Principles of Good Game Design

Dr. Chad Raymond

The Golden Rule of Game Mechanics

Mechanics are the rules and processes that guide players’ actions within the game. A game’s mechanics must match the world that the game is supposed to emulate. For example, in the board games Agricola and Lancaster, players take turns placing cubes on the board to gain resources, but the cubes perform different functions in each game. In Agricola, when a player places a cube on a spot that produces wheat, no one else can get wheat that turn. This rule reflects how agricultural markets operate—when someone buys all the wheat, no one else can buy it until more becomes available. A farmer’s land, in constrast, does not disappear when someone purchases the wheat that is grown on it. In Lancaster, the cubes are knights that have varying strengths. A stronger knight defeats a weaker knight and takes over its spot on the board, which makes sense because we know that in real life knights fought each other. Each game’s mechanic about whether one player can push another player’s game pieces out of locations on the board is simple to understand and matches the game’s overarching story, which helps makes for more compelling and engaging gameplay.

The Magic Circle

Like game mechanics, players’ roles and permissible actions should correspond to the fictional world players are in. For example, the board game Diplomacy simulates relations between nation-states on the eve of World War I. Players deploy armies and navies on a map of Europe to launch attacks and defend themselves against other players. There are no wizards casting spells or space aliens arriving in flying saucers. Gameplay reflects the historical environment. Whenever players encounter something that does not logically cohere with a game’s theme, it pushes them farther out of the magic circle by eroding their willing suspension of disbelief, and they lose interest.

Meaningful Decision-Making

A well-designed game forces players to make decisions that have meaningful consequences within the game. For this to happen, players must exercise judgment under conditions of uncertainty and their choices should produce measurable outcomes. If players are limited to a single course of action, or if play is driven entirely by random chance—e.g., dice rolls—then players lack agency and the whole exercise becomes pointless. While a game’s rules invariably restrict players to a finite set of choices, not every player should have to make the same decision when confronted with the same situation. Players should be able to pursue a variety of strategies to achieve different goals. For example, in the board game Caverna, players control families of cave-dwelling dwarves and compete against each other to create the most efficient cave-farm. Players can choose to specialize in raising pigs, digging for rubies, or other activities to provide for their families. The game offers several viable paths to victory.

Engine Building

“Engines” are the processes that players work through to pursue their goals more effectively as the game unfolds. Engines allow players to benefit over the long term by taking actions in the present. For example, in Monopoly, a player can unlock successively larger rewards by purchasing all the same-colored properties on the board. Once this is accomplished, the player can construct houses and hotels on those properties, which raises the amount of rent that other players must pay whenever they land on those board spaces. The player has built an engine that has increased his or her ability to collect money from other players. Common engine building mechanics include collecting a favorable combination of cards drawn from a deck, spending money to obtain potentially valuable tools or skills, and, as in the example above, achieving control over a specific area of territory on a board. Any of these processes can be used as opportunities for players to unlock new abilities during the game. These options create a “game within the game,” which makes a game more exciting.

Conflict and Cooperation

By their very nature, games place people in conditions of conflict and cooperation. In some games, players compete against each in a zero-sum environment—what benefits one player automatically harms another, as in tennis. In other games, players play against the game itself, with victory dependent on how well they cooperate with each other. For example, in Pandemic, players assume roles like medic, scientist, and dispatcher and try to collectively save the world from several contagious diseases. Games can contain a mixture of both elements, with players forming shifting alliances to achieve temporary goals. It is important to understand that conflict in games does not necessarily mean representations of violence, and that all games require some level of cooperation—players must all agree on the game’s rules, for example. In the best games, cooperation and conflict reflect the golden rule and magic circle.