Sen's Lens

You may have come across Sen-Foong Lim, an experienced game designer with an impressive portfolio, and part of the Ludology and Meeple Syrup teams, as well as plenty of other cool things he has done. Well, he recently shared an image titled, "Your Board Game Critique. Things I'd probably tell you if I had playtested your game", I believe initially on Facebook, but it soon started getting passed around on Twixxer, Bluesky, and I assume other bits of social media too. I gather there was a bit of pushback due to the slightly blunt language, but I was instantly taken by the truth of the document. I have heard most of the points Sen makes aimed at my own designs over the years, as well as at other people's games.

A day or two later, Sen released an updated version with slightly softened and also tightened up language, but making the same points, and I've added this version below.

I first saw the list just before a planned chat with Alex, who I am working with on The Artifact, a game project that I need to blog about again soon (though this post kinda counts). We're working through some structural ideas at the moment and trying to figure out if we are on the right path, and Sen's points proved to be a really useful starting point for discussion. We went through the list, point by point, and had a discussion about whether that criticism applied to our project. 

So, is there too much going on? Is anything detracting from the core experience? Maybe - we have a couple of elements that are currently a bit extraneous, but overall we think the game is about the level of intricacy we want.

Is the audience ill-defined? We have to admit that we're basically making a game that we'd like to play together rather than having a strongly defined target, which probably isn't great for when we get around to pitching the game.

Would the game be painful to manufacture? We don't think so - despite having been developed mostly in virtual form, it is manufacturable with a pretty standard number of cards, a few punchboard sheets for tiles, and not-that-many additional tokens (maybe wooden, maybe punchboard), plus a board, so while it won't be a budget game, it shouldn't be a problem.

...and so on. We got to identify a few things that need further thought, and had some good discussion  about some other areas that should help us move forward. We've both worked on assorted games before, and this game has been through a good few playtesting loops, so we were pretty sure we wouldn't be too far off the mark here, but it's interesting how revealing it can be to just work through some of these basic points.

If you're working on a game yourself, I'd really recommend having a look and asking yourself to answer honestly to each point: does this apply to my game?