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The White Box Essays
Mar. 4th, 2024 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhlee[repost from 2022 from my DW]
A couple days I finished reading Jeremy Holcomb's The White Box Essays, which I own both in hardcopy (came with the White Box by same, i.e. a bundle with some basic board game components to get you started) and in Kindle ebook. Bang for buck this is one of the best overviews of board game design and production I've ever seen, and an excellent starting point for a budding game designer. ETA: I should clarify that I do think a grasp of game design theory is important (it can be "intuitive" or "instinctive" and doesn't have to be analytical or explicit) BUT honestly playing lots of games and actually designing games is also very key if you want to make headway in this field even as a hobby.
It's not as theory-driven or thorough as some of the other textbooks now extant; Salen & Zimmerman's seminal Rules of Play is better as a crushingly thorough deep drive into theory, Brathwaite & Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers has a ton of great exercises (technically written for video game designers, but most of the challenges are pen-and-paper and would apply to board game design as well), Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses is a very different approach to theory, Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop attempts to be an entire textbook with exercises, and that's only the ones I'm personally familiar with. Most of those texts are also more expensive (some considerably so), and honestly IMO with (board) game design one of the important things is to get started as cheaply as you can.
- Ch 1 asks you to figure out what your motivation is for game design, because what makes sense financially in terms of production is heavily dependent on what your goal is. For example, self-publishing and # of games produced depend very much on whether you're trying to make a profit or not. ( Read more... )
A couple days I finished reading Jeremy Holcomb's The White Box Essays, which I own both in hardcopy (came with the White Box by same, i.e. a bundle with some basic board game components to get you started) and in Kindle ebook. Bang for buck this is one of the best overviews of board game design and production I've ever seen, and an excellent starting point for a budding game designer. ETA: I should clarify that I do think a grasp of game design theory is important (it can be "intuitive" or "instinctive" and doesn't have to be analytical or explicit) BUT honestly playing lots of games and actually designing games is also very key if you want to make headway in this field even as a hobby.
It's not as theory-driven or thorough as some of the other textbooks now extant; Salen & Zimmerman's seminal Rules of Play is better as a crushingly thorough deep drive into theory, Brathwaite & Schreiber's Challenges for Game Designers has a ton of great exercises (technically written for video game designers, but most of the challenges are pen-and-paper and would apply to board game design as well), Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses is a very different approach to theory, Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop attempts to be an entire textbook with exercises, and that's only the ones I'm personally familiar with. Most of those texts are also more expensive (some considerably so), and honestly IMO with (board) game design one of the important things is to get started as cheaply as you can.
- Ch 1 asks you to figure out what your motivation is for game design, because what makes sense financially in terms of production is heavily dependent on what your goal is. For example, self-publishing and # of games produced depend very much on whether you're trying to make a profit or not. ( Read more... )
