Recently I’ve been frustrated by the term asymmetry in game design. What are asymmetric games? Common examples are Cosmic Encounter, Chaos in the Old World, Twilight Struggle, Android: Netrunner, or Fury of Dracula. Looking over that list, it’s clear that we mean lots of different things when we talk about asymmetry! Twilight Struggle, for example, »more
Author Archives: Isaac Shalev
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Design Pattern: I’ll Rates You!
After last week’s post about worker placement games that dont’ favor buying a lot of workers, a lot of readers brought up some additional examples. By far the most common one was one of my favorite and most-played games of all time, Through the Ages. Thing is, TTA isn’t a worker-placement game. It’s a tableau-building, action »more
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Design Pattern: Don’t Work Harder, Work Smarter
When sitting down to learn a new worker placement game, many of us are just waiting for the answer to one question: how do I get more workers? Since workers are the currency of a worker placement game, getting more workers is the key to getting more of everything else: resources, turn order advantage and »more
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Design Pattern: May The Force Be With You
When I was about nine years old, I excitedly challenged my dad to a game of chess. I had just learned about the 4-move mate, which seemed like magic to me. My dad was a strong chess player, and he never took anything off of his fastball. I was excited to deliver a 4-move knockout blow »more
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Design Patterns: You Can Also Use It As A Resource
Recently, I’ve been addicted to Jump Drive, the latest game from Tom Lehman’s Race for the Galaxy world. This fast-playing card game carries on the central concept of the previous games in the series, which is that players play cards for their printed effects by paying a cost of a number of other cards. Each »more
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Design Patterns: I Have Something To Show You
I’ll never forget the first time I played Pandemic. After the very first outbreak, we performed the Intensify step, shuffled the discard pile and placed in on top of the draw deck. *Gulp.* We knew what was coming. Every turn going forward, we’d now draw the very same cities that had been infected in the »more
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Design Patterns: What ELSE Do You Know?
Every game should tests players’ skills in one way or another, or else it doesn’t have meaningful decisions baked into it. Skills that are common to many games include being able to gauge probabilities and calculate expected values, to be able to convert in-game currencies like money, goods and victory points, and to be able »more
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Design Pattern: We All Do The Same Thing But It Turns Out Different
Game designers struggle mightily with symmetry. Symmetry in what players can do helps ensure fairness, but it can also produce mirror-image play that’s boring. Besides, players love to identify with their in-game avatars, and having different abilities helps players do that. So do other asymmetries like having different setups, different units, and so forth. Some »more
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Design Pattern: It’s A Cover-up
No, I’m not talking about politics, or make-up. I’m talking about the design pattern of using tokens of different shapes to cover up an area, which has experienced a major surge in popularity lately. Based on the mathematical concept of tessellation, or how to completely cover a surface with geometric shapes, this design pattern offers »more
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Design Patterns: Everything You Do Is The Reason I Don’t Trust You
Distrust is a delicious ingredient in game design! What’s so fascinating about this design pattern is that it’s about the metagame, the game above the table, rather than the game that’s on the table. In a game featuring this pattern of stoking distrust, players typically have some shared goals and some opposing goals, and play »more
