week 5 readings

This week we played a lot and honestly it was very enriching as someone who is so new to board games. Something I found funny was the vast barrier of play between the two games we played this week and mainly their rules and procedures. In “Writing Effective Rules” which is a short document but well endowed, we learned how to write concise and to the point rules that will get the player up and playing the game in hopefully as quick a time as possible. This can be supplemented with pictures among other things etc but most of the time written rules are the standard. This was funny to me because this week we really learned about playing the games through videos, as well as watching other groups play which is sort of easy because we can take the writing process of rules to incorporate them. Writing rules is probably going to be one of the more difficult aspects of game design for me, so I think I'll be coming back to these chapters often. It's something we'll have more understanding of when we start playtesting which was talked about a lot in Macklin and sharps’s chapter this week. For me personally I want to use that ground as a way to understand how my rules become communicated to someone else, because until I see how others interpret them I'm only able to write them to my understanding. Which is narrow and offers a multitude of confusion. It's very tough to design a game which sounds funny to say but it's true. I have no idea how another person might interpret a line of text or find something that I think is cool to be fun. But the thing I want to accomplish with this next project is to introduce a layer of complexity to my games. My hope is that rules will be able to fuel that and make something fun and unique out of it.