article thumbnail

“Post-Balance” Cogmind Item Expansion

Grid Sage Games

Beta 11 was a huge milestone in Cogmind development, having completed a comprehensive review of all items and their stats and mechanics in order to rebalance where necessary, a process I wrote about in detail last year. As part of this drive, for months I’ve been creating over 100 new items, most of them including new mechanics.

Balance 52
article thumbnail

Creating the Perfect Board Game Scoring System (Tasty Humans Pt. 2)

Brand Game Development

Once you craft the basic concepts of your game and find the right mechanics to express them , you have to set rules. In my first Designer Diary post for Tasty Humans , I talked about the mechanics of dropping shapes (which represent the titular “Tasty Humans”) in order to fill up the stomach of the each player’s monster. So What Next?

Tile 130
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

Old World Designer Notes #2: City Sites

Designer Notes

In the original version, one player discovered that the optimum strategy was to cover every fourth tile on the board with a city, a mind-numbingly boring strategy that was always the best choice. Namely, building an urban improvement and producing a specialist on any tile extend the city borders in all six directions.

Tile 52
article thumbnail

A Simple Approach to Player-Designed Robots

Grid Sage Games

In this test recording, a robot created by the Botcube is represented with a Mutant tile, but will have their own once released. But since I do think this mechanic will be fun to play with, and there’s no guarantee that other map will actually happen, I think this is a good opportunity to at least provide a taste of it!

article thumbnail

A dramatic design shift for Spellstorm

Keith Burgun

For month after month, I tried fixing them with different supporting mechanisms, different ways that cards were obtained, different ways damage was dealt, and a lot more, but nothing really fixed the fundamental problem. Once I realized that we were going to have to ditch the core mechanism, that kind of meant something like starting over.

article thumbnail

How to Design the Mechanics of Your Board Game

Brand Game Development

The core engine is what’s left when you strip a game of mechanics and obstacles. The core engine is the bare minimum set of mechanics and concepts you need to have a functioning (but not necessarily fun) game. Game mechanics are how we bring the core engine of a game to life. What are game mechanics?

Mechanics 130
article thumbnail

Marvel Snap - The Definitive Deconstruction

Deconstructor of Fun

For a quick and general introduction of the game, it’s a player vs player only CCG game, which limits your cards to only 10 per deck, each game is less than 4 minutes, and it uses a very simple poker-like betting mechanic to keep things interesting. However, Marvel Snap has simplified this mechanic to make it even more accessible.

Tile 95