This blog is where game designer Amanda Vallerand records her thoughts about designing and self-publishing board games, and the lessons she has learned along the way.
Spicing up your resource management
I like Euro games. I like indirect interaction, engine building and puzzly, interrelated systems. I like Victory Points and delivering cubes to get them. And there’s also resource management. Resource management is one of those things that is in most games, but often doesn’t seem to have had much thought behind how it was implemented.…
Winning! An alternative to “most points”
After a game is over, how do you know who won it? As a Euro gamer, I play a lot of Most-VPs-Wins games, but I’m starting to sway more and more towards games which avoid the end game accounting associated with those. In this article, I dig into how Spirit Island handles this.
WHEN to add variability to your design
Last week, I talked about going from idea to prototype. Today, I want to talk about one of the pitfalls many of us fall into when prototyping. I’m a huge proponent of variable setups, missions, objectives, factions, and characters. I feel like it’s the one thing all of my games will have in common: “20…
Subsurface Games 