About five months ago, just after I was hired at Steve Jackson Games, Sharon came home with a box of a co-worker’s mis-printed business cards (about 200 cards). We spent an evening writing short ideas and suggestions to inspire innovative board game design ideas (if you’re familiar with the Oblique Strategies deck, this is in the same vein) on all of the cards (Actually, Sharon wrote all of them. I just helped think of them.).
Once we finished, we called them “Un-Sticky Notes,” (Get it? Eh?)
Here’s twenty of ‘em, selected at random:
- Everybody wins.
- Allow multiple paths to victory.
- Provide multiple goals.
- Enable solo play.
- What would a girl do?
- Let the game win.
- Share the pawn.
- Apply clever technology.
- Get messy.
- You’re it.
- Sabotage.
- Assume a benign universe.
- Be more consistent.
- Let them dream.
- Do something impossible.
- (The X, Y, and Z axes, drawn.)
- Steal something.
- What’s the last thing they’d expect?
- Do something dangerous.
- Disguise it.
I really like the cards. Every time I draw one, it kicks my creative mind into gear. Of these, I’d like to discuss Everybody wins. That’s a funny (as in odd) one, in that if you implement it in the broadest, most literal sense, you could argue that it takes a game and changes it from a game into an activity. After all, if everyone who’s playing wins, and everyone who’s playing always wins, and there’s no distinction between “levels” of winning, then why play?
It’s easy to abandon the idea of a game where the players always win every time, but I think there’s interesting space to explore there. Two directions that my mind wants to go with this are a game where the path you take becomes the focus of the game (instead of the outcome) and… Oh nuts. Writing that one pushed the other one out of my brain. At any rate, there are plenty of movies that tell you the end at the beginning of the movie, yet we watch and enjoy them (American Beauty). Could there be a board game that does the same thing? Will players assign victory-like conditions to aspects of play within the game? (“Hey, you found the silver and the gold widgets! Yay!”)
Perhaps I’ll type more on this later. I have to excuse myself for now.
— Jonathan A Leistiko :: gaming : thought
Invisible City Productions is a collective of game designers, writers, and artists who provide this as a space for the creators of secret media to come together and touch antennae.