Designing for different player types
You are a Muffin revised, player types, and Successors
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TL;DR Summary
☕ You are a Muffin… revised!
🔍 Examining player types
📐 Designing for different types of players
🎲 Recently played: Successors
☕ You are a Muffin… revised!
You are a Muffin is a cozy, solo journaling game about being a pastry in a café or coffee shop. Watch as customers arrive, place an order, and eventually leave. One of them might choose you.
“Beautifully creative and strangely evocative. I never knew how peaceful it could be to be a cheesy scone in a cozy cafe. Wonderful layout and easy to pick up rules. Excellent game!”
Originally published in February 2022, it has received a cosmetic update! It’s now a 24-page zine with additional art and improved layout.
Much like Eleventh Beast: Zine Edition, physical/print copies will be made first available at the upcoming Save Against Fear convention.
Both will be available on the Exeunt Press Shop shortly after that! Maybe pick up an Exeunt Press shirt while you are there!
Play: You are a Muffin
🔍 Examining game player types
Having discovered the 8 Kinds of Fun, I became interested in different ways of understanding tabletop game player motivations and types. This led to a three-part mini-series on Skeleton Code Machine:
Each model approaches the question in a different way, with slightly different results.
Researching this has helped me have a better vocabulary for talking about fun, players, and what we want to get out of games. Not a topic I’ve considered much before, but now I’m glad I did!
Read: Skeleton Code Machine
Skeleton Code Machine is a weekly publication that explores tabletop game mechanisms in board games and roleplaying games. It’s been called a “Seemingly endless source of gaming ponderings” and a “Goldmine.” Check it out at www.skeletoncodemachine.com.
📐 Designing for different types of players
I continue to watch old GDC talks and take some notes. This week I watched World Design for Different Player Types by Raylene Deck from GDC 2019.
Here are my notes:
Understanding player motives leads to engaging worlds and improved scope (i.e. limits scope creep)
The Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivation Model has six motivations: Action, Social, Mastery, Achievement, Immersion, and Creativity
Motivations can be paired to form gamer profiles that can guide design.
Immersion + Creativity
Make it easy to follow the narrative
Have one central problem to solve that spans across many zones
Let the player see how/why their effort matters (“What changed?”)
Side quests should be connected to the main quest
Action + Social
Each player wants to be the hero of the story
Make it easy and fast to hop in a game and play together
Player stories are more important than the designer’s story
Mastery + Achievement
Want worlds that give agency to players
Create opt-in challenges vs. mandatory tasks
Consider gameplay modes: Action, Roleplaying, Story
Design for repetition with agency: Variability, degrees of success
Player categories are starting points only
Who is your game’s target audience? (it’s not just you)
This was another fascinating talk that has much application in the world of tabletop game design. It makes clear that there can be competing priorities when trying to design a game for everyone. Deciding who the game is for is a key design choice.
Watch: World Design for Different Player Types
🎲 Recently played: Successors
I was thrilled to be able to play Successors: Fourth Edition (Berg & Simonitch, 2022) again! It’s an involved game and, having only played once before, I was thankful that most of the rules came back to us quickly.
This time was the two-player First War of the Diadochi (322 - 320 BCE) scenario from the playbook, lasting a single game turn. With mostly independent political control, there was only one actual battle in the game. Lots of tough choices on how thin to spread your military forces.
As the Imperial faction (green), I started with a lead and maintained it for almost the entire game. Then the Regent faction (black) had an impressive final two rounds and ended up winning.
I really want to play the full five-turn version of this game. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite board games!
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- E.P. 💀