Core Gameplay Loop Anatomy
Find the one action people repeat forever, then build everything else as scaffolding around it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 95%
Elan Lee openly admits he has no formal training in game design and made this vocabulary up as he went, but the core gameplay loop is the concept everything at Exploding Kittens hangs on. The input is any half-formed product idea; the mechanism is isolating the single action players will repeat over and over and testing whether that action puts the players or the product in the spotlight. The output is a loop so elegant that every other component — words, timers, punishments, packaging — can be justified purely by how hard it pushes people back into it.
Origin
Lee was hired out of college into Microsoft's Xbox group as a producer, was told within two weeks by Jordan Weisman that he was a terrible producer but might be a good designer, and learned game anatomy by dissecting other people's games rather than by studying it formally. He describes the loop as a term he invented for himself because he had no training and needed a way to talk about what he was seeing.
Core principles
- 01Every game has one action you perform over and over again, and that repeated action — the core gameplay loop — is the most important part of the whole product.
- 02The loop is a mechanism, not a theme: Uno is a lock-and-key mechanism where playing a key converts it into the next lock, and numbers and colours are just its costume.
- 03A loop that is merely descriptive is not the real loop; Russian roulette with a deck of cards is the pitch, but Russian roulette where you get to decide where to place the bullet is the actual engine.
- 04The best loops are not entertaining in themselves — they make the people you are playing with entertaining, so the fuel running the engine is the other players.
- 05Finding a compelling loop is really, really hard, and no amount of art, components or theme will rescue a product that does not have one.
- 06Once the loop is found, every surrounding element must be chosen to push players back toward it, forming a menagerie of things that enhance rather than distract.
- 07You know the loop is right when the product itself fades away and the interaction between people becomes the experience.
How to run it
- 1
State the repeated action in one sentence
Describe what a player physically does again and again. For Exploding Kittens the first-pass answer is Russian roulette with a deck of cards; for Uno it is playing a key onto a lock which becomes the next lock.
Pro tip Practise on games you did not make. Lee says he loves dissecting games to find these, and the skill transfers instantly.
Watch out A one-line Hollywood-style pitch such as Jaws in space is a theme, not a loop.
- 2
Interrogate the first answer until you find the real mechanism
Lee's own first description of Exploding Kittens was wrong. The accurate loop is Russian roulette with a deck of cards where you get to decide where to place the bullet — the placement is the whole game.
Pro tip Ask what single rule, if removed, would make the product pointless. That rule is usually the loop.
- 3
Test who carries the burden of entertainment
The very first Exploding Kittens test was a deck with a few bullets and no diffuse cards. It was no fun because it was players versus the game, and the game had all the burden of entertaining everyone.
Watch out If people are playing against your product rather than each other, the loop is broken no matter how polished the components are.
- 4
Add the rule that transfers agency to the players
The diffuse card let a player who drew the bullet secretly reinsert it anywhere in the deck. Suddenly the game was not random — you had to outthink the person next to you, and the game faded away.
Pro tip Look for a rule that creates hidden information between people rather than between the player and the system.
- 5
Build the menagerie around the loop
Only once the loop is locked do you add surroundings. In Poetry for Neanderthals that meant deliberately choosing words like teeth that make people stumble into funny territory, and adding the inflatable no-stick as a punishment.
Pro tip Lee says teeth was calculated — pick components by the behaviour they provoke, not by how they read on the page.
Watch out Every element you add must push players back toward the loop; anything neutral is drag.
- 6
Ship when the loop is elegant and fast
Lee's trigger for boxing a product is a beautiful, elegant, fast loop surrounded by components that all serve it. That is the moment the thing goes out the door.
Watch out Continuing to polish after the loop is elegant usually means adding baggage back in.
In the wild
The first version of Exploding Kittens was a deck with a few bullets in it and players taking turns drawing; whoever drew a bullet died and everyone else carried on. Lee describes it as absolutely uninteresting because it was people playing against the game. The team introduced diffuse cards, which let a player who drew the bullet secretly place it back anywhere in the deck. Now the question became did I put it on top, did I put it on the bottom, did I know that you knew that I knew — and the game itself disappeared behind the psychological duel.
→ The loop that Lee believes is the reason the game became the most-backed Kickstarter project ever by number of backers.
Asked for a loop outside his own catalogue, Lee reaches for Uno. He strips away the numbers and colours entirely and describes it as a lock-and-key mechanism: everyone holds a hand of keys, the centre of the table holds a lock, and the moment you play a key onto that lock it becomes the new lock for the next player. The colours and numbers are just the surface language the mechanism happens to wear.
→ A demonstration that loops are mechanisms which survive being stripped of their theme.
Lee once challenged a group of experienced game designers to describe the core gameplay loop of Settlers of Catan. All three said variations of the same thing — collect resources, spend them to expand fastest. Lee's reaction was that this is not how he plays that game at all: for him it is a social game and a trading game where he does not care about the board, only about his relationships with the other players, because that is how you win or lose.
→ Experienced designers reading identical rules were provably playing completely different games, which Lee found fascinating and Tim attributed partly to their inexperience with that specific title.
Common mistakes
Mistaking the theme for the loop
Tim raises the Hollywood pitch structure — alien is Jaws in space — as a possible loop. Lee's examples show why that fails: a theme tells you what the product feels like, a loop tells you what people physically do again and again. Products built on themes run out of fuel on the second play.
Letting the product carry the entertainment
Lee says the biggest fault he finds in nearly everything pitched to him is that the game is working so hard to entertain the players. His response is that he does not care about those kinds of games — the players, not the product, should be in the spotlight.
Adding components before the loop is settled
The Poetry for Neanderthals team spent a year carrying sentence-translation baggage forward because they were refining surroundings rather than the loop. Only when they asked why are we complicating this did the product become simple and fun.
Is it for you?
Best for
Game designers, product designers and founders trying to work out what the irreducible engine of their product actually is.
Not ideal for
Narrative or experiential works with no repeated interaction, where the payoff is a single linear pass rather than a loop.
From the transcript
“at the essence of any game is what i at least call the the core gameplay loop and that's the thing that you're going to…”
“we introduced these other cards into the game called diffuse cards and all the diff fuse card did was it said look if you draw…”
“now suddenly the game fades away and i'm playing against you and that's the core gameplay loop of exploding kittens”
From the episode
#653: Elan Lee, Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens — How to Raise Millions on Kickstarter, Deconstructing Mega-Successes, Secrets of Game Design, The Power of Positive Constraints, The Delights of Craftsmanship, and The Art of Turning Fans into Superfans