Here’s the Inspiration You Need to Create Better Learning Games
A categorised index of game mechanics
Boardgame Geek and differing agendas
The website Boardgame Geek has a great resource on boardgame mechanics. It’s a list of over 100 separate play mechanicisms that appear in boardgames. It includes things as simple as the roll-and-move mechanic at the centre of Snakes & Ladders, and others as complex as detailed ‘impulse’ methods for determining troop movements in wargames.
As a learning game designer, it’s a useful resource for me. But it’s not optimised for me; their agenda is not to help people like me. Boardgame Geek’s agenda is being able to categorise games, to help browsing, cataloguing and selection of games by mechanic. If you like games with a certain mechanic, as a boardgame hobbyist, it’s great to be able to find others like it.
What I really want is a list of mechanics that’s set up to use in designing learning games. And I’ve been using the Boardgame Geek list for just that, but the way it’s organised makes it hard work. I have to scan the whole list, and think about what each one is and whether I could use it. So recently I decided I could improve on it, for me and my agenda.
A small twist for my purposes
To make something I could browse more easily when creating games, I had the simple idea of turning the list into a categorised index. An alphabetised list of 100+ mechanics is hard to browse. 10 lists of roughly ten mechanics each, organised by categories like ‘movement’ or ‘game space’ is a different proposition.
Not only does this help me find what’s most relevant to the part of a game I’m designing, but it makes the whole thing easier to digest. I know which category I’m in, and that helps me more quickly visualise the mechanic from the name. And I can include other key information on the ‘spreadsheet’ (actually an Airtable). And the process of making the categorisations and transferring the information helped me in other ways.
I really got to grips with the information, and started to combine some entries and split others. Some I renamed. And I realised I could now build on my new database, because there are mechanics that are not in there that could be. Mechanics not really used in commercial boardgames. Mechanics from computer games or from games-based learning traditions.
Building the resource for the future
As I got most of the information on there from Boardgame Geek’s freely available resource, I’m very happy to make my new resource available for free. And this will help me to get suggestions about how to improve it over time. Do you think there’s one missing? I’d love to know so I can add it.
I may develop the database into other forms; even perhaps a deck of cards. I already have plans to use it for an event I’m taking part in where I’ll design a learning game in 24 hours, and I think it will help with my design process.
What I hope most of all is that people will use the resource to move away from defaulting too often from the same mechanics (such as roll-and-move). If you are creating a learning game, see if the Airtable will help you use combinations of mechanic in ways that are orginal, exciting and suited to your game.
