In TB4C I gave a suit of 52 blank poker cards to the students so they used them for prototyping. About 3 teams complaint that they would have used more cards at the end. Only one team use them to create a “Poker hold’em” type of game. But the large majority use the cards to write questions on them and did not consider any other affordance of the cards.

The point I’m making is that simplicity also needs a bit of structure. Specially people that never designed a board game, or play enough board games to consider designing their own one, some for of scaffolding is needed so they understand mechanics, and what affordances elements + mechanics can deliver.

Nonetheless, the challenge to design new games with ‘old/known’ elements sounds really interesting. For sure it can be added to TB4C. One thing I learned through the study of games, is that well-designed games can be won in many ways. And winning for the spider may not look like winning to the fly 🙂 [paraphrasing Morticia Addams].