Who do you design your games for?

Foremost I design games for me, primarily because I'm not even close to experienced enough to design a game that I know would be fun for someone else even though it's not fun for me. Maybe someday, though that's quite a challenge.

Once I get past me, I design games for 3 different groups: my regular spielfriek-y group, my semi-regular smart-friends-but-not-gamers group, and my family (who are also smart but who have different tastes than the second group). I want each of my designs to make at least one of those groups extremely happy and reasonably satisfy the other two then I've got a winner.

I am working on a couple of games for the Wal-Mart/Target/Toys-R-Us crowd that should also be good enough to please me and gamers looking for a light filler. It's a notoriously hard market to get into, though, so they're not high priority just yet.

Oh, and I've got one I'm working on for a couple of museums, but they don't know it yet. :)

Better get moving on that one. Martin Wallace (Liberté, Age of Steam) has managed to sell a design to the British Museum, which means that for once they will actually be selling a decent game, instead of the usual tat ;)

Anyway, in answer to the question, I think that any amateur designer inevitably designs for themselves in the first instance, and perhaps for others later. (I recently designed one that played to the different strengths of two of my regular playtesters, and it was interesting watching them gradually realise it :))

I create games that I think are fun to play and are somewhat unique. Right now there is a flood of building/German style games on the market so I am not about to go and create another. I have been a game hobbyist for nearly 25 years now so I have seen many trends come and go. One of the current trends in board games in individual play. Your playing a game against others yet nothing you do has any effect on your opponents. I think these types of game while not necessarily bad and sometimes good are missing real competitive interaction. I like games with competition and direct interaction so most my games will have both of these elements. I might be designing for a narrow group of gamers like myself but without my games those gamers could be stuck with only searching e-bay for some out of print game that they loved to play years ago and missing the fun of the new game.

How about a prime example of modern popular games.

" Puerto Rico "

Not that it is a bad game. The only effect you have on other players is using up recourses before they can get to them. You don't attack them or change what they have gained during the game only what they can gain. indirect interaction!

My wife and i play yathtzee on occasion and enjoy it also. I think that some people are getting the idea that i think there is no place for these game. There is certainly a place or they would not sell well. As in the case of " Puerto Rico " which i hear is a high volume seller. The thing about the game is if some one gets far ahead all i can do is race to catch up. I can't destroy, steal or devalue what my opponent has gained. All this is fine yet i would be spending my gaming money on something with a more battle like atmosphere. What i am saying is that i prefer more combat oriented games or game with combat like elements so i design games that i would prefer to play regardless of the popularity. I must emphasize that i am not a professional and never intend to support myself by making games. If that was my intention i would looking for the next big thing. I am a nostalgic gamer who would like to see more games on the market like the ones i grew up with. in the 70's and 80's before Hasbro blackholed some of my favorite game company's. That is also why i like this group and hope that every one out there that wants to publish their game gets a chance at least once. With few exceptions i buy my games from small and micro game company's and i encourage everyone here to consider that your 10 to 30 dollars means allot more to them then it ever will to Hasbro.

Yes, I think that's something I can agree with. While PR and PoF aren't multi-player solitaire, the interaction isn't direct. Instead of attacking a player directly, you attack the resource you know they're after. At this point, it's a matter of taste. Personally, I love both games' indirect mechanisms, but I realize they're not for everyone.

If I can make one last point on this poor flogged horse... :?

PR and PoF have interesting mechanisms that keep most of the players involved in the endgame. What they both have in common are devices that give a player a huge gain in victory points at the very end of the game (for Puerto Rico, these are the 10-doubloon buildings; for PoF, these are the 8-point Prestige Cards). PR also keeps victory points hidden to further cloud game progress. As a result, the exact game leader is usually a mystery.

But I can see Dralius' point, because neither game has a way you can directly take away what another opponent has already gained in cold hard victory points. If you're up against someone who really knows the game and you give him an opportunity at the very beginning, you may have lost right there. Also, both games have a relatively small factor of pure luck; the different situations that arise in playing them come mainly from the different choices each player has made. Since both games lack a device to directly interfere with a clear leader, it can be very frustrating to be five minutes into a 90-minute game and know that you'll be coming in last place.

Yes, I hope you understand that I'm not trying to say that PR or PoF are intrinsically better than a game with more direct player interaction, like a wargame. If there were only one style of games, we probably wouldn't be playing at all.

~Gil

Direct interaction in the sense that you can destroy an opponent's resources, armies or whatever does pose a problem for the game's designer. Far too often you'll see that direct interaction leads to overt leaderbashing, which in turn may bog the game down. This doesn't mean that you cannot use "destructive" interaction in a game, but that you should be cautious when you do use it.

I always find it important to think about how a game will end. What is the endcondition? Is it possible that players keep dragging eachother down and that a situation may arise that no-one is able to win? May the game go on and on, with no real progress being made, just players picking on eachother and dragging eachother down? If that is the case, then you may want to reconsider the use of direct interaction or try to find a angle.

One of my favorite tricks to use in a game with direct interaction is to not let one player own one particular thing (or make it a choice whether they want to own something completely or not) and to score at intervals, not just at the end of the game.

For example, in my competition entry "Gheos" players can "share" a civilization and at the end of their turn they may decide to use a scoring chip to score points. A smart player will spread his risk by having followers in different civilizations, so that when on civilization is destroyed they will still have some followers left. When a player chooses to invest heavily in one civilization, it is likely that this civilization is attacked and whiped out in the following turns, but at least the player can score points for it before that happens, if he chooses to.

I don't think direct interaction is so much a design problem when dealing with shorter games (half an hour or less). The trick is to have a "timer", which makes sure that the game will end on time (for exmaple a deck of cards that runs out).