Series 1: Game Mechanics.
Week 1: July 20 "Action point allowance" -- SVan
Week 2: July 26 "Roll and Move" -- Richard_Huzzey
Week 3: August 2 "Tile laying" -- jwarrend
Week 4: August 9 "Role selection" (e.g. Puerto Rico) -- Richard Huzzey
Series 2: Common Problems
Week 1: August 16 "Analysis Paralysis" -- Richard
Week 2: August 23 "Kingmaker" -- zaiga
Week 3: August 30 "Seat order effects"
Week 4: September 6 "Runaway leader/bash the leader" (two sides of one coin?)
Thanks to Steve and Richard for doing a fantastic job getting us started with moderating the first two forums. Richard did WAY more than was needed for his "opening essay". Please, others, sign up to moderate upcoming discussions!
If you have other favorite mechanics or problems that aren't in this list, don't worry -- we'll get to them! The third series will be, I think, "player goals" -- eg, "race", "VP accumulation", etc.
-Jeff
Thanks for your question. The "Topics in Game Design" forum is, in its current form, at least, two forums in one. There is the "official" part of the forum, for which there will be exactly one discussion topic each week, and the discussions will typically fit into "series" that span several weeks. Each week's discussion will have a "moderator", who basically just writes a brief essay about the topic (2-3 paragraphs). Anyone can sign up to fill this role by IM'ing or PM'ing me.
Then there is the "unofficial" aspect, where people are free to post topics that they find interesting, subject to a few provisos -- the most important one being that this forum is about game design in general terms, and discussion about a game that one is creating is not on-topic.
If you want to propose a "series" of discussion topics, you can do that publically in the forum here, so we can all discuss and brainstorm. If you want to start an individual topic, feel free to go ahead and do so! I will, for the time being, reserve the right to relocate posts to different forums if I deem them not within the scope of the TiGD forum.
Finally, your post reminds me that we're nearing the end of our current series, which means it's time to announce our next series, which I'll do in a separate thread.
Thanks,
Jeff