The Core

The core is the central mechanic or mechanics of your game.

In a way, the core is your game.

Just the core, please

Do not put all your ideas in one game. Make your game about one thing. The less things the game is about, the better.

Once you've worked out your core, remove everything else from your game, other than what's needed to support and enhance the core. I want to be playing your amazing core, not a whole lot of other stuff.

Dominion was the first "deck-builder" game (each player starts with a weak deck, and uses its cards to buy more and better cards to shuffle into it). The designer originally had this as the core of a much larger game, but, in the end, he removed all that extra stuff, and the game was an instant classic.

Many designers think they need to make an epic game around their core, but the correct choice is often a relatively simple, half-an-hour game. Each irrelevant or extraneous thing you add makes your game worse.

If your game is about one thing, and that thing is great, then your game is great. If it's about ten different activities, then they all need to be great, for the game to be great.

There's no point adding anything else to your game, or proceeding, until you have a good core. Do not go off and work on other parts of the game, while you fix the core.

The core is the game.

No amount of good ideas, work, art, and other things will matter if the core doesn't work.

Clarity

There's a second advantage of just focussing on the core of your game.

Imagine the following game (I just made it up):

There's a ten by ten grid. On each of your turns, you add a stone of your colour to the board. Players cannot place stones adjacent (including diagonal) to their opponent's stones. The player with the most stones on the board at the end wins.

It's nice that this game has such simple rules, and can be understood so easily. You can start strategising immediately.

The game above is an interesting puzzle, precisely because it's a very simple and clear problem. It's not a sprawling array of rules, but poses a very stark and simple question to you. If this example interests you, it's not going to be made more interesting if I add extra things on top of it.

I call this clarity. The more your game is about its central challenge, the more clarity it has.

This game is not interesting enough for me to want to play it twice, but it is interesting momentarily.

Give the players a distilled experience of one simple concept.

Give me lots of something, or none

Every concept in a game should be significant, or absent.

If your game has a great core that's about X, or X and Y, I just want to play that part. Don't tack on all kinds of extra stuff.

This applies to smaller concepts too. If you make something that's outside the norm for your game, that's great, but if it's good enough to be in your game, why not have more of it? Amplify it.

Look through your game components, for things you like, and make more variants of them.

In my gangster game, there is no spatial element. However, I made a "secret base" location, that you can only go to from an adjacent location. I liked the idea, so now there are many such "secret" locations.

In Ticket to Ride: Europe, players can largely plan out which train routes across Europe they can build. However, a few routes are "tunnels", which cost a random extra amount of cards. Players will attempt to build them, and sometimes fail. This is a highly random element in a game with little in-your-face randomness, and it's jarring and un-fun to have your plans disrupted in this way.