Game design

Chris Dahlen at Unwinnable informs us that Lego's Heroica games are designed to be hackable.

First you need to assemble the board and the pieces and then you play – and once you’ve played, you’re encouraged to change the game by rearranging the board, making up new rule and rebalancing the scoring. The manual even gives you practical tips: Take chances. Fail fast. Change one thing, test it out and see if it makes the game more fun. As a graduate of Marc LeBlanc’s two-day game design workshop, I admired how the team at Lego had pared down an entire practice into language that small kids could understand.

I played one of these games with my nephew a while back and was charmed by the mechanic it included of having you rebuild the die during the game (because Lego!) but didn't catch on to this aspect. Very cool.