In this three part series, read about the League’s secret mission in coordination with Stonemaier Games to select the top 10 games every designer should play at least once!

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Key Links

Part I, Jamey Stegmaier introduced the challenge, and we our methods.

Games Designers Play – James Mathe polled designers from top BGG choices.

Top 10 List on BGG – open voting, add games and thumb up your top 10.

Criteria

During our discussions on Trello, Mark and Christina Major came up with a stellar list of criteria on selecting games that I wanted to highlight here. Not everyone used these guidelines or felt a part of creating them due to the late stage in the game when they were introduced, but I think they are very useful for considering game lessons.

Overall List Criteria

These criteria should be considered for every game, with the view of the list as a whole.

Broad and Inclusive

The list needs to have a wide variety of lessons about game design. We should attempt not to focus too much on any one idea, and pay attention to any potential blind spots we have due to our own collective preferences.

Teach Lessons in 30 Minutes or Less

Each game doesn’t have to be short, but the primary lessons we want designers to get should be encountered within the first half hour of gameplay. If the interesting part of the game only shows up during end-game scoring, for example, it probably shouldn’t be on the list.

Focused Lessons

When playing each game, designers shouldn’t have to hunt for what part of the game is valuable. Likewise, designers shouldn’t have to sift through a dozen different gameplay concepts in a game to figure out which ones they should pay attention to for their own design goals.

Positive Lessons

Playing any game on the list should prompt designers to think constructively about game design. We should avoid populating the list with “this is what not to do” examples.

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Criteria for Individual Games

A game should be suggested if it works well for any of these criteria, though generally the more criteria it works for, the better. Some criteria are better than others, and we may have to have some not represented since we only have 10 games to represent them with.

Prompts Thought About Core Aspects of Game Design

This is kind of a meta-criteria, and can be redundant, but some games are built to directly play with our understanding of games and how they work. A catch-all for games that we’re really not sure how to categorize otherwise.

Creates a Particular Experience

This is a particularly strong criteria if the experiences are crafted in a subtle or non-obvious way, given a description of the mechanics.

Good Balance (Symmetric or Asymmetric)

This does not have to be “player vs player” balance. This could also include a good balance in a player’s choice between various paths.

Rules Clarity / Focus / Simplicity

Simpler rules work well for the “Focused Lessons” goal, but even more complicated rules might work here if they are intuitive and easy to understand.

Replayability (Variability, Depth)

A game with strong replayability makes a designer want to explore the game’s potential, though the potential needs to be apparent from a single session.

Theme & Story (Strong Context)

A game with strong context does a good job integrating the theme and the mechanics, creating a game that is immersive with intuitive player choices.

Systems, Math, & Probability

An easily overlooked criteria, any designer’s toolbox should include experience with a game that does interesting things with the math and logic of how its parts move.

Player Engagement

Strong player engagement can be achieved a number of different ways, but it’s always valuable to make sure players are happy paying attention to the game uninterrupted through the entire session.

Components

Some games are notable for having atypical game components. Though we should avoid including games for the sake of novelty, it can be good to have examples of games using a unique outside-the-box idea to the fullest extent.

Influence on Other Games

It is good to be educated about where particular game design ideas came from. A weak criteria, but if an idea is really pervasive it is worth including. Also, it might be easier to meet the “Focused Lessons” goal with the original example.

Exemplar of Genre/Mechanic

While this is a good criteria for “advanced” lessons, it should be a low priority criteria for a top 10 list. There are a LOT of genres and mechanics, and fitting all notable genres and mechanics into 10 games is unlikely.

Here is a short list of genres and mechanics, some of which we’ve already suggested games based on:

Economy

Time Based

Social Deduction

In-Game Deck Building

Worker Placement

Drafting

Bidding

RPG

Card Battle (CCG/LCG)

Party Game

Abstract Strategy

Wargame/Tactics

Card Game

Tile Placement (Map Building)

Press-Your-Luck

Area Control

We might discuss some of these if we think they are important enough for game design as a whole to prioritize in the list.

Mechanics Soup

Also a relatively weak criteria. A game that works for Mechanics Soup could help us showcase several mechanics in one game, but it also goes in the opposite direction of the “Focused Lessons” goal.

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Designer Top 15 lists

It’s been said that the sum of the parts is more than the sum of the whole, and it’s no less true when you ask 12 different designers and teams to pick their own lists. Yes, we’re happy to have come up with a single, final list, but we each took time and care to make our own picks, and it would seem a shame not to share them to give the big picture.

I struggled with how to present 12 designer lists without it being a wall of text. I settled on a tab system, which was an easy enough WordPress thing to do. You can click through as many of these as you like, if you are curious to see what we nominated.

Note: reasons were listed as fragments and are short “twitter” length on purpose for Jamey to combine a few together on reference sheets.

Final Score?

Stay tuned – next week we’ll tabulate our results in the “The top 10 Games that Every Designer Should Play At Least Once” for Stonemaier Design Day 2014.

Please continue to leave your top 10 (or 15) on the comments!

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Part III, final picks.