EXPOSED: The Game Behind the Scenes

Game conventions have been around for a long time and are a great opportunity for board game and role-playing game enthusiasts to discover many new and classic games. They also allow players to meet publishers and engage in conversations with them. But are these conventions truly beneficial for publishers? In this article, we will explore...

Hello to all board game enthusiasts! We are excited to present the first article in a series dedicated to the world of board games and publishing, exploring the behind-the-scenes and upcoming changes in an ever-evolving industry. Throughout this series of articles, we will also provide tips, tricks, and tactics for the games we publish. Feel...

For game design, we’ll use a slightly more straightforward definition: scaling is a game’s ability to retain a similar experience regardless of the number of players. It involves changing rules, numerical formulas, or other design elements based on player count to ensure that the game stays playable and balanced.

Of the three pieces of information that brace the sides of every board game box (the length of the game, the age range, and the number of players), the first two are approximations that can be determined by the publisher and/or the designer during playtesting or post-production, but the number of players is explicit in the design. The dimension of gaming we’ll talk about in this article is the player count, the use of different player numbers as a mechanic or design decision. One of the many ways to classify games is by the number of players. The player number is a deliberate design choice with implications for strategic depth, length, pacing, and complexity.

The ultimate goal of every decision to include a theme in a game is to make the players feel like they have the experience you’re trying to provide. You want your players to think, “yes, I feel like I’m doing what the game tells me I’m doing.” We’ll explore three areas in which that sense can be achieved: using an appropriate theme, integrating theme with mechanics, and balancing theme with player experience.

As gamers, we know when a game lacks balance, but how do we come to know and recognize this? Not all gamers have the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to evaluate whether a game is balanced mathematically, yet nowadays, they will quickly label games as “well-balanced” or “broken” upon release. Balance means raising the stakes over the course of gameplay and providing interesting paths and strategies across the entire playthrough.

Hello, and welcome to one more blog post of the EXPOSED series: Virtual games night with Mythic Games. Game nights are social interactions, catching up with friends, maybe some ribbing, eating snacks, enjoying a drink, holding cards or moving pieces, maybe rolling dice, and enjoying how a game unfolds, its twists and turns. It’s about...

The more we play games, the more we learn. We learn better strategies, new mechanisms, be a better loser, and a better winner. We understand that we don’t always have to have the latest games that we definitely do, and we learn a few other things besides. In this article, let's focus on something else. We can look at what playing board games have taught us, knowing more about ourselves, about the people around us, and how it has changed us over time, if at all.

After the long process of creating game designs that came with brilliant ideas and inspirations, the next step depends on whether the designer wants to self-publish or hand the game over to a publisher. That decision is often closely linked with the type of project that this game is – and there are two types of them.

As you can imagine, different designers go about game design differently. The same designer will come up with new games in different ways. Some games lend themselves to specific approaches better than others. There is certainly no single way of coming up with the initial idea, even if the process of developing that idea into a working game ends up being the same for every game.