DR Games

Never has the concept of luck been driven home to me more than recently when I have been designing my own tabletop games. What role does it play in the…well the game play? Does a game become weaker because of a dependence on random nature? Can this cause anxiety or fatigue? Should we rely on luck less? Make more of the choices ourselves? Be in control? I wanted to lay some of this out in this latest blog post as it is becoming a particularly important part of how I design games. Making my way across a map...with only a die to guide me With the design of Dark Force Incursion, I created a game that heavily depended on the roll of a dice. Every turn you are bound by the result of your roll and this leads you in a direction, for which there are a set of consequences. Is this too much to ask of a player to be so bound by a one in six chance? Yes, because how can they influence the outcome? This is what gamers will often strive for, a controlling element. I introduced the option o...

DFI came about through an unusual set of circumstances at a strange time, that I discuss in a previous post. But it was solid and reliable with a core set of rules and maps and could be download for free from my website. Yet, as if out of control, the game began to take on a life of its own in my mind. I imagined new land features, hex tiles, expansion rules and maps. I think that, for me, any creation is never truly complete, they just keep on growing, expanding, and ultimately opening new gaming choices.   Pretty quickly I set about writing the rules and drawing the land features for the new maps and expansions. It presented as a series of updates with new landscapes that would be interesting to experience in their own hex maps. This presented as four distinct expansions that would work nicely as pledge levels…yes, I began to think Kickstarter. I had established a presence on Board Game Geek and the free core rules were out there for people to play and they had. I w...

I thought a great way of see how this game plays is if I create a video showing a play through. At first I tried to set up the paper and pencil as you would ordinarily play it. It's a game you can just grab and play in a second but as it turned out you just couldn't see the details. So I had a think and came up with the idea of creating a digital version...now let's not get ahead of ourselves here. I do not mean I've coded something here. No, I'm simply moving assets around in Photoshop, which takes longer but I ended up editing the boring bits out, as I moved these images around. It took a while. So I ended up with an hour video. It is longer than the game plays for as I'm explaining the rules as I go but gives a clear view on the mechanisms of the game. The video is below. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. Cheers guys, Toby. (If it looks small then you can click on it and expand it out. Thanks)