EXPOSED: The Game Behind the Scenes

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.

Different people buy games for various reasons, and many of us will have amassed a small or not so small collection at home that we are proud of. Yet, sometimes we’re not sure how we got there or how we should continue going forward.  So it’s often useful to re-evaluate the games we’ve got and...

The production of the miniatures concludes the validation and preparation of the molds, which means that now we are ready to start producing the miniatures. However, the miniatures are not the only “plastic” component that our games usually have. This same process is followed for any deluxified component that is in a form of plastic token. Then, after all the plastic is validated, the factory will start preparing the trays.

The discussions on how publishers prepare for the new 2020 trend, online conventions. Covid-19 has created several problems in the industry. The fact that we are not able to attend conventions, which have been for years a big source of income and other business for several publishers, is one of them. All major cons this year have been cancelled and instead they have created a new model: online conventions. How do publishers deal with them?

The discussions on a very big part of the journey that a game makes. This is production. As the process that leads a game to production is a big one, we will be analyzing it in three articles. This takes place before we are even close to production: The initial contact with the factory.

This article explains why there is a place for social activism in gaming and describes the thought process that Mythic Games as a publisher followed and was led to that conclusion.