[Basic Units] Breaking down basic components.
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I've had a series of posts on my blog called 'Little Parts, Artfully Arranged' - the idea was to take the basic game components that we're used to and completely analyze the properties of each so that I can find the commonalities and the differences between component types.
For example, a six-sided die and a hand of six cards numbered 1-6, shuffled and replaced face-down after each draw. On the surface, each of these offers the same result - a random number between 1 and 6. But there are inherent difference between a rolled die and the stack of cards: one is absolutely independent (the die's result is lost if it is re-rolled, and may be same result again), and the second offers the possibility of dependence (instead of shuffling after each draw, you can pull the next card, and it will never be the same result).
These sorts of differences are crucial in game design, and I've never seen an exhaustive attempt to catalog the properties of game components. Here are the first two posts I did, on cards and dice:
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Others I have planned:- Poker Chips
- Spinners
- Pawns
- Dominoes
- Tokens
Feel free to grab onto any of these and start breaking them down. I'll add more here as I post them. -
Nice. I can see it'd be useful to have a full list of these, so you can see what you'd gain and lose by swapping out a common game element for a near equivalent. When I play a game with swathes of poorly-considered tokens, or a deck of three-possible-colour cards that I have to shuffle every few minutes, I wonder exactly what they would have gained and lost by using a different mechanism.
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