Three Books I Found Useful

There's a lovely chap called Adam Porter, who is a talented game designer, and who also has a YouTube channel called "Adam in Wales", where he mostly talks about game design from a number of different angles. This week he released a video entitled "10 Books Every Board Game Designer Should Read"  and, as always, it's a great bit of viewing. Please do go and watch it, and if you like that, watch more of his stuff - he has a lot of interesting insights.

Anyway, I have read more than half of Adam's recommendations (and agree with them), and the others have gone onto my wish list, but this made me think of what books I would recommend for a game designer. I'm not going to try to come up with a thorough survey of the field, but here are three books which I would suggest for a reading list.

Adam recommends a book by Austin Kleon, "Steal Like an Artist", and I would absolutely support that, but to be honest, I think I got more out of another of Kleon's books, "Show Your Work", which is full of more great advice, but is more focused on the idea that sharing your creative process and your output is a great way of building community, getting feedback, and generally developing as a creator. It was one of the driving forces behind me blogging about what I am doing in game design.

"The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" by Jesse Schell is one of those books that gets recommended a lot - or did when I was first looking for reading material a few years back - and for very good reason. While coming from a mostly video game angle, almost all of it is still relevant to tabletop games as well, and the book effectively provides a set of questions for you to ask yourself about a game you are working on, in the hope that thinking about the game through the lens of some of these questions might cast light on what is going on (or wrong) with the game. There is also an adjunct set of cards (both physically and a digital version in the form of a mobile app) that distils the key points of the book into a form that you can basically just carry around and fiddle with.

And finally, what is probably my favourite book about game design: "Uncertainty in Games" by Greg Costikyan. This is a small book, focusing on one thing, but which pretty much blew my mind when I first read it. Basically, a game needs uncertainty, but that uncertainty can come from many different sources from whether you will roll a six to if you can flick that tiddlywink into the pot, or if that other player has a plan that you hadn't thought of. The book catalogues a load of sources of uncertainty and discusses how they are (or can be) used in a game.

So that's my three for today. There are a load more I could suggest, but I have to stop somewhere. If there is anything else you can recommend, please do share in the comments. I'm always on the look out for good new stuff.