OUGD503 D&AD

The do's and don'ts

The do's and don'ts of board game design that are stated by Shannon Appecline, a board game developer and critic from America. Shes set up these rules to help with the design of board games as he has an experience of submitting a bunch of games 

Don’t Reward the Last Man Standing. 

This is one of the things that Eurogames do right, so it scarcely needs to be said any more. However, it’s still an important point. Unless the game is really short, you shouldn’t allow player elimination, and you especially shouldn’t decide who wins your game based on the same. After all, what are the eliminated players supposed to do until the game ends?

Although most games don’t use last-man-standing mechanics, there are nonetheless some that allow players to be effectively eliminated. There are any number of games where you can look at your score and quickly realise that you have no chance of winning.

This is one of the great benefits of hidden scores. Even if the information is all technically trackable, a losing player is the player least likely to take advantage of that ability. It’s the old happier-if-you-don’t know idea that parents used to love.

Otherwise, you need to have some way that a player can catch up. Risk-reward systems usually allow this. If you have a big risk that has almost no chance of paying out, then the big reward might get you back into the game … and it gives you something to do until the game is over, anyway.

Don’t Confuse Complexity with Depth of Strategy.

Lots of modifiers to die rolls, lots of different options, or generally a game that’s more complex than others out there isn’t necessarily better … and may well be worse. There’s much to be said for cutting out complexity until you have the shining gem at the core of your game design, and only then looking to see if anything else actually added to your gameplay.

Unless you’re trying to write a simulation, and you know your players want to play a simulation, complexity is usually not the right move.

Don’t Support False Strategy.

 False strategy is a somewhat hard thing to define, but I know it when I see it. Unfortunately, it also seems pretty hard to convince a game designer that his game includes false strategy … and I’ve tried. False strategy involves including choices in your game that are essentially meaningless.

Don’t Include Rock-Scissors-Papers.

 I think games that include important rock-scissors-paper mechanics are fine examples of the idea of false strategy that I just mentioned. These are usually blind-bidding games where you have three essentially equal choices, in which there is no way to choose intelligently between the choices.

and finally  there is this on dosn't bode well for me working on this project

Don’t Develop Your Own Game. 

My heart aches every time I see a game that could have been a contender, but isn’t because someone insisted on self-publishing. Unless you’ve already gotten 20 or so games under your belt, you don’t have the ability to remove yourself from your game design and see its flaws, and you don’t have the fortitude to cut out those beautiful subsystems that don’t really improve the game. An external developer does and he will make your game better.

link
(http://www.mechanics-and-meeples.com/2007/06/21/five-game-design-dos-and-donts/)