Why chess is awesome

Chess is amazing. It’s the purest and simplest example of beautiful systemic design.

You see, what I appreciate about games is how deep and interesting systems they can create from simplest possible mechanics.

Chess is a king and queen of this concept. Anyone can learn chess in few minutes, no matter the age. By learn I mean, anyone can quickly learn how pieces move and what’s the goal of the game.

That makes the rules (mechanics) very simple. If they were complicated, it would take a while to understand, but, through this simplicity of mechanics, chess creates game so complex modern computers are not able to solve it.

Isn’t that fascinating?

Modern computers can count really fast, but not fast enough to figure out how to win a game of chess from start all the way to end. There is just too many possibilities and all those possibilities are created from simple mechanics a child can learn.
Mind blowing, it really is.

This is sort of a holy grail of game design I believe. Creating a game that’s so easy to understand, that anyone can play and enjoy it right away, but still offers complexity that would take several lifetimes to master.

That’s a long way of saying:

Easy to learn, Hard to Master.

It’s a nice idiom, you can ponder when thinking about game design. Most games are very very far from being easy to learn and a lot of them are also not that hard to master. (We could call it dominant strategy, but let’s not dive too deep into that now)

So, whenever you are thinking about mechanics for your game, take a second and think about:

Is this easy to understand?

Does this create interesting interactions with other mechanics?

What other mechanic will adding this enhance and what will it make weaker?