My name is new guy

Hello Eamon!

Thank you for the warm welcome. :)

This far we've just basically describe the game pieces and discussed how well they, mainly physically, work in the game. We would really love to be able to understand the game designers intention and to do gap-analysis of how well the actual components match the intended concept.

We've been able to get ahold of a few game designers that have agreed to answer our questions (helping us bridging the gap between our interpretation of the components and their intended concept). But we still haven't made any final interviews with any of them as of yet. Hopefully that will help us write more decent articles.

At this point, the main criticism we've received has been related to the photographies that we've somewhat amended. We'd love to get your help in writing better texts and knowing what to focus on. We can easily discuss how well a piece works, but the mind-set of game designers is harder to come by.

Here is the url to the blog:
https://boardgamecomponents.wordpress.com

So far, we've just done Carcassonne Winter and Patchwork. Next up is Pandemic. We reached out to Matthew Leacock who suggested a few videos on Youtube in which he was presenting some of the development of Pandemic that he hoped could assist us in writing the article.

We're hoping the next article will be a bit more analytical of the actual game mechanics and how the game components affect the gameplay.

Looking forward to discussing with you and receiving feedback that we can use in developing the blog. :)

Best wishes,
Markus

Hi Eamon,

Thank you for your extremely insightful words and your spot-on feedback! This is highly useful for us in developing the blog. I really love the article ideas and, as you've pointed out, just doing one type of articles (component breakdown) is probably not reader friendly. The article suggestions are all great and very much in line with what we want to accomplish in the future.

As a bit of 'history' (a somewhat heavy word for the short time period we're referring to), we initially wanted to help consumers to see what actually comes in the board game boxes. We think that many online board game stores miss out on the great opportunity to showcase game components in their product views. This makes board games comparable to books, and the cover says it all, doesn't it? :)

Given our starting point, the images (at least in my opinion) reflect our initial goal - to show people what board game boxes actually contained. During the short time since we started the blog and through the feedback that we've received, we're trying to go more towards to analytical articles. This is a bit funny, seeing as none of us are good at analyzing board games, writing articles or even taking pictures. But we're hanging in there and I hope people will enjoy seeing us 'Bambi' our way down the street of board game components.

I would love to know more about board game design - primarily information that can assist us in our goal to analyze components. If you could nudge us in the right direction to where we can start learning, that would mean a lot.

Thank you very much for your very appreciated response. It made us realize the shift (as described above) in thoughts that we just partially were aware of.

Best wishes,
Markus

Thank you!

Not at all, we've been discussing the need to show the pieces in play for quite a bit ourselves. The issue we're facing is the way we are taking the pictures. If we want to keep the stale-ish backgrounds and showcase components, we need to keep them quite small. (The photos are all taken inside a moving cardboard box :) ) We're having the same issue when we're trying to take pictures of game boards - the size is simply too big. But we're trying to come up with a solution that allows us to take pictures of bigger objects and thus be able to build more interesting scenes of gameplay.

We've been discussing the 'one-component-different uses'-idea, that we love. However, we're having a hard time figuring out how to actually identify all the different uses. Most main-stream games (that we play) use them in somewhat the same way. Is there any way to use BGG to, for instance, identify games that have different types of score boards, rule reference cards or currencies?

I really love the Board Game Design Lab. I've read quite a few articles from there since this morning when I read your post. It will surely help me in becoming more proficient in analyzing board game designs. It made me curious as of whether there is a 'beginners guide' to board game design that I could use to get all the essentials?

I am not able to get on to your blog, though. It says I'm unauthorized. How does this work?

Thank you very much again for all of your help!

I'll make sure to make a new thread for the different topics we've discussed!

Best wishes,
Markus

The link works now!

Thanks! Gonna take a look, seems to be a lot of useful information there.

Best wishes,
Markus