Assignments and Materials
Required Texts, Guidelines, and Due Dates
Required Materials
Required readings span the breadth of contemporary thinking on tabletop games — from working designers reflecting on their craft (in essays, design diaries, and podcast interviews), to critical scholarship on games as cultural texts, to practical guides on the mechanics of design. We will also be playing several board and card games throughout the term, all of which will be provided as hard copies in the Greenlaw Gameroom. Students will be responsible for reading rulebooks carefully as homework ahead of play sessions.
PDF files of all assigned readings and rulebooks will be distributed through Canvas.
Weekly Attendance and Participation
Everything we do in this course will be rooted in three core activities: critical gameplay, design experimentation, and guided discussion.
A significant portion of our class time in the Gameroom will be used to facilitate critical play of featured tabletop games where we will work together to play, critique, and discuss these games in small groups. To facilitate this, students will be required to closely review rulebooks for selected games prior to the session in which they will be played. In addition to conducting critical play sessions of published games, students will also spend many of our class sessions playtesting and prototyping their own tabletop game designs.
We will also spend a good deal of class time exploring selected readings on the history, narrative, and design of tabletop games. Several of these readings will be required throughout the term, but a host of others will be made available as optional resources to enrich the in-course activities and offer further avenues for self-directed learning.
Expectations and Effort
Participation is assessed by your record of attendance, the frequency and quality of your contributions to reading discussions, and your demonstrated level of preparation and engagement during gameplay sessions.
Each unexcused absence will result in a 6-pt deduction from your overall total score (out of 100). Given that we meet once weekly for a 3-hour block, the opening of class carries substantial discussion and instructional weight — please plan to arrive on time and stay for the full 3-hour block.
Failing-Grade Threshold. Because this course meets only fifteen times across the semester, accumulating five or more unexcused absences makes meaningful engagement with the course’s three core activities impossible. Students with five or more unexcused absences will receive a failing grade in the course, regardless of their performance in other categories.
Design Diaries
In this course, we will be keeping design diaries. These diaries are created and maintained independently by each student and are intended to provide a space to engage in deliberate guided reflection on course materials, practical experimentation with design principles, and process documentation related to the design projects.
Throughout the semester, students will submit diary entries in response to specific prompts. These prompts will range in style and substance — applying a key idea from one of the readings, posing a quickfire design challenge, guiding a structured diagnostic exercise on your prototype, or giving you space to reflect upon your design process and decisions. A few of the later-term prompts will also be inflected by your assigned design team role — Gearhead, Storyteller, Propmaster, or Vibe-Checker — with each role taking a distinct angle on that week’s question.
Note. Students will need to create a Google Doc during the first week of the course and share the link with the instructor by 12:00 PM ET on Friday 08/28/26 (the due date of the first diary entry). Be sure to enable “suggestion” privileges.
Expectations and Effort
Students will complete 10 diary entries over the course of the semester. Diary entries are due at 12:00 PM ET on Friday of the corresponding week in which they are assigned. Diaries will be assigned during weeks 2–5, 10–14, and 16.
Each entry should be 250–300 words in length and take 20–60 minutes of effort to complete. Entries are assessed on a 5-pt scale for completion and effort, ×10 for 50 pts total.
Design Project #1 — Monopoly, but…
The first of two group design projects, this assignment asks students to produce a rules re-write of the modern tabletop classic, Monopoly, but… that creates a spin on the original — using its core mechanics and systems to innovate new forms of player interaction, motivation, goals, and constraints. The assignment is inspired by the popular YouTube series “Monopoly, but…” produced by the gaming entertainment channel No Rolls Barred, in which guests play Monopoly with the familiar rules altered for thematic effect.
The purpose of this assignment is to allow students to begin experimenting with design choices and gain practical experience with the implementation of new mechanics and rules through iterative playtesting. In small groups, students will choose an area of thematic focus and spend two weeks working together to re-write the rules of Monopoly in accordance with a new experience of gameplay that supports their chosen theme.
Deliverables
- Revised rules document (variable, no more than 5 pp.)
- New or altered physical components (variable)
- “Monopoly, but…” one-sheet — short design statement (1 pp.) outlining the group’s thematic intentions and narrating how they were realized through specific design choices
Game Concept Proposal
The Game Concept Proposal is an opportunity to craft the “north-star” vision of what your game will be, and what kind of player experiences it will generate.
This document should be theme-first and spend minimal time focusing on the specifics of mechanics and systems, focusing instead on player position and motivation, sketching the game’s overall structure and flow, and formalizing, in language, the critical intentions behind your design ideas. The proposal also serves as the moment where your team commits to a research grounding, formalizes role assignments, and articulates the shared vision you will be realizing together over the second half of the semester.
Expectations and Effort
A strong Concept Proposal demonstrates: (1) a thematic focus that takes a real-world topic seriously and is researchable in productive ways; (2) a research grounding that is more than gestural — sources are named, situated, and connected to specific design directions; (3) a design vision coherent enough to guide the team through prototyping, playtesting, and revision; and (4) clear role assignments that reflect both individual inclinations and the team’s shared vision.
The proposal should run approximately 1000 words across four sections: Statement of Thematic Focus, Research Grounding, Design Vision, and Roles and Responsibilities. Due at the end of Week 9, just before Fall Break.
Design Project #2 — Original Tabletop Game
The second design project asks students, working in small groups, to conceptualize, design, fabricate, and test a playable prototype of an entirely original tabletop game for 2–4 players, with a play time of 45–60 minutes. This project will be scaffolded over the course of several weeks and form the basis of all our work both in class and outside of class for the second half of the semester.
Throughout this process students will use the insights gleaned from Project #1 to develop a game concept, engage in rapid prototyping, use playtesting to guide iterative design changes, draft and revise original rules documentation, and use physical components (boards, maps, cards, dice, pieces, tokens, etc.) to create a fully playable prototype. At the end of the term, during the final exam period, the class will hold an experimental design convention — “341 CON” — inviting members of the UNC community, and the public, to come playtest these designs.
Designing from the World
This project asks students to design a game that takes a real-world topic seriously — a historical moment, a cultural phenomenon, an everyday ritual, a social institution, a natural system, a body of knowledge — and translates it through the affordances of tabletop game design (mechanics, components, and play) into something that can be inhabited and worked through by players. Games of pure fantasy or sci-fi without grounded research, and games of pure abstraction that aren’t about anything in particular, are outside the scope of this assignment. The thematic focus must be one that can be researched productively to inform the design.
Designing as a Team
Project #2 groups operate as four-role design teams, with each member taking on one of the following roles: Gearhead, Storyteller, Propmaster, or Vibe-Checker. Roles are explained in detail and assigned through group negotiation at Week 7. Each role will take the lead on a particular dimension of the design, but every team member contributes across the project’s mechanical, narrative, material, and aesthetic registers — these roles have been devised to organize collaboration, not to silo it. At the end of the project, each team member will submit a Designer’s Note narrating their design process from their role’s perspective.