Iteration is the lifeblood of games. Take a concept, make some changes, you end up with a completely new game! It's an amazing process with no real rules beyond "change it enough, and people will tell you if it's too similar". But there's a little less-discussed bit that comes up every once in a great while:
Please, for the love of god, do not just make it worse.
I played a game called Nacho Pile tonight that was very, very similar to another from 15 years ago called Cheeky Monkey. The list of changes were, in their entirety:
- added superfluous special abilities that were completely random as to when they triggered
- forced players to move stacks of tiles every time they made a match
- said stacks could not stack, because the original game's chips were replaced with slick curved plastic "chips" made to look like Doritos
- all discards went back into the draw bag, meaning the game could literally never end
- it came in a bag instead of a box which had to be sealed with a ziplock that only mostly worked
Friends don't let friends make or play games like this. I am a bad friend.
