For this 4-part series of workshops, we will explore tabletop game design! These are no-experience-required workshops that introduce attendees to making games with cards, dice, tokens, boards, or in the mind with plenty of rules!

Part 1: Brainstorming Game Design!

First in this series is a brainstorming and information session where we will look at the history of some popular boardgames and the cultural history of a few card games.

We’ll look at comparing the essential parts of our favorite tabletop games and game-making questions like “Can Monopoly be played without a board?” “Can Yahtzee be played without dice?” or “Does Poker really need cards?”

We’ll hold a brainstorming session thinking about what Player, Tokens, Dice, Ruleset, and Game Board and other game-making terms mean when we play games.

Finally, we’ll finish by staging out a simple game design flow process of Brainstorming, Creating, Playtesting, Prototyping, and Shipping. Participants will leave with a vocabulary for game-making and a graphic organizer for game design flow.

Please register for each workshop separately. Other workshops in the series

Instructor: Victor, Digital Media Lab intern

We recommend that participants remember their email logins or bring in flash drives to store files over the course of the series.