Design Your Destiny: Running Out of Time Review

When I was a kid, I cycled through a handful of special interests, and the one that endured was board games. Shocking, I know. Part of it was that I was such a voracious reader that sometimes the only thing around the house that I hadn't read was a rulebook. The obsession was so strong that, in elementary school, I made my own game; a disastrous Parcheesi-style roll and move with set collection and lose-a-turn mechanics on top. Because God knows that's what Parcheesi was missing, more ways to lose progress. When I saw Design Your Destiny, my immediate reaction was to wish I could time portal it to baby me. At least that first game would've been less torture for whomever I subjected it to.

Design Your Destiny is more or less what it says on the box: a game design story and activity book, plus an assortment of components. The story part is fine, but it's the side dish to our main course. There's a handful of intentionally underdeveloped games to playtest, each with explanations why it doesn't work and suggestions for improvement. It also contains sections for notes/journaling, again complete with instructions, prompts, and tables. There's even a sticker sheet of rewards for iterating on the games! I cannot say enough good about this box. I will warn adults that are interested in game design that it's very obviously geared towards the youths, but if you're an adult, you can afford to go to a Con and sit through some seminars, hang out at an unpub, and learn the ropes that way.

Sticking to my perspective, it's a great box. 80 points, the perfect gift if you've got a kid in your life that cares a lot about games. Maybe there's more to it, though. We've got a family friend who's a retired teacher, and she was overjoyed when I showed this to her. The process of game design is essentially the scientific method, but with games? I never thought of it that way, but yeah. My only experience as an educator was helping the other kids in my AP physics class  almost two decades ago, so I can't speak to its value as a more generalized education tool, but she did get really hype when I gave her the review copy. I dunno. It definitely implies there's more to it than just just teaching game design and theory.