Towards a pattern language for the book “Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design”

Abstract

The “Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design” is a collection of patterns for board game mechanics. The authors attempted to construct a pattern language by focusing on the references between the patterns in the book. First, we confirmed the centrality of categories (chapters in the target book) by network analysis of graph structures. Next, we extracted the parent-child relationships found in patterns, focusing on categories with high centrality. In addition, we analyzed the network of patterns that are used simultaneously. By feeding these results back to the pattern descriptions, the relationships between patterns can be more easily understood, and a pattern language can be constructed.