The differences in the mechanics have as much to do with the skills for an age group as they do with the presentation and overall goal of the game. By goal the reference is not to the game’s objective, but rather what the designer intends players to learn/hone from the experience. This is what makes the design process as much fun to create as it is to explore spaces in the same genre. It’s also how you can end up with games that rely on physics (especially in real-time games) while others are steeped in psychology and behavior studies (the core of poker and chess, for example). Neither chess nor poker explicitly state in their rules that they rely on psychology to win, but the bluffing mechanics as well as strategic planning needed requires players to learn the subtle clues their opponents express physically or through their pieces teaches players to use these skills to discern the other’s thoughts.
Because of the social mechanics used by these games, you have to create a welcoming space where designers are free to open themselves up to this level of self-examination. This isn’t to say that it has to be a support group per se, but you do want to ensure that exploration of games which rely on deduction and bluffing where a person’s feelings or personal lives are involved don’t feel like a crucible or that the designers are under a microscope. Games that use a social component may use math to govern outcomes, but their true strength and enjoyment are the rewards of successfully “mind reading” the other players. To do this, you need different tools from more straightforward games.
Add to this games that rely on engineering challenges (similar but not the same as physics-based mechanics) to solve puzzles (Kerplunk, Don’t Break the Ice, and Bausac, for example) or those that use a limited space for the pieces and/or game board to place all the data used therein. The play space has to vie for real estate as much as the components do to fit on the game boards, the table, and in their respective boxes. If the space is too small, your designers might not be able to implement their ideas as intended—or at minimum, not be able to playtest their full design. The other problem with space constraints is the exploration of the upper limits of wieldiness for that genre.
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What Game Design Teaches, Part 2