You cannot learn design by only reading about it. Each stop on the course has a few games that show the idea working at a real table. Play them like a designer: not to win, but to feel where the decisions live.
Games built on a single, sharp mechanic. Notice how much depth comes from almost nothing.
Watch for: one verb, drop a disc, and a surprising amount of forward planning. The whole game lives in a single repeated action.
Watch for: a complete game made of sixteen cards. Every card is one tiny rule. Study how little it takes to make a real decision.
Watch for: chess-like depth with a handful of movement rules and no board at all. Mechanics as the entire game.
Where every choice has a visible consequence and you can see enough to choose well.
Watch for: total information. No hidden cards, no dice. Every loss is yours. The purest case of a decision with consequences.
Watch for: every turn is a clear trade of time for buttons for space. You can always see the cost of what you want.
Watch for: taking what you need also hands something to your neighbor. Decisions you can read on the table.
Tell input luck (the hand you start with) from output luck (the roll that decides it after you commit). Feel how hidden information changes the whole texture.
Watch for: pure output luck you choose how far to ride. The dice are random; when to stop is all you.
Watch for: the math is luck, the betting is information warfare. The cards barely matter next to what you make others believe.
Watch for: the entire game is hidden information about who is lying. The board is the other players' faces.
Games engineered to produce one specific emotion. Name the feeling, then find the mechanic that causes it.
Watch for: dread itself, built from one object. Pulling a block to act means the tower might fall and your character dies. The feeling is the mechanic.
Watch for: whimsy and ambiguity by design. Score rules push you to be clever but not too clever. Aesthetic as the goal.
Watch for: the feeling of a heist movie going wrong. The whole structure exists to manufacture escalating disaster.
Feedback loops, table politics, and the co-op problem where one loud player runs everyone's turn.
Watch for: the leader gets ganged up on, the robber and trades drag them back. A negative feedback loop you can watch happen.
Watch for: the three-player problem at full scale. Kingmaking, betrayal, and the player who cannot win but decides who does.
Watch for: the "quarterback" problem live. One confident player can plan everyone's moves. Notice how that drains the others.
Watch for: the elegant fix to quarterbacking. You cannot see your own cards and may only give narrow hints, so no one can run the table.
The third build's core question. Does the game model how a system works, or just show a picture of it?
Watch for: it represents disease spread with a clever rule, it does not simulate epidemiology. Notice what it chose to model and what it threw away.
Watch for: a model of influence and tension across the globe. Study which real forces it turned into rules and which it ignored.
Watch for: a famously bad simulation of real estate. Almost no real decisions, runaway leader, no catch-up. Study it for what not to do.
House rules, legacy formats, and games whose rules change as you play. The well-played game.
Watch for: every player has a power that breaks a different rule. The course's case study for why "fair" is not the goal. Read the canon entry alongside it.
Watch for: the rules and the win condition literally change mid-game through the cards you play. A game about changing the game.
Watch for: a game you alter forever as you play, tearing up cards and adding rules. The legacy format, where change is the point.
Watch for: almost no components, all social. The game is the conversation. De Koven's "well-played game" in its rawest form.
The MIT course points at this one on purpose. Play it to feel the absence of meaningful choice.
Watch for: a game that can end on turn one for reasons you could not prevent. It is funny precisely because it has almost no real decisions. A perfect mirror of what you are learning to build instead.