Today I am detailing my 5 main lessons-learned while designing a legacy style dungeon crawler called LLudwik’s Labyrinth (which you can learn about here). 1) Start with a base game that is solid. I have heard Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock both reference this on Podcasts, but the idea being -if you are building up a game into a full campaign, you need to make sure your foundation is solid. A campaign is a very big task that requires a lot of testing, and breaking it apart to fix its foundation is not always an option. Thankfully, Lludwik’s Labyrinth used…

The Labyrinth map was the very first concept I came up with when designing Valor & Villainy 2: Lludwik’s Labyrinth. In V&V 1, there was already a concept of open ground and difficult terrain, so I wanted V&V 2 to be set somewhere that could present some new challenges to navigate, without reinventing the mechanisms. My Inspirations I don’t know what it is about it, but I have come back to examine Saboteur many times, because I just love the way the map builds in this game. It’s so simple and intuitive, and it creates a really cool visual tunnel!…

A common tendency for playtesters is to point out things that they think would make your game better. And rightly so! In a significant way, this is why you asked them to playtest your game in the first place, and specific feedback can be great! But… Very often a player does not have all of the intimate details of why you made the game how you did. Sometimes (maybe even often) they miss the mark on suggestions. Or they can be so emblazoned by the passion of the game they just emerged from that they can’t step back and look…

A board game is short, so why not focus on escalating the player’s arsenal, and constantly raising the stakes, as opposed to giving the players something and then taking it away. One of the mantras I adopted very early on in my design process, is a suggestion that came from a friend of mine during one of the first ever playtests of the game I am working on, Minions of Mordak. The essence of it, is the idea that it’s better to escalate the conflict in a board game rather than to clawback the progress the players have made. Adding…