, I love your videos. They were such a great inspiration when I made my first boardgame.

Any updates?

A hexagon grid war game

thank you for this video!

A board game idea I had is... I got to thinking about the relationship between randomness and strategy. Strategy games are terrible party games because different people at the party are going to have different levels of proficiency in strategizing, and whomever is best at strategizing will win consistently- no fun for everyone else. This is especially an issue when the players are different ages, kids and adults playing the same round. But you don't want too much randomness or else you get something like Candyland that's pure luck of the draw, no player agency whatsoever. So, you need some strategy and some randomness to balance things out. How to achieve randomness? Well, there's dice, card decks, spinner-boards, tile draw bags, but I feel there's other forms of randomness that have been underutilized. You know how Clue is really annoying because you can only make suspicions about rooms you're in, and if players want to be mean they can keep you in a perpetual loop of getting re-summoned to the same room over and over again when you're just trying to get to one specific different room? What if the whole game revolved around that, your location on the board being outside your control and you just have to be at its mercy, working within its restriction best you can. So far, I'm thinking of something like various demons that keep getting summoned to various summoer circles and players are both the demons and the summoners and have to do... something. Still workshopping the premise.

Your Night Time Die reminds me of the game Vampire Hunter. To those unfamiliar, it's a game that revolves around the day/night mechanic signified by the light tower's orange and blue modes. The board, tiles, cards, and dice are marked with colored ink that is only visible under either the orange or blue lights. The difference it makes is that the insta-lose countdown gets closer to triggering in the day, but the movement die rolls higher and the combat die has higher chance of success. Whereas during the night, you're more likely to encounter enemies you have to fight and you have booby-traps to worry about. Also, there's shortcut portals that change location between day and night. The light mechanic is fascinating, but I don't feel the game uses it to its full potential. I tried messaging the publisher, Hasbro, about it, but they said the game is out of print and they have no plans for it until further notice.

you helped me so much! i am trying to desing a board game and this reey helped me😄

While watching this you have me an idea of You explore and land on different hexes BUT as you explore you find place a hex and you can grab a flipped hex and flip it over and place it down then there can be place two hexes and so on. The goal is to build a good land but if you over 10 bad spaces on your land you must start over Do you like it

I've just come back to this channel, noticed you haven't uploaded in a while. Absolutely no pressure to upload again, but I hope you're doing good, and find motivation again at some point in the future! This series has been great from what I've watched so far.

Still waiting..... dont give up.

Really Fantastic to see the new design Games,We are Board Game Manufacture,Good at produce printed nice box,board,rules,brochures,wooden pawns,dice...

"You came up with" ? sorry, mate! i dont want to steal your mechanics. lol. i would love to make a explorational trading logistics game but obviously it is hard to imagine that kind of game with some looting and need for a mercenaries etc. And second one would be football(soccer) board game based on Hattrick football manager game. At this point i have designed few wooden educational games.

Please don't tell us you dropped the whole thing?! I hope you just took a break and will return.

Thank you for us having a part in your process. Very interesting to witness your progress throughout the videos. I must admit in the middle of the video I thought: "Wow, that sounds like a completely random luck-fest like the children's game of the 90s." Walk, roll or draw and get a random outcome does not sound like a game you could still publish. But then I was happy to see you alos realising there was a lot still missing. It is going to be great in the end!

What I find very interesting is that you somewhat take it for granted to start with a theme. From what I learned from especially German board game designers is that they barely bother about a theme as the publishers usually imprint it later on. So they say one should totally focus on mechanisms without restricting in in advance because it has to make sense with the theme. The only designer who starts with the theme that I certainly know of is Vital Lacerda. And it is great in a way, but I am not sure if it is the best idea to do exactly that with your very first design? Or I am not sure, because I also started with a few themes already and I am not sure where it is going 😀 So, what I hear from you sounds also a bit like 7th Continent in a way. But you want to avoid the predetermination of the story and the complexity. This means in my head at this very point that you other go down a legacy path (which I don't think you want either) or the exploration "surprise" has to come through a huge number of combination versatility?! I guess I will just continue watching and see what happens! :-)

Since 17 years - which is exactly half my life - I am talking about becoming a board game designer one day. Even though I had many very different ideas over the ideas, I never really started developing aynthing. Next January I will cut my wagework to four days a week and really get things going. I am super happy for having found this channel and I am looking forward to your other videos!