Know Your Audience: Scotland Yard vs. Letters from Whitechapel

This week Max compares classic board game Scotland Yard to its contemporary Fantasy Flight counterpart Letters from Whitechapel in order to analyze why focusing your game's target audience can be helpful. (Hint: it's because when a designer knows who she is designing for, the design can be much more tailored to that audience's desires and use cases.)

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Design Comparison: SolForge vs. Magic: the Gathering

Max analyzes the design choices made in Magic: the Gathering and new digital collectable card game SolForge.  He compares the games on three axes: deckbuilding, gameplay, and cost to play/acquiring cards.

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Stacking the Deck and Other Tricks for Demoing Games

For the first of a two-week series of lessons from Gen Con, Max discusses ways to effectively demo games, including why he whole-heartedly recommends stacking the deck with no moral quandaries!

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Readers Ask - Expansions as Scaffolding?

In the first Readers Ask segment ever on Most Dangerous Game Design, Max responds to the question "Are expansions a form of scaffolding?" as a followup to Monday's post discussion of easing new players into boardgames though choice scaffolding.  

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Scaffolding Choice: How to Ease Players Into A Game's Choices

In this week's post, Max elaborates on the number one design tip from July's post on designing game learning: designing scaffolding into the learning experience.  Max discusses what scaffolding is, why it's important, and some tips and tricks for designers to design scaffolded learning into their games.

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Learning to Ignore Playtesters

In a rare non-theory post, Max gives concrete advice for knowing when to make changes based on playtesting experiences and when to ignore problems that playtesters find.

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