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Boardgame hobbyists and/or designers?
What's our population of boardgame fans like? What are your favorite games? What kind of experiences do you like to get out of games?
What's our population of boardgame fans like? What are your favorite games? What kind of experiences do you like to get out of games?
Indeed there is... we even have a resident professional designer here already. :P
And one of our very first threads was about people's favorite boardgames.
I used to play some magic, which is an incredible engine, and I've spent a few years immersed in the hobby.
The way I experience the numbers in games has made it hard for me to play with people who are less experienced. That's not bragging, really -- it's just difficult to get excited over proper execution in a domain that seems so broadly shallow to me. Boardgames aren't actually shallow, but the math governing their core systems can be, so maybe you know what I mean. I still love cardboard very much, but my relationship to it has changed and now I pursue designs of my own in mostly abstracted veins. I like Carl Chudyk's designs best.
Recently I've been playing around with standard poker decks and trying to make them express something new. I've invented a novelty shuffle where you combine half the deck upside down with the rest. It gives a strong, varied texture to the pack with a lot of gameplay potential, I think, though I haven't found anywhere great to put it yet.
Interesting about the math. Are you saying you look at games from a statistical/probability perspective? Or from a Game Theory perspective?
Nothing so scientific, unfortunately -- mostly I'm just very pretentious.
Virtually every system in modern cardboard design is ruled by the number of actions you can take in a given period of time. Action economy has sub-areas, I think: graph theory is very big, as are the twin concepts of card advantage and tempo. Most choices you can make are quantifiable in units specific to your objective structures. Even in games with a lot of secrets or randomness it is very difficult to obscure these principles.
To be clear, I'm not claiming to be an expert at anything you put in front of me before I've played it, but even so I usually crunch through a game's essential systems pretty quickly. And, of course, many games are too combinatorically complex to intuit or grasp seriously by any but the most dedicated and/or talented players.