The secret to game design? Just pick something and try it. But game designers like Henry Audubon are trying something different. This article by Geoff Engelstein explores the question of numbers in game design.
One of the most frequently asked questions on game design forums is how to pick numbers for your design: How much should cards cost? What should the hand size be? How many victory points do you need to win?
The canonical answer is to just pick something, try it out, and see how it feels. Then change as needed. Or if you’re trying to cost a set of cards with different abilities, for example, just pick an arbitrary cost for a basic card, and scale everything around that. If a basic attack costs 3, how much should this enhanced attack cost?
There are other approaches, of course, and an interesting one was chosen by Henry Audubon, the designer of the new game Cosmoctopus. Henry is also the designer of the wildly popular PARKS (and in the interests of full disclosure a friend).
We had the opportunity to grab lunch at Gencon and he revealed to me that Cosmoctopus leans heavily on the Fibonacci Sequence for all of its numbers.