Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces

In this 2019 Board Game Design Day session, game UX expert Jason Schklar presents a summary of findings during a series of “Board Game” UX exercises, and some tips for making games easier and more fun to learn.
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[@GameDesignThinking]

This is a great talk! It tackles into the misconception that UX is just common sense. It's much more practical than that. It requires researching, playtesting, and other practical techniques. The answer to what are the most common pitfalls was really great. Of course there are methods that facilitate the work, but in UX there aren't one-size-fits-all solution.

[@pikapomelo]

This is great! And applicable to so much. I'd read in The Design of Everyday Things that manuals are an indication that the thing has failed to communicate its use on its own. But, I'd not really thought to apply this to as a test in this way. I work in software development and many codebases have sparse readme files, or worse, readme files with wrong information. It's an excercise in figuring out how to use things based on guesswork and experience from similar codebases. And then because naming is so hard, people come up with their own misleading names for common commands. The easy to use ones follow conventions, provide minimal quick start files, and provide feedback when you do something wrong such as giving suggested commands. Boardgames would struggle with the feedback, but the rest is remarkably similar.

[@PatchworkFez]

This was great! Many thanks

[@killymxi]

Imagine being given a set of regular playing cards (you know, a set of 36 or 52 cards of 4 suits) and trying to come up with playing rules. I think Qwirkle can be a platform for community-made games as well. Perhaps, any set of game pieces can be characterized by the variety it can provide. Perhaps there can be a community of people play-testing custom rules for various game pieces... Kind of a meta game.

[@elduck3281]

Really want him to talk about Munchkin :>

[@Davila_Designs]

Wait till he kicks open the door

[@mtgphil42]

Munchkin sucks in terms of UX