20 Games That Teach Important Design Lessons

One thing I hear all the time is “play all the games you can before you start to design them.” I appreciate the spirit of this advice, even if it hasn’t necessarily applied to every great designer I’ve met. I can say that playing and studying games has taught me most of everything I know about them, and I know for sure I wouldn’t be where I am without my trial and error efforts to capture and repurpose their content.

The problem is, there are so many games, especially for a newcomer to the hobby. Even if you played games as a full time job, 40 hours a week, you would not be able to keep up with the thousands of new releases that debut each year.

With that said, I’d like to share my personal study guide. Each of the games on this list hold some important lesson to me, which I’ve put to good use along my journey, and I hope that they can help you, too.

Pandemic (2008, Z-Man Games)

Variable player powers in a cooperative game can lend not only replayability, but a sense to players that they feel special when they are able to uniquely affect the game state. This feeling adds more than its weight to the fun.

Beat Design – Matt Leacock explains this much better than I can in his GDC talk, but here’s the gist. Cooperative games, like any good entertainment, need beats. There should be times in the game where players feel incredible and powerful, and times when they feel crushed and defeated.

Lords of Waterdeep (2012, Wizards of the Coast)

A solid introduction to worker placement. This isn’t the first or best worker placement game, but many elements in its design are noteworthy.

A good example of scaling and escalation across multiple axes. The game scales to number of players in multiple ways, and also introduces an additional worker halfway through the game to scale to its own increasing WP real-estate.

With the right presentation, just about any game can be thematic, even if it is honestly just a deterministic “cube-pusher.”

Uno (1971, Mattel)

A design lesson from Eric Lang, passed on to me by JR Honeycutt of Waitress Games: Games are for the people that play them, not for us who make them.

An experience can only be positive for an audience so long as that audience is able to access that experience. Uno has very few bars to access, so anyone can sit down and enjoy themselves with it.

Circle the Wagons (2017, Button Shy Games)

You can accomplish a whooooooole lot with very few components.

Two axes (in this case, color and icon) can provide a great deal of game space to explore, as long as you go about it in the right way.

Circle the Wagons is better than I’ll ever be. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to just give up now, because I know I can’t make something this good.

The Networks (2016, Formal Ferret Games)

It is possible to incorporate humor into a game without relying on that humor to carry the experience. The Networks is a good example of a game that does so, and does it tastefully.

If your game encourages you to build an engine or tableau, that building process can be much more fun if you’re emotionally invested in the end product. Notice how, when you play The Networks, you feel proud of the programs you’ve cobbled together, and how each combination of show and star and advertisement feels special.

Notice how you feel when you score your viewers at the end of each round. You had to count quite a lot (the board even comes with a built-in abacus)… but those points assign objective value to your subjective decisions. This is the kind of feedback that’s important to many players: make choices, be rewarded in a measurable way.

Dominion (2009, Rio Grande Games)

Deckbuilding is a simple, streamlined way to present a positive feedback loop: players make decisions based on their gut with results that can’t be accurately predicted, and they feel rewarded for those decisions each time they have an opportunity to use the things they purchased.

Modular design – Make more of the game than you need, and play with different subsets of it in each session. This excitement leads to repeat play.

The Resistance: Avalon (2012, Indie Boards and Cards)

An enduring social deduction game, which is absolutely essential to study and understand if you intend to create your own social deduction games.

A study in incomplete information. Players make their choices in the game based partly on what they can measure, and fill in the rest based on how they feel. Intuitive decisions feel much more rewarding than analytical ones.

Rock Paper Wizard (2016, Wizkids)

An exemplar of simultaneous action selection – where each player secretly chooses one of several options, and all reveal their choices at the same time. The classic “Iocaine Powder” dilemma.

An exemplar of intuitively accessible game systems. Take one brief glance at the components and the name of the game, and you know 90% of what you need to play.

Castles of Burgundy (2011, Ravensburger/Alea)

A quintessential design in determinstic, procedural games. The true Caesar of point salad.

Dice can be put to good use as an input device, rather than an output device. When rolling a d6 to determine the damage you deal with your short sword, for example, the best result is 6x better than the worst–that model generally translates quite poorly to the tabletop. However, a 1 and a 6 are procedurally the same in Castles of Burgundy, with the input variance determining your options rather than their results.

When your game focuses on an audience that wants to make clever decisions, then tension in those decision points is extremely important. In Castles of Burgundy, you’re never choosing between an apple and a slightly larger apple; you’re choosing between incomparable apples and oranges. Tense decision points come from evaluating your options on more than one axis, when those axes cannot compare with one another in any certain way.

Deus (2014, Pearl Games)

Let your players do things. Deus is a game with very few “speed bumps” between the player’s capabilities and their wants. As a result, every turn can feel fantastic.

“Tall vs Wide” tension – Incentivize players to focus on a single asset, and incentivize them to diversify their assets. This tension can result in players following different lines of play.

Century: Spice Road (2017, Plan B Games)

It is possible to include math in your game without demanding the players actually do that math. In Century, yellow cubes have an expected value of 1.0, red are 2.0, green are 3.0, and brown are 4.0. The player that wins will most likely be the player that is able to milk the most total expected value out of their turns on average. Here’s the catch: you probably didn’t know or care about that math model when you were playing, did you?

Tactical Framework – Imagine playing a solo game of Century: you’d just be running on a hamster wheel. When you add in other players, Century’s tactical framework changes from turn to turn. Sequencing your plays isn’t particularly difficult in a vacuum, but other players’ actions can change the opportunities that you have available to you. For example, when one player takes a new card from the market and leaves those yellow cubes out, now you are tempted to do something a bit different. Or, if a player suddenly converts their cubes into another type and you think they can beat you to an objective, you may be wise to pivot. This indirect player interaction is what makes the game work.

For Sale (1997, Eagle-Gryphon Games)

I actually do not know who originally published this one – my apologies if this attribution is inaccurate!

Elegance – When appropriate, convey your core experience to your audience in the least cluttered, most focused way possible.

Mechanical synthesis – For Sale combines an auction in one phase with simultaneous action selection in another phase. The result is much greater than the sum of its parts, as each lends context to the other.

Exploding Kittens (2015, The Oatmeal/AdMagic)

The experience is by far the most important part of a game, to the point that the most important purpose of systems design is to stay clear of that experience’s way.

The story behind a project and its creator absolutely matter.

Acquire (1964, Avalon Hill)

“Modern” board games are hardly new. While some elements of Acquire are dated, it can still be noted that Sid Sackson was making incredible games two hundred years before you were born.

Economic modeling – Acquire is a game that revolves around transactions, and turning investments around into profit…again, in a way where the math doesn’t obstruct the experience.

Ethnos (2017, CMON)

Area Influence – Ethnos is one of many exemplary area influence games. A key difference between area influence and area control is that, in area influence, one player’s investment in an area does not come at the cost of another player’s investment.

Push Your Luck – The card exchanges and ecology in Ethnos are fascinating to watch. While the core rules are very simple, the dynamic that emerges is beautiful. As the round nears its end, the players are faced with losing the value out of unspent cards in their hand; however, in choosing to play those cards, they may be creating opportunities for other players that end up causing the round to be prolonged. This nail-biting tension is just what you want to see in a push-your-luck system.

Kemet (2012, Matagot)

A game does not need to rely on a random element to create high-stakes, serendipitous moments. Kemet features these moments, but with very little in the way of variance.

Tactile experiences can be important in certain games. Notice how fun it feels to be the only player with a giant serpent miniature, and to smash it on the board.

Champions of Midgard: Valhalla Expansion (2017, Grey Fox Games)

Loss Aversion – Play Champions of Midgard, and then compare it to the experience with the Valhalla expansion. In one, your lost warriors are simply gone: you’ve invested resources and opportunity, and you may end up getting nothing for them. With Valhalla, the consolation prize of the soul tokens smooths out this negative play experience, and allows even unlucky players to continue feeling interest in the game.

Power Grid (2004, Rio Grande)

Organic resource market – Power Grid features a clustered track where the price of resources scales to their demand. The clever part is, no player calculation is required, since that track also serves as the storage/supply for those components when they are not in use.

Catchup Mechanism – The player that trails behind has first pick on the resource market, meaning they pay lower prices. They also receive an extra bit of flexibility during the asset auction. The greatest takeaway here is that a catchup mechanism shouldn’t necessarily give a poorly-performing player a way to win–it should give that player access to the things in the game that feel good (especially if that feeling can give the player hope).

Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition (2017, Fantasy Flight Games)

Access Investment – Players that are willing to invest the time and bandwidth to access game will expect a greater level of agency in the game, and will feel a profound satisfaction when their expectations are met.

Engagement – In a game where there could be several minutes between each of your turns, Twilight Imperium keeps players’ attention and engagement in many different ways. First, the game’s considerable breadth is enough to keep players picking at the puzzle during their downtime. Second, many elements in the game allow you to take action while it isn’t your turn.

Scythe (2016, Stonemaier Games)