This portion of the working checklist is intended for general principles for superior functional design. It has been organized into three parts--general, rules, and boards & bits. Contribute freely.

Please refer to the parent article first:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/77401

I. GENERAL

1. Game developers must acknowledge that functional design is important. From there it follows that publishers and designers will give extra attention and time to a game while it is still in development and before the graphic artist submits his final drafts.

2. The trick of superior functional design is to go unnoticed. In the game whose functional design is most polished, no obtrusions distract players from the game play itself. Players are left to focus on and discovering the merits of the conceptual design, and that's exactly where designers and publishers want your attention anyway.

3. Working out solutions for revealed design issues is not as important as revealing those issues, as the former cannot be accomplished without the latter. Once issues are identified, time and thought can be given to elegantly solving them. Publishers must scrutinize games in the draft stage just as editors of major publications scrutinize copy.

Though I think it is the exception, I find it striking that when publishers republish out-of-print titles they sometimes do not attempt to improve the functional design. Worse yet they sometimes fiddle with and worsen the original functional design. Each game, whether it's brand new or a redevelopment of an old game in it has an opportunity for introspecting the functional design. Is the game what it could be?

The meticulous designer/publisher will spot and eradicate most of said shortcomings. Incredibly some flaws that are glaringly obvious to most any player have progressed through the development cycle into publication.

Think outside the box. Consider all bits as first envisioned, then consider how they might be redeveloped if all preconceptions of a typical game were thrown out. Functional design even with games is an interface usability issue of sorts that designers and publishers should creatively approach. There's much to be said about how much a game of superior functional design can have a great impact on the mood it invokes, and the perception and enjoyment of those who play it. Conversely, when attention is not paid to such details, a game's potential is not reached.

4. Realize that the same game can be embodied in many forms. There are various functional means to designing a game, so don't be constrained by your initial conception. Part of thinking outside the box is to at least consider some alternative physical designs. Contrast the current implementation of Puerto Rico against Mike Doyle's recreation.

http://www.michaeldoyle.com/PRege/LaCiudad.html

Without making arguments for implementation over the other, the point is clear: the delivery of a design is largely open to artistic interpretation. There are many other practical, workable ways that Puerto Rico could have been physically delivered. I am convinced that people's complaint about the lengthy setup time could have been addressed with an alternate, creative design that required far fewer bits.

II. RULES

1. The best rules are clearly and succinctly written. The wordier explanation is not necessarily the better one. Be as clear as possible with the fewest words possible. The final determination for how clearly rules are written can be made by having several groups of inexperienced players read the rules and play the game without assistance.

2. The best rules ought be easily scanned for reference facts. The select boldfacing of keywords is incredibly useful for making rules more legible and making it easy to quickly locate certain commonly referenced facts, such as set up information.

3. The best rules chart information that ought to be charted. How many times have you read rules that wrote out chartable information into sentences and paragraphs? How much need be said to realize that a chart conveys more with less and can more quickly be digested or scanned for reference.

4. The best rules provide illustrated examples. No tool more clearly communicates than do actual examples. Both normal situations as well as exceptions should be included.

5. The best rules have been creatively pruned of rules of little or no consequence. Not all rules are created equally and add equally to a game. There is a threshold on the number of rules that embody a game before the rules become cumbersome. With this in mind, each extraneous rule that is eliminated can be replaced by another rule that more strongly bears on creating meaningful and interesting play. Remember that for each rule you say yes to, you are saying no to another.

III. BOARDS & BITS

1. The manipulating of bits must not be a fussy endeavor. Game developers should zealously seek to reduce the number of necessary bits, even redesigning when necessary. Though some games may necessitate plentiful bits, this should be the exception. Many times a creative designer will discover alternate, more elegant means to the same ends. Furthermore, reducing bits makes a game less costly to publish. It's a good earmark that bits have become obtrusive when you hear a player partway into the game comment that it would make a good computer game.

Often heavy games become this way because their designs draw together many kinds of components that work together to present a challenging experience. Naturally, heavier games having more bits may be a somewhat obtrusive. Nonetheless, obtrusions can be creatively minimized.

There's an important distinction between having too many bits and too many bits of too many kinds. The game GO for example has lots of stones, however, this is not bothersome because there are only two kinds of bits—white stones and black stones. One might argue that there is one kind of bit (stones), but the distinction I make between kinds of bits deals with organizing and managing them. At the outset of a game of GO, it is likely that players will separate all of the white and black stones. PUERTO RICO, by contrast, has many bits of many kinds—colonist chits, VP counters, building tiles, plantation tiles, ships, a trading house, role cards, etc.

2. If the bits themselves lack key facts, a player aid should be provided. In games having many rules to digest, players should not be left to remembering all the key facts. Sometimes it is sensible for the bits to include the necessary facts. Other times printing the facts directly on the bits, especially facts easily remembered after a couple plays, may in itself be obtrusive. In such cases the extra facts should be clearly printed on a player aid.

Interesting idea. I look forward to your reviews. Since much of board (and card) game design is graphical, may I suggest a purely graphical discussion, as found in the works of Edward R. Tufte.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

Eh, I just skimmed over this because it's so long. I give it a 5.

"The manipulating of bits must not be a fussy endeavor"

This brings to mind the scoring tracks & bits that we ignore for some games. Using a pencil and paper is often easier & more accurate (no bits to get jostled around!). Come to think of it, we often adust gameplay in ways such as this to make things work more sensibly.


Anyway, thanks for the articles

Some comments:



There are some types of game (and gamers) for which this will not be true. Wargamers are the most obvious group.
For example, several the early Avalon Hill wargames, published in the '60s, had a road movement rule that simply allowed a unit a bonus of some amount of spaces, as long as the bonus was used when moving along a road. Wargames since then have had the rules for movement trending more complex so that, for instance, in BARBAROSSA: ARMY GROUP NORTH a piece can't use the road movement rate to enter a space if it intends to leave the road in that space (in addition to having various classes of movement for the units and various classes of road, which have become standard in wargames). Now there is nothing to say that AGN could not be played with the simpler rule, but I doubt that any of the current players would believe that the simpler rule was better design.
This is due to the fact that AGN, as with many games from the wargame publishers, are attempting to recreate hisotrical events as accurately as practical. Sometimes, complexity is the point.



Where the dividing line for this decision should be placed is subjective. For example, RA has printed on the board two copys of a shorthand summary of scoring and the inventory of tiles. After a few plays a player could become familiar enough with the notation on that summary to not need additional information. Yet there are some players that use the more elaborate play mats available as player aids available here for that game, and never bother to use the more compact on-board summary. Neither method could objectively be called superior design, or rather, both could.

Firstly, superb work Mario. I really like the threads you've created and appreciate the thought that has gone into the,.

Secondly, well said (on both points) Allen.

The BC Police.

First off, great thread Mario - working out guidelines for game design is a noble pursuit! I'd like to contribute to this with a response to your Tikal critique:



This is an interesting question. I design video games and face this issue constantly.

When I first was introduced to eurogames, Tikal was one of the first I played. Torres was another of my first games, and features a similar reference card. My own experience with both games was that their player aids were not helpful until I already knew what my actions were - and in fact how the game played.

On my first glance as a new player, both cards were a small grid of graphical symbols, none of which made sense to me (I could see some corresponded to components in the games, but others didn't seem to). Once I learned each game, they provided a useful shorthand, although both games were also simple enough that by the time I knew the actions I didn't need the refernce card very much. Because I did not immediately comprehend the aid cards, they actually made me more confused and nervous as a first time player - to me, the many boxes full of non-explained symbols added to the apparent complexity.

I personally prefer a player aid that just tells me, in my native language, what my options are. The quicker I can comprehend a game on first looking at its pieces the more willing I am to play it (and the less time I have to wait to get over the learning the rules phase and into the playing). Graphical codes on a player aid in addition to text are useful, so that I no longer have to pay attention to the words once I have become familiar with the rules. But I actually find both to be important. Neither text nor graphics on their own are ideal.

We face similar issues when making interfaces, especially menus, for video games. It is very tempting to ease localization to different languages (and to save on limited screen space) by making choices purely graphical, but in my own experience this nearly always fails. It is most common nowadays in my industry to have some sort of help text or even voice available in the native language in addition to any kind of iconic information, though being digital we have the advantage to be able to display localized text cheaply instead of having to print different components for different languages.

Anyway, in summary I don't feel this is something you can make a hard and fast rule about. Obviously there's a desire to reduce production costs by keeping text off of game components. For some game designs, it may even be possible to explain them entirely graphically. But for many games, this will fail for some players, or you may be trading initial accessibility for later playability (as my experience shows). The "right" approach is probably different for every game and every player. You feel that the Tikal functional design is excellent - for me as a player, it could have used improvement. I even came away from my first experiences with eurogames with the feeling that the developers were "too cheap" to actually put text on all the components!

I think this underscores my own belief that game design is an art, not a science. However the more we think about our art, the more sophisticated it can become, so thanks for the interesting posts.

This post by Shannon Appelcline was so appropriate I had to include it.

http://boredgamegeeks.blogspot.com/2005/12/shannons-list-of-...

An excellent contribution!

Here's one from a recent thread:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/91188

Scoring tracks should be complete rather than numbering only every 10th or 5th space.

I read a book on web usability called Don't Make Me Think and at its essense you don't want to give users even a moment's pause if you don't have to.

I'm somewhat repeating myself from a recent geeklist, but during playtesting a "touch test" will often reveal problems. The touch test is simple: Has someone used this rule/object?

If you're dealing with optional items (such as there's several groups to choose from) and no one voluntarily chooses that group, its usually an indication that it's either poorly designed OR poorly presented.

If its not optional, but its a small part of the game, or it covers an unlikely outcome and yet nobody is using it is also and indication something is wrong. Either the outcome is too unlikely and its just not coming up OR players are purposely ignoring it!

Sometimes misreadings or misuse of items is more informative than seeing someone do it correctly. If you see this happen several times, examine the piece or rule involved. What's leading to the misuse of it? Is the wording just unclear? Is it counterintuitive?


Now my background in anthropology, so I tend to default to those research methods. (I've even done research on gamers, no less!) For people not familiar with the principles you may need to create a worksheet or something similar to help sort out the relevant info from the nonrelevant. If something is slowing down game play and its not immediately obvious what it is, creating a sheet to simply track how many times players do a certain thing may reveal part of the problem. Is the card deck constantly needing to be reshuffled because its hitting the bottom too many times? Are players needing to draw too often? How often are players grabbing the rules book or players aids? Is the board so big that players have to stand up to be able to reach additional counters?

So a simple sheet where you tick things off each time they occur may reveal surprising details. This may initially creep playtesters out if you appear to be constantly writing while watching, or even using a stopwatch to time how long things go, but they get used to it quickly. Being watched WILL have some effect, but they will generally start to ignore you scribbling after a bit, so long as you don't stop to interupt what they're doing. If you see something you want to ask about (example: why did you do Y?) write it down, ask later. Don't interupt flow.

Along same lines, you may want to note down people misusing components or going and grabbing something else. Did they run out of counters and go grab some pennies? Did they end up with an unmanagable pile of bits pieces and cards and start propping them against their can of Pepsi to try and be able to see them all? Did they take one look at that pretty scoring track, chuck it, and use a pad of paper?

Of course when you see people doing something WRONG with your game, the natural inclination is to immediately interupt. But unless they ASK because they're genuinely confused, let them do what they THINK is right. People tend to gravitate towards the most natural feeling course of actions. This is why there's always paths worn in the grass at universities, no matter how many sidewalks they put in! Even if directed on paths and there's a keep off the grass sign, they'll still make a more natural path. Clever universities just add a sidewalk where the dirt path is. Letting players forge their own path will reveal what they think if the natural course. If it turns out to be one they don't like, they'll only take it once. You're looking for them to beat the path in the grass before you change rules.