A child will remember Napoleon's historical situation better by playing the role of Napoleon than by reading pages and pages of text. Better still, if he enjoyed the game, he will read all the historical background in the rules, before or after the game.

[...] and while presented on glossy paper and often having great illustrations, the contents of the rulebook are a let-down which makes it difficult to get into and actually play the game. The rulebook is the players’ pathway into the game. As such, it should have a high priority in terms of its design and content.

Game design ideas gain value, sophistication, and meaning only when they are playtested. The hard work of the process, the actual game design itself, happens during the iterative process, not the concepting process that proceeds it.

For me, it’s important that the theme supports the gameplay, but never at the expense of a clear mechanism. That means that I will never include a detailed rule just to be closer to the theme.

Finding good playtesters is hard, and playtesters are probably underrated as to how much they contribute to a game. When I started out designing, I relied on friends and anyone who didn’t run fast enough.

Games tend to be experiential teaching. Stories teach vicariously.

If you take any three wargames at random, you’ll find more fundamental differences in approach and design, even though these are all hex-based military simulations, than you will among three real-time strategy games selected at random.

Magic and mystery, heroic longings, the foreshadowings of music, sculpture and logic all seek form and expression in noble play. [...] In play, therefore, the antithetical and agonistic basis of civilization is given from the start, for play is older and more original than civilization.

But the basic rules of historical simulations still applied. Or, as we put it back then, “If you can’t predict the past, you can’t predict the future.”

Historically games were less designed than evolved. Not many of these games are credited with a designer, and for those games that are, the contribution of the “designer” is usually a small variation of an existing game.