• Noticing—Noticing an internal or external stimulus, Attending to something, Tracking something.
• Feeling—Noticing, Identifying the emotion, Disentangling the immediate cause and associated beliefs.
• Focusing—Noticing, Selecting what to focus on, Attending to Something, Shifting focus, Tracking something over time, Keeping in mind, Staying in Touch with, Not getting distracted.
• Recognizing, Identifying—Noticing an internal or external stimulus, Having a Referent (e.g. previous experience with the thing I am trying to identify)
• Gathering information, Finding out—Discovering, Investigating, Scanning for—Knowing what you need (to know, to look out for), Gaining access, Interpreting what you learn.
• Remembering, Recalling—Remembering how to do something or explicit knowledge, Having gained that knowledge, Remembering to remember.
• Generating, imagining alternatives (creativity)
• Assessing, discerning—Assessing, Evaluating, Discerning, Telling whether, Separating, Identifying.
• Deciding, Weighing, Choosing—Trading off, Prioritising, Balancing more than one concern, Choosing the best ... (team, time, space)
• Modeling, Foreseeing—Modeling interactions, Stepping into the shoes of the other, Foreseeing consequences, Anticipating.
• Changing Situations and Games—Making space for, Creating, Getting, Finding, Arranging, Collecting, Building, Borrowing, Asking for support with, Pausing, Rearranging
• Social Skills—Negotiating, Listening, Asking, Understanding, Reminding, Providing support, Stepping into their shoes, Empathy
• Resources, Capacity, Experience—Setting yourself up ahead of time to do hard things later.
• Changing Course, Dealing with Setbacks—Accepting, Sitting with, Bearing, Knowing it's okay, Improvising, Stepping back, Aborting, Changing mental model, gear, lens.

• Other consequences living by this value might have (to) assess, accept, sit with, make space for, hear out, mitigate, prepare for, remember, change, ignore

Does the game begin and end in a satisfying way? Is the beginning scary? The end triumphant? What design elements are important here?

Some people go all-in as soon as a game starts, and others are slower to warm to it. Ideally a game can accommodate a variety of levels of engagement and win people over to a kind of commitment through play. Does your game do this? How does it create room for the less engaged player? Will they have experiences that draw them in? Will social pressure exists even among less engaged players that will push them towards commitment? Can it accommodate different rates of engagement?

Does the game have a skill set all its own, or does it just engage standard issue human skills (i.e., will the winner generally just be the strongest, the best at pattern matching, the most social)? Ideally, challenges of the game should be unfamiliar and worth improving at.

The best games have a complexity and richness which isn’t revealed in the instructions but instead slowly through play. Does your game have strategies which a player would only hit upon after 10 minutes (or 10 hours) of play? Do the roles and tasks create an ecosystem together which affords a variety of ways of playing and of attending to the play of others? Are there different ways to use the room, to use props, or to use other players which take time to explore? Do the instructions manage to create a good beginning and a good end without spelling exactly out how they happen?

In game design, the word balance is used to mean a game in which very different personality styles and very different strategic approaches can compete equally. So a game is balanced if offensive strikes and more defensive approaches can both seem like a good idea. Or if introverts and extroverts can play against one another, using their different strengths. Balance, more than any other feature, is what makes a classic game.

What do the players focus on, at each stage of the game? Do competitive or race condition tasks take players focus off of each other, and is that desired? Does a difficult task take focus off how a player is being perceived? If there are moments of conviviality, how does focus come to be on the group feeling?

Is there a rhythm to the engagement of the game? Does it give people time to breathe, to appreciate their accomplishments, to plan? Are there quiet moments, or moments of sub-group intimacy / knowing eye contact / etc?

At what level are players able to contribute something of their own? Do they invent their own strategy? Is there a performative quality they can bring? Are their creative tasks? Does a player have room to really invent or are they pressured to optimize? Is their contribution actually of consequence or is it merely a gloss?