As long as players can continue to encounter meaningfully different game states, they will enjoy making decisions on the fly. If they decide that they have seen everything your game has to offer, this is the moment when it transforms from chess to tic-tac-toe.

But, look, friends, quitting has nothing at all to do with character unless we make a rule that it does. And who would want to make that kind of rule? It would ruin our chances to play freely. We’d never be sure that this was the game that everybody wanted to play if everybody had to stay in the game, if no one could quit.

Imagine if the artwork for every boardgame was created by the designer. All of the cover art, cards, boards, etc. I imagine there would be a lot of complaints about the quality of the artwork. Expecting untrained designers and developers to write professional-quality instructions is just as unrealistic as expecting them to do the graphic design.

When the “how” of your actions (understanding the mechanical hoops through which games make you jump to meet milestones) align with the “why” (how these milestones add up to victory), players are more likely to achieve flow.

– Story is what players remember, at the end of a game, about what their characters did in a game.
– But what most players in most games remember is the story they wrote, not a story the designer wrote.

[Playing against Fischer] began to feel as though you were playing against chess itself.

I see play as a portable tool for being.

It is quite natural that we should tend to conceive music as lying within the sphere of play […]. Making music bears at the outset all the formal characteristics of play proper: the activity begins and ends within strict limits of time and place, is repeatable, consists essentially in order, rhythm, alternation, transports audience and performers alike out of "ordinary" life into a sphere of gladness and serenity, which makes even sad music a lofty pleasure. In other words, it "enchants" and "enraptures" them. In itself it would be perfectly understandable, therefore, to comprise all music under the heading of play.

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

A manual wargame demands that the players understand far more of the designer’s intention and work, through the simple fact that they must work harder to make sense of it, through reading and interpreting the rules, shuffling the cards, moving the bits and rolling the dice. I believe the very tactility, the fact of physical engagement with the game and its components, promotes a different understanding and processing of the information the game offers.