People start designing games for many reasons, but a big one is freedom. You see all sorts of games, but notice a striking omission, and think you could make it yourself!
Throughout the tabletop hobby there’s a view that a new game is a totally blank slate and that game design is a liberating creative outlet. But this is far from the truth. In reality designers must deal with countless constraints when creating games, both externally imposed and self imposed, sometimes subconsciously.
That might sound like a bad thing. After all, freedom is usually seen as a positive, while we avoid restrictions whenever possible. But constraints can actually be very helpful. They can give you guidance, they solve many problems you probably didn’t even realize were problems in the first place, and they can lead to creative new ideas by forcing you to approach a problem from a new perspective.
Today I’m going to discuss constraints in game design. I’ll start by looking at the many types of constraints all designers have to deal with, then discuss how constraints can be helpful, going over the ways constraints helped shape a design I recently worked on: the Owl Bear for Birds of a Feather.
