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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2665 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

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What are your favorite articles/videos on game strategy? I'm thinking of things along the lines of Who's the Beatdown? for the Magic the Gathering card game. Not looking for any particular game, just interesting strategy articles.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ

It's not really strategy, but I think the general realm of game design is pretty similar, since obviously good designers are considering possible strategies. The first link is twenty lessons a Magic game designer learnt. The second video is about "cursed" problems in game design, where cursed problems are where your game design goal has a fundamental contradiction and is basically impossible to make fun.

Related to MtG, I always recommended that article as well as Ben Stark's drafting the hard way to new players on Arena.

I also like level one, but that's not an article.

I love aggro in magic so who's the beat down was one of my favorites. And surprisingly I was the beat down less than I would have guessed.

Absorbing that lesson really improved my play but most of my favorite wins came when my opponent thought they were the beat down only to learn they were not about midway through turn 4.

For MTG, clearly 36 bears. There are some other cool explanations on that site, but none so readily capture the essence of competitive gaming.

David Sirlin's Playing to Win is a classic book on strategy as pertains to fighting games. It generalizes pretty well even for games that aren't designed with the same principles. Some parts of it are also more about the culture of winning, especially in contrast to a culture of improving.

This blog has a bunch of articles on the design of roleplaying games. The top series is not strictly about strategy, but about decomposing the interactions between players, game conceit, and in-fiction logic. I thought it had pretty interesting implications about translating player intent.

I've got a lot of disagreements (and don't particularly like the fighting game genre), but Sirlin's writing are generally pretty strong. Not all are about strategy, but even things more focused on game design still drop ideas like donkeyspace.

The Game Design Forum is even more about game design, but it's overwhelming through a logistics and strategy lens. I don't think every player encounters the game like the author expects them to (aka the Elixir problem), but it's interesting to see from the inside.

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