To learn game design, you have to play games, invent games, and break existing games. Nothing substitutes for hands on. Here's how to break a game, from my "HU-210: Game Design & Theory" class. It uses an 'instant challenge' style similar to the awesome Destination Imagination format.

Instant Challenge #1: Muggling Up a Game

Your task is, as a team, to take an existing game or sport and add a side game or minigame that greatly unbalances the primary game, in the same way that the 'Seeker' position unbalances Quidditch.

The Game:

In the “Harry Potter” fiction series, there is a sport called Quidditch that is a sort of airborne mix of rugby and soccer. Two teams of 7 players fly on broomsticks to try to lob a ball through one of their opposing team's 3 goal hoops. Each goal is 10 points, the highest team score at the end of the game wins. Teams can typically score up to a dozen or so goals before the game ends.

What Ruins It:

The gimmick that unbalances Quidditch is there's a special position, the 'Seeker', who has to do in essence a separate minigame. Each team has 1 Seeker, whose only task is to find a special tiny flying sphere (the Snitch) and grab it. The game only ends when the Snitch is captured-- and the Seeker that captures it earns 150 points for their team. So in a game sense, the Seeker dominates the game-- almost every game is won simply by their Seeker capturing the Snitch.

Bad math:

Winning scores in the books range from 150 to 320, and in 12 games described there's only 1 that has a point differential of >300 (310, G vs R in HBP, http://www.hp-lexicon.org/essays/essay-quidditch-almanac.html)

Analogy:

As Cracked.com put it, that's like having a football game and including two guys playing tetherball in the middle, and the guy that wins tetherball scores 93 points and ends the game. “Your team could have Peyton "Laser Rocket Arm" Manning throwing passes to a platoon of Jerry Rices, and it wouldn't make a difference if the other team had a real tall kid.”

Your task is to intentionally make a bad or pointless game by modifying an existing game. Take a modern game or sport and Quidditch-ruin it by adding some subgame or rule that makes the rest of the game fairly pointless.

For example, see the Football example above, or try this: Quid-Poker: Poker is played as usual, but each round the Dealer is presented with a really hard math problem, and if they solve it, they win all the money everyone brought to the game. Since Poker is a zero-sum game where each player decides how much to risk each hand, having this rule not only provides a non-poker way to win money, but is doubly unfair because it takes away money the player may not have intended to play.

You have:

• 2 minutes to find and join your team and assign roles (recommended: one person to write down your ideas, one person who will do the verbal presentation at the end.)
• 5 minutes to talk and brainstorm ideas.
• 1 minute to write your team's final idea.
• Choose 1 person from your team to present. Optionally, draw the scoring math on the chalk board.

Your presentation must include:

1. Introduction with your name and the names of your teammates.
2. Describe the game or sport you are ruining and provide the official rules and how it plays.
3. Ask for questions on the game/sport before proceeding (not everyone may be familiar with it).
4. Then, add in your modification and explain how that ruins the game.

Outcomes?

The six teams in my class gave widely different results in this successful exercise. Two were board game variants using Monopoly, one changed Poker, three were sports variants (2 for Basketball, 1 for Football). Three used the tactic of adding a random element (roll a die, land on a lucky space) to depreciate skilled play, while the other three took a deeper approach.

One added a tangential challenge very much like Quidditch, but with tactical options-- in Basketball, a successful half-court shot means you win and ends the game. Otherwise, the game plays as usual. This was very well aligned with the original case study yet adds interesting play options. They argued that most games would proceed as they do now, as lobbing the ball for the quick end means you lose a chance to score normally. However, if you have someone that can make this 'trick shot', you would have a game-stopper. Definitely a game-breaking rule, though more balanced than Quidditch.

One sport variant added a Sniper team position to American Football, with very well worked out rules. Each team's sniper gets 1 bullet for each point their team scores. They can hide anywhere on the field or in the stands, and can shoot each other as well as the opposing team (shooting Referees results in a 5-yard penalty). A bit like Rollerball, this would lead to more in-game player substitutions and require more players on your roster. I could see a movie about this.

The board game variant I'll discuss in more depth seemed to break Monopoly, but I think it leads to a neat "Speed Monpoly" variant. The rule change is "the first player to acquire a Monopoly-- all properties of a single color-- wins". At first glance, this may seem like it favors luck, but it has two neat qualities. First, it potentially leads to very short Monopoly games, which otherwise are a bit of a painful 4-hour slog. Second, especially given the oft-ignored Auction rules for properties, it means that property buying is very aggressive and trading likely disappears. The unintended consequence is that, if you don't get a quick win by getting a monopoly, the game is likely to take even longer, since no one can build hotels and money will likely just circulate among players for hour after hour. In short, a very interesting single rule leading to vastly different play.

I recommend you take the time to break a game. It only takes 8 minutes, and while you don't have to present in-class, you can put your variants in these forum comments for the amusement of others.

Until next month,
Sandy at rpg.net