# Game Designer

> Design a game people keep coming back to.

Bicycle Guide reconciles the best books on a topic into one sourced guide and shows where they disagree.

Categories below are subject shelves: each groups guides that answer one kind of work or life problem. A guide's link points at its canonical home, which may be a persona front rather than this domain.

Game design is a real discipline with a real literature, and almost none of it reaches the people starting out. This is the travel-guide version: we read the designers who built the games that lasted, planned the route, and marked every stop worth making — honest about where they disagree, grounded in playtesting and research, made to stick.

Guide pages include source information and clearly mark paid sections, tools, and downloads. Links point at each guide's own canonical home, which is not always this domain.

## Games & Play
- [The Bicycle Guide to Design a Board Game People Want to Play Again](https://gamedesigner.guide/guides/board-game-design): Commercial and publication success becomes something you produce by design, not by luck.

## Capabilities
- The skills, knowledge, abilities and dispositions taught across multiple guides, joined to the books that ground them and the jobs that require them — see https://gamedesigner.guide/capabilities
- [Lusory Attitude](https://gamedesigner.guide/capabilities/ce_lusory-attitude): taught across 3 guides, grounded in 20 books.

## Disagreements
- [Where the books disagree](https://gamedesigner.guide/disagreements): 0 named disagreements with cited books on both sides — tension name, poles, and sources only.

## Books
- [Book library](https://gamedesigner.guide/books): the source corpus every guide cites, browsable by subject.

## More
- [Full guide index](https://gamedesigner.guide/guides): every guide this site serves, organized by shelf.
- [Sitemap](https://gamedesigner.guide/sitemap.xml): every URL on this site, for a complete crawl.
- [MCP server](https://gamedesigner.guide/mcp): remote Model Context Protocol access to the guide registry, taxonomy and capability spine — read-only, no auth required. Also served at https://gamedesigner.guide/api/mcp.
- [MCP well-known descriptor](https://gamedesigner.guide/.well-known/mcp.json): the same transport + tool list as machine-readable JSON, for a probe that checks .well-known before opening a session.
- [OpenAPI](https://gamedesigner.guide/openapi.json): the same registry as a REST machine-readable spec.