7-7-7 Rule for Game Design (Paperback)

Not for me. The pacing did not work and I struggled to finish it.

A colleague recommended this and I can see why. It does something that few technical books manage: it respects the reader's time. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. The author is unusually honest about where the simplifications break down, which I appreciated. I would look elsewhere unless you have a specific reason to need this particular title.

Decent, but uneven. Some chapters are much stronger than others.

This is the third book I have read on game design this year, and it is comfortably the best of them. A couple of chapters felt like they could have been merged, but that is a minor complaint. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. Fine, but there are stronger books on the same subject if you look around.

Very good, with a few caveats. The core material is strong.

There is a particular kind of technical book that is dense without being difficult, and this is one of them. The chapters on game design are the strongest — the examples are stripped down but complete, and I could follow along without constant guessing. The exercises at the end of each chapter are worth doing — they caught a few misconceptions I did not know I had. Four stars, and I suspect a second edition could easily push it to five.