IDS 101: Tabletop Game Design

Presents over 100 sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game's design over 600 pages. Written by one of the world's top game designers, this book describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design, demonstrating how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in video games. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.

This is the first volume to apply insights from the material turn in philosophy to the study of play and games.

Blends decision theory and game theory from classical optimization to modern game theory. It demonstrates the importance of mathematical knowledge in understanding and analyzing issues in decision making.

A smart coffee table book that explores multiple facets of board games, including their design and culture, and conceptions of space and place

Games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players, game designers, educators, and scholars a guide to how games work.

This book covers how to create a prototype of a game, including software and physical tools that can be used, graphic design and rules writing, and considerations for final product.

An authoritative, fully illustrated resource. The lively text captures the rich lore and history behind games.

Updates to popular games have created significantly different messages about personal identity and evolving social values. Games offer representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, age, ability, and social class that reflect the status quo and respond to social change. Using popular mass-market games, this rhetorical assessment explores board design, game implements (tokens, markers, 3-D elements) and playing instructions. The existence of board games marks an ever-changing sociocultural framework, exploring the nature of play and how games embody and extend societal themes and values.

Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter.

Probability theory continues to play a major role, game analyses still depend on expected value calculations together with computer simulations and game theory models for human behavior still strive mightily to capture an elusive reality.