There are a ton of ways your game design can go off the rails. You might want to design something specific just because, or maybe it’s for a contest, or you might want to pitch to a particular publisher. Or maybe you somehow made a bunch of games with the same theme or mechanism and you want to differentiate the games you’ve made. Either way, you want to get your design back to a spot where you’re happy with it. How you do that depends on your specific situation!
First, you want to think about what the end goal for the game is and how your current design is different from that. There’s a major choice that you need to make regarding how you go forward. You can either take your current design and pivot to make it closer to what your end goal is, or you can keep your design as it is and start anew on creating something that fulfills the criteria you’re going for.
When I’m thinking about this, one of the most important aspects is how I feel about the current game design:
- Do I really like the new direction that it’s going in? If I really like the new direction of the design and don’t want to lose the momentum and excitement of the design, I’ll most likely try to keep the design as it is and see if I can take anything from another design that I’m not currently working with or an idea from my list of game ideas.
- Is there a part of the game that I really enjoy that I want to take and put towards the original goal? If I’m not so attached to the current direction of the design, but I really like a specific part of it, I’ll try to see how I can change the design to support the original vision a bit more while keeping the core interesting part of the game.
- Do I have any other ideas that I’m excited about that support the original goal more than the current design? If I have another idea that now fits the original goal better, I tend to shelf the other design to focus on the idea that fits with the direction I want to be going in.
- What sort of timetable do I have for this design? If there’s no deadline, I’m more likely to start on a fresh design, but if there’s a reason that the game needs to get done ASAP, having parts of it that are playtested and functioning well can make the difference between getting the game done in time or not.
There’s a lot of ways that game designs can go off the rails:
- You’ve made too many games that have themes or mechanisms that are too similar
- The game you’ve made is either a lot larger/heavier or smaller/lighter than you intended
- The game’s components are not what they should be (as in, you wanted to make a game that costs $20 or less and suddenly it has a slew of miniatures and custom dice)
- You simply have too many game designs and need to actually finish some of them
Games that are Too Similar
Sometimes you can get into your own head and design a lot of games that seem to be the same in theme and/or mechanisms. You’ll want to do different things depending on how the games you’re making are too similar.
Creating games that are all the same theme isn’t the worst thing, especially when you’re designing games to pitch to publishers and you’re fine with them changing the theme, but you could end up doing the same sorts of designs if you keep choosing to use a theme that goes with a certain feel of game. Plus, while the theme doesn’t always matter to publishers, it’s nice to get someone excited about a game based on the theme, so having multiple themes of games can definitely increase your chances of getting noticed by a publisher.
It’s also possible to get stuck making games with the same mechanisms, or at least games that sound like they have the same mechanisms, if you don’t try to differentiate the games enough. For instance, you might like drafting games a lot, and that’s fine! But if all your games are drafting games, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t use the exact same kind of drafting in each game. There are a bunch of ways to differentiate your games, even if every game you make has set collection or press your luck or your personal favorite mechanism.
- Use different components with the mechanism. If you like press your luck, you can have different sorts of press your luck using different components, such as dice, a deck of cards, or tokens in a bag. Dice behave differently than a deck of cards does. If you’re working with a deck of cards, you’ll have to go through the deck before you see a specific card again if all the cards are unique, and It’s possible to card count with cards. With dice, each die has a certain probability of a value, but it’s rare they’ll all be the same value! Bag building is another option, as you never have to draw something out of the bag if you keep returning things to it.
- Use different variations of the mechanism. With spatial puzzle games, you can have a wide variety of ways that things fit together. You can place things on top of each other, next to each other, fit them into a grid, or have them be freeform. A game that’s limited by a certain play area will feel completely different from a game where you can go as far as you want in any direction. Another example is drafting, where there are so many types of drafting games! There’s the regular draft where players all take one card and pass the hand around the table; there’s “I split, you choose” draft where one player creates each of the drafting piles and everyone chooses which one they get; and then there’s the winston draft, a type of drafting that adds in a press your luck factor. There’s also open drafting (where players can see what everyone else has drafted so far) and closed drafting (where players cannot). Even if you use the same broad mechanism, you can make many games with it that all feel very different by making small changes.
- Vary the heaviness of the game (cognitive load). A light game will feel very different from a heavy game, even if they share the same theme and mechanisms. If you have two games that are too similar, you could try to take one of them and simplify it, while taking the other game and adding more meat to it. To make a game heavier, you could add in more mechanisms, like hidden objectives, recipe fulfillment, set collection, engine building, and more. When you add in mechanisms, you’ll have to change the game to incorporate them and the games will get further apart the more you add and subtract.
At some point in the pandemic, I made a lot of designs that were about birds using with spatial puzzles and engine building. However, each game was distinct in its own form, as the designs ranged from a really simple colors-and-numbers card game to a heavy engine-builder with polyominos. There was a game where the positions of the cards mattered for the engine that also had recipe fulfillment and a game that was mostly tiles and a few cards. The spatial aspects and amount and types of engines you could build were different in each game.
Game Weight is Not What You Intended
Sometimes you want to design a game with a specific weight, either to prove you can, because you want to work with a certain publisher, or because you want to enter a contest. However, it’s really easy for your designs to get a bit out of hand and go in directions you aren’t intending.
Too Complicated of a Design
Personally, my designs have a way of becoming more complicated than they need to be, but they tend to not go into truly heavy territory. Having too much in a game is generally a problem that more designers have than the problem of making games that are too light. It’s very easy to try to fix a problem by adding more, rather than stripping things out to make an elegant solution. There are a few things you can think about when you’re trying to simplify your game.
First, you can think about what could possibly be an expansion. There have been plenty of times where I took an entire aspect of a game out only to repackage it as a game expansion. It’s easy to do this if there’s anything that only interacts with the core of the game, instead of everything interacting together. To find these different aspects, you’ll want to try playing at least a few turns of your game without parts of it. If taking out a part of the game causes a giant cascade of changes to be made, this usually isn’t a good candidate for expansion material; but if the game is the same, but simpler or more focused without it, then that’s a good way to make an expansion.
- You can look at the number of different resources and only use certain resources in the base game, leaving all cards and tokens with the other resources for the expansion. For Way Too Many Cats, there are seven types of kittens, but only four types of cats in the base game. This is because the game felt right with four types of cats, and it worked really well for new players. However, I had made seven types of scoring conditions, so the other three types of scoring will most likely be in expansions, just to make learning and playing the game a lot easier. This also means the base game will have less components and weight.
- Are there any aspects that could be taken out that mostly add complexity to the game? When I’m first making cards for a game, I might list out all the things about the card that I think might be useful in the future, but aren’t actually needed or are extra information. These could be things like specific names of cards or classifications. If you have an engine-building game, there could be an aspect to the game at the beginning or ending of the engine that you could remove. It might also be a certain type of power or player interaction. One common way to make an expansion is to take all the cards with ‘Take That’ aspects and have them removed from the base game or have them be removable so that players don’t have to play with them. This can be as simple as adding an icon that players can quickly look for.
Too Simple of a Design
On the other hand, sometimes you make a game and it’s not heavy enough. It’s simple and it works, but it just needs a bit… more. When this happens, my go-to move is to think about the theme of the game and think about what the next logical step would be or if there’s anything that should happen earlier in the process. Is there anything that you can do with the output of the current system you have?
- When I’ve had systems that simply result in points, you can make these more interesting by adding another mechanism to the points. You could add area control, so whoever gained the most points by doing a specific thing will gain even more points. You could add set collection so that players want to collect a variety of things. The overall goal for this is that you want to make people make different decisions and go for different things than they otherwise would without the addition.
- You could also add a progress track that will cause things to happen when players do certain actions a particular number of times or reach a certain point or resource total. This could simply be a round track that causes more options to be available each round.
- The game could be multiple phases and switch midgame. Some games have players gather resources in the first half and then use them in the second half. The switch could happen for all players at the same time or players could choose when they switch between different phases.
See? There are a ton of ways you can change your game to make it the weight you were looking for without completely starting over!
Part 2
Game design doesn’t always go as you plan and neither do blog posts! This one has gotten a bit long, so to avoid a post that’s too heavy, I’m removing some of the components parts and putting them in part 2. Here’s what I’ll cover there:
- Components Not Being What They Should Be
- Too Many Game Designs
- General Tips
Did you enjoy this entry? How have your game designs gone off the rails? Please let me know! I’d love to hear what you think and what kind of things you’d like to see from this blog. Feel free to send me an email or comment with your thoughts!
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