A week ago, I ran a workshop on tabletop game design at the Pickering Public Library with a friend of mine. It’s the second time we’ve run this workshop (the first time was for the Ad Astra convention in the spring).

The workshop runs for about three hours, and covers the very basics of rules & mechanics. We start off with a discussion of mechanics, and from there move on to examining how changing the rules of a particular game would change the way it plays. Finally, participants get to build a simple prototype for their own game idea.

Karl (my fellow presenter) and I have learnt a lot about workshop presenting by running this, and the attendees have imparted a few of their own lessons on game design as well. Every time we run this workshop, we tweak it based on feedback as well as ideas we determine ourselves for improving things.

While the other parts of the workshop are quite interesting, the part attendees remember best is the prototyping activity. When we ran the workshop at Ad Astra, participants built a chariot-racing game, where players would build the track and try to maneuver around each other. This time around, we split attendees into three groups for the house rules and prototyping activities.

Team Green starts off this workshop recap. When we covered rules changes, they took the simple game of Checkers, and modified it so that players could sacrifice pieces to crown a king. They believed that the loss of a couple pieces in exchange for a guaranteed king would add a new strategic layer to the game, and wouldn’t be a guaranteed winning move.

Green’s prototype was for a four-way capture the flag board game, with fantasy trappings. Players would take on a traditional RPG class, and work from their corner of the board to the centre and back. Different encounters, both fixed and random, would occur on their travel, giving them the opportunity to improve their equipment and stats. Players would be able to put encounters in play against each other, and those in the centre would also have the chance to duel each other directly.

Team Blue’s house rules exercised involved making player alliances in Risk something official. There would be actual in-game benefits and disadvantages for making, maintaining and breaking them. They also spent time reasoning why players in alliance wouldn’t be able to share territory between their armies. When it came to the prototype, Blue created a somewhat similar game to Green’s, except inspired by games like Call of Duty. Players would move to the centre to collect weapons, and then move to other corners to fight each other and collect points to win the game.

The third team, Team Red, took chess as their game for the house rules activity. They turned it into a four-player game, and added player-controlled “dragons” in the corners for extra challenge. They also made the strangest of the prototypes, an arena game where movement was done by actually measuring distances and players controlled different classes of creatures.

Fitting the workshop in three hours means that we don’t have the time to fit in everything we should. Karl and I have talked about additional workshops based on this one, which would cover things like “fluff” (the story, etc. which add flavour but doesn’t actually deal with the rules themselves) or refining concepts. We also already have ideas for refining this workshop further, when we run it again at the Pickering Public Library in February and Ad Astra in April 2012.