Amsterdam Board Game Design

“If the player does something you didn’t expect, you should not chastise him, you should design it into the game.”

— Dan Taylor

I have established Amsterdam Board Game Design in 2021 in an effort to get board game designers together more often. It’s quite easy to create mechanics and it’s reasonably predictable how those mechanics will work. You can even try them out yourselves to get some of the major kinks out of the game. However, how the dynamics come out of the mechanics is difficult to foretell. This has been formalized in a framework called MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics). Not everyone wants to play a game where the rules change mid-play, but designers can look through this drawback. In many cases, it makes sense to play

the game before all the mechanics have been formalized. Having a vision means you know which direction your game should go but it’s also import to stay flexible enough to get there. Perhaps the mechanics you envisioned don’t work well together, or they might be unnecessarily difficult. Good design is about communication. The advantge is that communication

Since November 2021, a group of board game designers comes together every other week to discuss game game design choices, playtest games and talk about