> Overall, HHS teams are more likely than professional teams to create truly creative game designs.
That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my opinion.
That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my opinion.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they're not truly viewing the whole indie landscape. For every truly innovative, well balanced game, there may be another 100 failed kickstarter clones of existing games, or just plain bad games
And there's the whole business of how much of a luck factor you want, how much rubber banding there is to keep it competitive, how much your strategy has to adapt in response to what others are doing, etc etc. These are things that pro designers carefully iterate on in the context of hundreds of test plays, often with a community of other designers who are equipped with the necessary experience and context to think deeply about how a game works and will work across multiple playthroughs.
I once listened to a podcast by some board gamers who had gone way too far in this direction. They'd say the name of a game, and describe it as e.g. "it's worker placement with area control", and that was the end of their description and analysis of the game. Seems to me they're missing a fair bit of nuance and more importantly, it doesn't tell me anything about how likely it is I'd enjoy the game. Oh well, to each their own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel like a broken record posting something about this on every thread about games, but I really think it’s worth spreading around.
On the other hand, there are certain mechanics that I either don't enjoy (dice battles) or am sick of (deck building) which if present makes it much less likely that I will enjoy the game as a whole.
What I like about the 8 kinds of fun is it pushes back against an approach I think you see a lot in “serious” board game circles of a kind of “model/view” perspective on games. The mechanics are the model and the only part worth paying serious attention to, and the setting/fluff/etc is the essentially interchangeable view. The “8 kinds” perspective is a reminder that people engage with games in a lot of different ways, many of which really live in the interaction between the model and view.
As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a framework to analyze games - which states, that the mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework (the article itself is linked in there)
While the authors don't state it directly as this framework, they refer to the framwork as an explanation of why they use mechanics.
Novel can be a double edged sword but useful implies good I believe.