Game design and Board Game Club

December has inaugurated a cold snap in the Bay Area, perfect to stay inside for a spell and play some games. Similarly, the new month has ushered in the second trimester at school, which means that Board Game Club gets underway this week. Nine students are enrolled in the after school class: six second graders (five of whom are in my class), two third graders from the room next door, and one seventh grader who I really hope decides to stick it out with all the youngins,' perhaps even stepping up to help out. The composition of this fellowship skews younger than I had anticipated in my early preparations and planning, necessitating a revision of the structure and tempo of the club, as well as the games I will bring.

Conversations with some of my colleagues, and friends in the Golden Gate Gamemakers, have encouraged me to try to incorporate some sort of game design element into the club. Creation, innovation, and design can be such powerful engines for student learning, and it would be gratifying to have students walk away from this class, not just with a new understanding of modern board games, but with something tactile they have made themselves. I was struggling for a clear way to implement this vision when Randy O'Connor shared with me an easy design exercise that he uses as an introduction to his own game design workshops. The exercise by Brenda Romera walks participants through an uncomplicated step-by-step process to create a unique "race to the end" style game (think Candyland). Using this as a starting point, I was able to put together a sequence of design activities that we can do during the first few weeks of the club so that by the end, students have their own prototype or design to share and play.

And it goes a little something like this:

Week 1: Theme: If you could design a game what would it be about? One of the hallmarks of modern board games—compared to games the students would be most familiar with like chess, connect four, etc—is that they often have very specific themes. There are games about trains, games about birds, games about space, games about fantasy adventure, games about dragons, games about distilling whisky (maybe I won't use that as an example), and much much more. The idea is that a game in 2025 can be about anything. So without worrying about how it would be played, think about what the game would be about. What is the setting, the location, the characters and what are they doing? For instance, in a game about frogs, are they hopping on lily pads across a pond? In a game about gymnastics are the gymnasts performing moves in a floor routine? This jumpstart into thinking creatively will see students jot down some high-level ideas for a game theme and later on, think down from that point about how the game will work (admittedly opposite of designers' usual process).

Weeks 2-4: Components (dice, cards, and tiles): The next few weeks of the class see students exploring different common components in games, how they function, and selecting which engine they want to power their own game. In Romero's words, how do you "start at point A and get to point B(?)" What moves you forwards from the beginning of the game towards the objective at the end? Are you flipping cards? Are you rolling dice? Are you drawing? Are you doing something else that earns points of some kind? With the theme and objective of their game in mind, students are going to think about what components their game will include and begin to formulate ideas about how their game works. Maybe in that game about frogs, the player rolls dice to see how many lily pads they can move per turn. The gymnastics can sees players flipping cards to see if they can extend a combo on their floor routine. These weeks will be more applied thinking to the students' ideas, considering how these components and mechanisms may, or may not, be part of their game idea.

Week 5: Resistance!: With the concept of the game and some sort of progress mechanism in place, next students will think about adding challenges to their game. What could go wrong? What tests are the players up against? Without conflict in a game, it's sort of easy to go from start to finish without actually doing or thinking very much. Adding conflict can make the experience go from stale to stellar. Maybe the frogs need to roll exactly a certain number or else they jump and miss a lily pad. The gymnast's floor routine can be complicated by adding a push your luck element to the card draw.

The Level Up Board Game Club logo I've tentatively settled on.

I don't want to get too ahead of myself and plan the entire three month club agenda. These first handful of weeks put us through the Winter holiday break and well into the month of January. The many off-weeks during this time where the club does not meet due to scheduled breaks is ideal for evaluating how students are doing with the design exercises and making adjustments to the plan.

The design activity also serves as a natural lead in to the games I bring each week. Although I want each week to have a unique topic, a mechanics- or theme-based approach—trick-taking week, engine-building week—may be too ambitious for the audience of the club. Instead, it seems most congruent to choose games that exemplify the design topic each week. For instance games with strong thematic elements in week one, games that exemplify using simple components creatively for week two, and so on. This way, in thinking about how they want to implement these ideas in their own games, students will get to play some selected modern games that really nail that idea well.

Next up, I'll post some meetup recaps each week including a reflection on how the design exercise went, a list of games I brought, and how they each went over.