"Typical mistakes in boardgame design" lecture

For those visiting BGDF its just a summary of what we all know

Give us more than just the topic, i bet you can

I'm "the other guy" so I'll just pop in with some comments.

Ansi's choice of word is a bit wrong there. The whole thingy was about "typical gamemechanical problems in games" and thoughts around that subject. It certainly is exactly the same thing that has been discussed here in the "Topics in Game Design", but we just thought it might interest people to mention about our lecture here as well... and actually it was more of a discussion session rather than a lecture (the lecture part was there perhaps more to inspire discussion and wake some thoughts).

The points Ansi has listed now in his blog are basically a direct translation (from Finnish) of the document we used for our "lecture" part. They don't contain everything we said about the subject but they pretty much contain all the points we talked about. And yes, it certainly is pretty much a summary.

The whole point of our lecture was not to give the ultimate truth behind everything around the subject and netiher was it to dig very deep into the various topics (after all they would each deserve their own lecture). It was just to get people to think about mechanical problems and taking them into consideration not only when designing but also when rating or discussing about games... a kind of introductory session on the vast subject.

Indeed. And because it's such a fundamental thing it certainly is important (IMO) to take it into consideration from the very start. I've myself faced surprisingly many "glorious" gameideas and descriptions where only the descriptions of the mechanics show that they haven't given thought on various "typical problems" that would arise from the suggested interactions between the mechanics... or if they have given thought they haven't had much experience from such problems.

Therefore we thought an introduction and summary on the topic was important... they might be self evident things to most users here but we just thought it still might interest someone even here.

-Stefu

PS. Some small background:
-We are just hobby designers but very active gamers and thus we have faced alot of game mechanical problems in games but we might not have faced the task of actually solving them in designing
-We come from Finland were boardgaming culture is starting to bloom but gamedesign culture is in babies shoes (thus we wanted to hold an introductory thingy to get mainly hobbyist designers to think about the topic)
-Ropecon is a big annual convention in Finland made by a large group of volunteers. It's the biggest annual convention in the Nordic countries with over 3000 visitors each year... it's pretty much a mini Gencon.