Modern Tabletop Game Literacy

Catalog description

Modern Tabletop Games are undergoing a renaissance, with designers building upon each other’s innovations at a bewildering rate. The cornucopia of concepts in modern boardgaming can be daunting to a newcomer, yet any digital game designer is well advised to familiarize themselves with this parallel world, both to expand their “bag of tricks” and their notion of what a game can be. This class aims to familiarize students with a wide variety of “gateway games”: relatively straightforward exemplars that will give the student a solid foothold when further exploring their respective genre in our extensive library of boardgames. While doing so, we will be discussing related short readings in Characteristics of Games, in order to give the design strategies being engaged a broader context.