Howdy from Canada,
I'm Jefe. I've been a gamer since I was a pre-teen, becoming involved in such classics as Squad Leader, Risk, and the standard parker brothers fair.
My earliest memories of being hooked by games (and game mechanics) revolve around watching my brother play an aged classic called "Super KGB" where players were investigating a large mansion, trying to find 'the secret formula' while avoiding wandering security guards. My brother even bought me my first set of DnD dice (just around the time ADnD was in full swing).
Since then I've had an on and off career as a gamer. I got sucked into computer gaming and Massive Multiplayer Online games - starting with Ever Quest (the classic), through Asheron's Call, and into World of Warcraft where my good gaming friends, my wife and I gamed in an e-environment.
We also have had a long standing tradition of friday-night games-night. Here we play many of the popular euro games in groups of up to 8 (believe it or not).
My personal game collection includes:
(Not my intention to brag about a collection, but to show my range of game interests...and I usually watch for the hotness coming out of each yearly Essen.)
Carcassonne (with several expansions) - My first owned Euro!
New World: A Carcassonne Variant
Settlers of Catan
Agricola (with most of the extras: Farmers, goodies deck, animeeples, etc)
Small World (With all the expansions)
Small World Underground
A Game of Thrones Board Game, 2nd Ed.
Flashpoint: Fire Rescue
Eruption
Thunderstone (6 expansions)
Dominion (4 Expansions)
Alhambra Big Box
Power Grid: First Sparks
Kingdom Builder
Bang!
Incan Gold
Munchkin: Cthulhu Edition (with expansions)
Potion Making Practice (a quirky and fun little russian game)
Dominant Species
Puerto Rico
Caylus
Colosseum
Pirate's Cove
Ticket to Ride
Diplomacy
King Maker
World of Warcraft Board Game (Played 3 times in as many years!)
Gammarauders
On my Current Wishlist are:
Survive: Escape from Atlantis
Eclipse
Lords of Waterdeep
Belfort
More Power Grid
More Ticket to Ride
Expansions to Kingdom Builder and Puerto Rico
+more fun-ness from Essen.
My wife, when she picks games to play, usually chooses Puerto Rico, Caylus or Carcassonne.
My buddy (C) and co-designer really enjoys Agricola and Flash Point.
I'm not sure which one my favorite is, but I'll play any of these games happily.
I live in Calgary, Alberta. I work in IT - currently a manager, but have done BA and PM work, so planning and project organization are skills I've built over time.
My interest in game design came when one of my gamer buddies (K) and I decided to enter a Days of Wonder contest to create a Ticket to Ride expansion. Our entry was not chosen, but that sparked an interest in me that grew from there.
After that project was put on hold, (K) and I talked a little bit about designing other games - and have an idea for one on-deck right now. ANOTHER buddy (C) and I have been working on a game now for about 3 months, though.
(C) is what you might refer to as a 'rules lawyer' and is an excellent resource for finding and tuning balance in games. ) And in the process of designing this (new and unnamed) game I have wandered through the Board Game Geek forums, the personal blog of Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim (of Belfort and Train of Thought fame) who are VERY informative, a few other designer blogs and interviews online, and then to here.
I think my path came to this form from a game publishers website, where it was explicitly suggested that spending time here could only be beneficial for any game designer.
I've been lurking for a week or so to get the lay of the land, but I'm ready now to introduce myself and start talking about games, gamification, designs and mechanisms.
From what I've seen so far, the suggestion I took above to seek this place out was some pretty darn good advice.
Cheers!
SO to exercise your mind and rework this fantastic knowledge you have, I would like you to come up with an entirely new mechanic that is unlike anything you have played before - entirely off beat and new. No need to make a full game , but I challenge you to come up with a new mechanic that will not likely be found in normal boardgames (see: out of your comfort zone)
Your mechanic MUST involve:
6 sheets of blank paper and NO writing tools (pens, pencils etc) just 6 blank sheets of standard paper.
Go-
Interesting challenge.
I have several thoughts on the matter. My first instinct is to go with folding.
Folding could be used as a form of blind bidding for auctioning. Depending on how or the number of folds one puts in their paper, that is the bid they make for some auction mechanic of the game.
From there I move to tearing.
Using a pictionary/charades style of topic selection, players could be encouraged to tear shapes out of their pages that provide clues to the topic that their team-mates must guess.
Or scoring could be derived from the level of complexity inherent in a design.
Both of these methods, while interactive and different, require a fair amount of skill. And also chew through resources. A game like this would probably be hard on trees if it were popular.
We could use the paper as a shield/shroud that allows for hiding all but small portions of a bigger game-board - like a fog-of-war simulation that gets moved or controlled by the players.
Finally, we can turn these mechanisms into "the game". An instructional origami game could be fun, and with different levels of difficulty, could open up an achievement style progression. Again, a fairly skill intensive endeavor and may be frustrating for some player-types.
I want to chew on this a bit more, because the above solutions seem, to me, fairly obvious, and I want to see if I can get outside the box a bit more and find something else.