At this year’s Gen Con, I had the privilege of sitting on a couple panels with three giants in game design: Mike Gray (VP of new games acquisition for Hasbro), Reiner Knizia (most prolific board game designer in the world), and Richard Garfield (designer of Magic: The Gathering, among other great games). My friend Rob Stone helpfully took notes during the “10 No-No’s of Game Design.”

A couple hours before the seminar, Mike asked each of us to come up with our own list of 10. During the seminar, we ran through them as fast as we could, with lots of impromptu commentary. From Rob’s notes, we have the list below.

You might notice there are only 33 points coming from four people. Working in parallel, we came up with many of the same points, which reduced the overall number. Then, during the seminar, we came up with some new ones on the fly, which raised the number again. That’s what you get when you toss together four sharp people who each come at games from a different angle.

Note that not all of us agreed with every point either. In fact, we sometimes went exactly against each other, but that ended up being why the seminar worked so well.

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