Last year, I was asked to help host a local designer game event.  Preparing for the event got me to thinking—what advice would be most useful to new designers?

Those thoughts led down a bit of a rabbit hole, and during the span of last year, came together to form a book called Guidelines for Strategy Game Design.

Guidelines is a little different from most Game Design manuals out there.

For starters, it’s only about 40 pages of text, and those pages are pretty light. The whole book reads in under 2 hours.

I’ve tried to trim the text as short as possible, while capturing essential ideas with examples and diagrams.

This is because the book is intended to be a functional tool for game designers, rather than a course in theory. The book also limits itself to Strategy Games, a very narrow subset of the whole field.

Guidelines starts with a series of diagnostic questions which you can hold your game up against. The questions include things like “Does play deliver on the pitch?” and “Are moves an end unto themselves?” When you aren’t satisfied with the answer to one of these questions, you can turn to the 1-page entry and get some expert advice on how to solve that problem.

Starting now, and every Thursday from here on out, I’ll post a single article from Guidelines for you to check out. Later this year, you can get the complete book in print, for those who want to keep a copy on hand during design sessions.

I hope that it’s helpful to you!

Without further ado though, here’s the first article, as well as the full diagnostic battery… https://www.level99store.com/blogs/guidelines

Happy Designing!