From an 80's era games developer I say ...

Doug!

Lovely to meet you and can I say what a wonderful post :)

I think there is (way down under the hood) a lot of similarties between boardgames and properly well crafted computer games. I infact originaly started wanting to develop an "App" game for iPhone or android and decided to do some reserach. In my acres of research about games design where it got its roots from, and the tenants and fundamentlas of "fun" and what a game really means, it drew me further back into history leading onto early windows stuff (trasnport tycoon) then through MUDs, SCHMUPs, then finally onto the atari classics (that I used to play when I was younger: my father fancied himself a bit of a programmer and tried his hand on a few home games as well by the way! His favorite claim to fame is that he designed the shooting mechanics as seen in "Worms" and "Tanks" a few years before the games came out ^^ "I did that first you know?!")
But of course leading even more historically you get to Pong and such like - but of course current games (especially the RTS's) have been Majorly influenced (some would say entirely created) by German Euro Board games! And in my quest to make a game (starting as an App) I felt it right to "do it properly" and found my way here making my game post apocalyptic cardgame AtomPunk.

Have you found some decent other forums and resources? Unbeknownst (sp?) to me there is an absolute mind boggling world out there in the niche boardgame hobby now and if you need any help whatsoever just ask and I (and all of us here at bgdf) shall try our best to help you out :)

Really looking forward to speaking to you more Doug!

Sam

Game Play technology = Mechanics :)

I'm pretty sure at least.

In PC games - game play technology would mean "the ideas and elements that make up the gameplay" (healthcounters, rolling screens, tech trees, weapon upgrades etc) back then, if you wanted to add a new type layer onto your game, you had to literally create it and "advance your games technology" (eg sim city/sim life's first macro scale or Cannon Fodders map exploration)

In boardgames it would mean "The ideas and elements that make up gameplay (roll and move, worker placement, tile exploration, deck building, push your luck, hidden info, auction, drafting etc) :)

Very well put Doug.

I do agree with your conclusion here actually. Or as far as product marketing / spin goes about these things - ad agencies get paid to come up with new ways of selling washing powder even after not changing after 100's of years!

Just so you don't get others confused, generally in boardgame terms these would be called Mechanics. Eg: The mechanics of "Deck Building" in Dominion. as demonstrated here, if you call it anything other than mechanics, people may well become confused more easily.

So what kind of ideas have you got in the bubbling pot so far? Any magic "Ahh I know!" moments?

A lot of mechanics have been tried and tested and of course some are more or less popular than others as dictated by the fashion of the moment. I think currently, still one of the major "trends" in mechanics is the deck building that dominion made famous. there are dice version of it (Quarriors) there are them that use poker chips, hundereds of iterations, some that combine it with a RPGish element (Thunderstone). I wonder what the next one will be *ponders*

I actually did the same thing yesterday, created a Card class & Deck class and added some methods to them (in Python..).

I created them so i would be able to simulate an idea I had in my head, and the result was totally different then I had calculated. Had to double check everything and noticed that my math was off a bit (well hadn't taken all parameters into account) so the simulation really worked as intended.

Really liked how smooth and easy it became to do simulations after you've created all the classes you need :)

Hope you'll also find some use in your code!