Your Turn! by Scott Rogers
Your Turn! by Scott Rogers, is a must read for aspiring game designers.
When I created the Elevation of Privilege game, I got lucky. The set of choices I made led to a playable, even fun game with a purpose. Some of those choices were informed: I wanted a game that was easy to learn, not the Dungeons & Dragons of threat modeling. Some were serendipitous: I saw people pushing their laptops to the side, and made the cards larger. But what I didn’t have was a guidebook. I relied on my knowledge of games, stumbled on spades as I explored ideas, and it worked well enough that there’s now versions focused on privacy, OWASP threats, machine learning and cloud.
And while those are great, there are many other games for security, built on all sorts of foundations. Several years back, I found The White Box Toolkit for game design, and I raved about it. It presents tradeoffs and choices in a way that I think is tremendously helpful to people making serious games.
Recently, I’ve read another book, Your Turn!: The Guide to Great Tabletop Design by Scott Rogers. It takes a completely different approach to game design. Mr. Rogers* walks you through designing and testing complete game after complete game, with increasing levels of difficulty. It feels like he's there in your game room with you, encouraging and cajoling you as you create together. Along the way, you read stories of his experiences building and selling games.
There were places where I longed for the White Box approach. For example, in discussing custom dice, I found myself thinking of the discussion in White Box about when to use dice (pure randomness) and when to use a card deck (randomness without replacement, or varied probabilities, changing probabilities). And there were places where I found the Your Turn approach to be better, because he was making an opinionated argument, or because he worked those tradeoffs into a set and tackled it under “complexity.” There he points out that complexity accumulates in a design and distracts from playability, and points out that it comes from planning work, nested complexity, spatial complexity. component complexity, algorithms, and rules and mechanics.” Similarly, Your Turn spotlights the physical playspace: what’s close to or far from a player. Had I had that framework handy, my serendipitous discovery about laptops would have emerged from the frame.
That’s one of the two strengths of Your Turn: The frameworks and the stories of how to use them.
If you want to develop a game, iteration and playtesting are essential steps. And so are both the White Box Toolkit and Your Turn!. I cannot wait to see what new fun they spawn.
Disclaimer: Wiley sent me a complimentary electronic copy.
* As should be apparent, I couldn't resist.