One of the reasons I really enjoy offline (board and card) games is because they offer a lot of great opportunities for game design. There's nothing quite like chewing over a game's mechanics while playing with friends. It's a fun exercise to think about how to turn an interesting board game mechanic into something that would work for the design of an online game. Offline games are also a great opportunity to tweak the rules to try to make them better. Perhaps you want to make a game harder, or easier, or just want a different experience after playing the game for the hundredth time with friends. If you can find a group willing to experiment, offline games are a great opportunity to practice game design and talk it over with other interested people. Let me talk about some of the variant rules I've been playing with in games.

Post copyright Brian 'Psychochild' Green. Visit the post to participate in the comments:

Game variants