I’ve become a fan of board games (as I’ve mentioned a few times). I think board games can be a great way to learn game design since they are often mainly about the gameplay mechanisms (especially so called “eurogames” with not so strong themes). I think every aspiring game designer should really learn as much as possible from board games – they can bring really good pointers on what to do with your computer game design.

Do you play board games to learn game design?

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My experimental Nudgers “RPG” (headquarters) reminded me how creative people can be – and it’s pretty darn sure that humans will think about witty ways to deal with things. AI intelligence simply cannot compete with creativity.

The “cooperative adventure RPG” nudgers mechanism is simple: group of players together decide what they will do next. After they’ve chosen their action, I’ll (as a storyteller) tell them what happens next. And then they take action. Then me and so on. And we repeat this cycle over and over.

It’s pretty nice to watch people coming up creative things. For example, now some of the group members started messing up with a blood and they try to use it to make a fake pool (to confuse dogs). Cannot say (yet) whether that will work, but it certainly reminded me about the creativity people can have when you let them to freely discuss what they could do in different situations.

(And I actually look forward to reading their posts every day – it’s fun to see what these players are up to this time…)

I know there can be times when multiplayer is not working well (playing with idiots, people cheating, too different skill levels and so on), but when things work well – the experience can be really creative one. There can always happen things that AI simply cannot think of.

In some games at least.