Making Your First Board Game *Board Game Design*

you have this idea hanging out in your cranium a squatter in your frontal cortex a vague concept for a game a world inspired by a movie a novel a video game but it's a slippery little might this brain worm just as you think you've pinned it down devised some rules of play the idea morphs the world just grew rendering your imagined rule set unworkable the setting shifted to an entirely new environment the Cowboys became Pirates and your brain is off again the cogs are turning before you know it months have passed and your concept has shifted so many times you don't know what's what you know you want this game to become a reality but that seems an impossible task there are so many iterations filed away in your hippocampus which one would you produce and these files are corrupted your game doesn't exist as a pure entity version 12 is cross-contaminated by elements of version 15 20 2 and 37. how are you ever gonna get this damn thing out of your head [Music] I'm Adam Porter I'm a game designer from Wales and on this channel I like to share my experiences in the world of board game design if you like what I do please subscribe comment and share the video this video is really intended for those first time designers who feel a little bit lost with the process of board game creation I receive emails from such people on a regular basis and the question tends to take one of two forms one I want to design a board game but I don't have any ideas or two I have an incredible idea for a board game but it's all in my head and I don't know what to do next now there's no right answer to either of these questions those first tentative steps as a game designer are perhaps the most personal the most dependent on your own personality tastes experience and priorities fine artists don't hang their first ever painting in the Louvre it goes on their mum's fridge world-renowned novelists don't publish the first stories they ever penned they're jotted in the back of an exercise book awarded a gold star by teacher perhaps not even that game creation is the same your expectations for your early designs should be low but you should enter into these experiments with a wide-eyed child-like enthusiasm game ideation is a joyful process so start out by chasing the fun I was a game designer all my life I just didn't realize it I remember drawing racing cars on tiny pieces of card and flicking them across the living room floor completing circuits around the furniture I invented pitch car at eight years old some ten years before Jean de Paul won the spirits with the same concept at the age of 12 I got hooked on the Avalon Hill card game wrestling a simple take that card game simulating the Hulk Hogan era of American wrestling but I wasn't content playing the game in the Box mimicking the play-by-male football leagues my older brother was obsessing over at the time I created a wrestling league for my friends I made a character generation system inspired by the one I'd read about in palladium's pen and paper RPG Heroes unlimited our wrestlers upgraded their stats and signature moves they suffered injuries formed friendships and rivalries switched Allegiance and evolved from one match to the next I loved creating worlds for my friends to play in the rules weren't balanced most of the time there weren't any rules it was all off the top of my head I was chasing the fun like any creative Pursuit game design shouldn't be a chore it should never be forced the process should be organic and easy so what do you need to become a game designer an active playful spirit and someone who will indulge you a willing guinea pig to try out your half-baked ideas when I was in my early 20s my sister was seven or eight years old and I loved hanging out with her and encouraging her to be creative I was running an improv theater group at the time my mind was often occupied with creating new drama games in the mold of Whose Line Is It Anyway my little sister had an enormous expanding collection of Thai Beanie Babies animals of all varieties and colors and together we developed a rule set for racing beanies across the living room floor just like my cardboard racing cars except these races weren't flicked their moves were dependent on dice rolls and measured out with a tape they could attack and defend too and each racer had its own traits depending on its species so horses had a boost for Speed dogs had an attack bonus when fighting cats winged animal ignore difficult terrain and each animal would level up depending on the outcome of a race their stats would change and they'd develop new skills all recorded in a little notebook this was Warhammer meets DND meets plushies and we played for hours I still didn't know that I was a game designer these are the Scrolls of a nascent illustrator the scribblings of an emerging author game design is no different to any other art form when you start out you do it for the love of it but crucially I did do it my ideas didn't linger in my head I put pen to paper quickly I wasn't embarrassed or fearful I designed terrible games but I fixed them as we played I had no concept of an end result I only cared about having fun if you ever meet me in person at a game design Meetup you'll probably find me quiet and polite perhaps a little aloof smug even and occasionally really Brash new designers often try to tell me their ideas and I tend to give them short shrift I'm not intentionally rude my mind just doesn't work that way get those ideas on the table in whatever form they spill out of your muddled mind be fearless and unashamed no one can play the game in your head put physical components in front of us and let's take this thing for a spin find out all the ways it's broken and most importantly try to locate the spark the intangible non-pinpointable something the soul of the game the fun one of the first titles which really got me hooked on Modern games was Dominion when I started playing over a decade ago there were a couple of expansions available but there was a thriving community of players creating their own fan made cards and I quickly threw myself into creating wildly unbalanced Kingdom cards and forcing generous friends to suffer their way through frustrating off-kilter sessions the bulk of the fun wasn't playing it was tinkering laying out the cards tweaking and adapting after each test finding images online to blend the cards in with the original game it wasn't just a minion I recall creating my own expansions for takanoko dice town and Super Dungeon explore my friends must have got fed up at playing ill-conceived variants because before long I found myself creating solo modes for multiplayer games I remember playing a lot of Glenn Moore and drumroll by my own Solitaire rule sets this is a great way to learn about board game design with a very low barrier to entry the game already Works you've got a sound system a fully realized world when you tweak such a game bolt bits on or chop bits out you start to understand the interwoven mechanisms at play and how a seemingly minor element of gameplay functions as part of a greater whole in a well-designed game every aspect has been carefully considered and if it made the final cut it's there for a reason what happens if you Lop that bit off how is the experience altered for the players it's a great exercise for a game creator learning their craft what happens in Dominion if you shuffle all the cards together and reveal a market of 10 random cards instead of using predetermined decks why aren't purchase cards placed on top of your deck for immediate use instead of the discard pile well try it and you might find out ten years ago if I wasn't playing games I was tweaking them and I still didn't consider myself a designer one week on games night a friend arrived with a Prototype game he had put together it was an area control game about fish populating a coral reef this was the first time I'd played a game which was hugely imaginative and promising vibrant and joyful but also gloriously deliciously broken muscle memory from three decades of game design though I'd never called it that kicked in and I became obsessed with this thing I was the worst sort of play tester I wanted to change everything and I bombarded my friend with praise criticism helpful suggestions and unwelcome alterations after several weeks of politely incorporating elements of my feedback into the game My designer pal gently suggested that I take all my ideas and make my own game leaving him to develop his coral reef project in the manner that he deemed fit I had developed a passion for design and I wanted to do more but I had never created a new world from scratch all of my design experience to date was based on tweaking and developing existing rule sets in 2013 I was watching Wimbledon Andy Murray was promising to end a 77-year wait for a Brit to claim the men's singles title and I thought to myself if I don't have my own rule set why don't I just adapt an existing rule set such as tennis into a board game how would that work well this is my prototype for Advantage Tennis project I briefly shared online as a print and play game along with two related games using similar mechanisms Advantage cricket and Advantage baseball Advantage Tennis is a simultaneous card selection game in which players try to deduce where their opponent is going to land the ball and then successfully return it it's not a good game but this was the first time I genuinely considered myself a designer I foolishly created listings on the board game geek database to share files for these three print and play games decision I regret and despite many requests over the years I can't get Board Game Geek to remove the pages and frankly they don't belong there this weren't polished games they were early prototypes BGG functions a lot like a CV for a professional game designer as of the spring of 2023 I currently have eight published games to my name and I'd rather that these precursors didn't muddy the picture so there's a lesson for you first time designers out there don't create Board Game Geek page for your game unless it's on the customer being published you might regret it later I enjoyed creating these three games so much I wanted to do more now I'm not really a big sports fan but I was still fearful of creating a wholly new rule set from scratch so I went looking for another pre-existing set of rules to adapt my next design project was recreating my favorite video game Super Bomberman as a board game I went all in on this one I spent weeks laying out the artwork creating variable Arenas buying wooden components and recreating every aspect of the original game with vague Daydreams of publication and in the knowledge that I would never be able to get the license to the video game characters I devised my own narrative a Hunger Games or Running Man styled Arena full of wacky combatants a call to the game a limey Nation elimination was a fully realized game it functions well and it simulates most of the mechanisms of the video game while Bomberman is played in real time elimination is turn-based and it uses an action point system that is to say players have a number of action points available each turn which can be spent to do a variety of things move a space drop kick or throw a bomb popular in the early 2000s action point games are notorious for creating an arduous experience players are often paralyzed as they weigh up the massive number of choices in front of them the one element of Bomberman that elimination failed to recreate was the speed of play arguably the defining feature of the original game if you ask a group of designers about using artwork in early prototypes they will tell you to avoid beautifying your game because you'll be adapting destroying and recreating it often and wasted hours spent laying out Graphics not to mention the cost of ink will make you reluctant to carry out necessary changes I must admit I differ from most on this point laying out the artwork for a prototype is one of the most enjoyable Parts I get lost in it hours pass by in a blink of an eye the process of laying out artwork even as a placeholder helps me to fall in love with the game and frequently time spent in this focused creative mode helps me identify answers to mechanical issues as if I'm nowhere a solution will pop into my brain addressing an issue identified in a recent play test I cherish these hours laying out graphics and imagining what the game could become if you're designing for pleasure and simply want to create a wonderful game to play with friends or family with no aspirations to publication or commercial success I fully support designers going all in on their project immerse yourself as deeply as you like create beautiful prototypes one way of doing this is to use launch lab a print-on-demand service from launch tabletop the sponsors of this video launch tabletop are a full-scale board game manufacturer so games produced through their launch lab service are indistinguishable from a professional project you simply create an account select your components and download templates to lay out your artwork in the correct configuration the games will be posted to you wherever you're located in the world in an impressively short time frame at a very reasonable price if you fancy creating a high quality prototype visit launchtabletop.com upload your files and use the code Adam in Wales for a 20 discount I was fortunate that around the time I really started to indulge my new passion for design a regular designer Meetup was advertised by Rob Fisher a local game inventor who had self-published his first game a couple of years earlier I attended the inaugural meeting for the Cardiff play test group back in 2014 my professional game design Journey began surrounding yourself with other game designers is inspiring informing challenging sometimes frustrating and always motivating the knowledge that the group will be meeting every month or in our case every week gave me a drive to create that soft deadline meant that I had to prototype quickly new ideas and iterations were rapidly implemented and perhaps most significantly I learned the value of play testing perhaps the single biggest shift between the amateur designer and the professional is the commitment to numerous rigorous repetitive sometimes tedious play tests now that's the topic for another video so follow the link above not quite ready to work without a safety net my early designs in the group tended to be mash-ups of other games what happens if I combine these two seemingly incompatible mechanisms how would this game look if I re-themed it totally and let the theme inform the new mechanisms before long I had a handful of promising prototypes which genuinely stood a chance my knowledge of the industry was growing and the Autumn of that year I visited the essence Spiel convention and started pitching for the first time this video has turned into a potted history of my own early experiences as a game designer and I'm not sure it it could be any other way this part of the process is so personal I can't speak for others but hopefully there are lessons here which help you with your own Journey there are some pieces of advice which are so frequently cited by game designers in play test groups and online forums and stated with such certainty that I think they weren't revisiting and critiquing number one prototype early sometimes phrased as fail faster the frequent advice to prototype early is sound get your ideas out of your head and onto the table before they become corrupted cross-contaminated and weird a physical prototype is a constraint it rains you in and contains your ideas grounding them in reality a new game designer once told me that he had no need of play testers he could run simulations of all of the various game States and scenarios in his head like that girl from the Queen's Gambit this is nonsense you're not chat GPT get it on the table don't waste time and money on graphic design and art frequent advice to keep your prototypes cheap and ugly is also sound if you're aiming to streamline the process and reduce costs but if you find joy and inspiration immersing yourself totally in a design project you're willing to accept the extra time and money this approach costs then I say go for it number three don't base your game on popular properties from film or TV well this advice is essential if you're hoping to publish your game most Publishers don't want to invest in licensing rights and your Ted lasso football game is going to scare them off but in the early stages of experimenting with design I think this advice is limiting rip off anything and anybody I say just as long as you're not planning to sell anything you're educating yourself and fully realize worlds from popular intellectual properties might give you the inspiration you need number four play many games absolutely this is going to inspire you many of the problems you hit when designing your own games will have been encountered by designers before you and overcome there's no need for you to repeat those struggles play loads of games and fill your designer toolbox with mechanisms which have been proven to work in the past don't let budget stand in your way here if you're designing for publication you need to be up to date playing the latest games but most games will have regular gaming meetups where you can play a variety of games without having to spend a penny if you're designing for pleasure well then it doesn't matter how up to date you are pick up any old game from the back of your closet or from the dusty shelves of a charity Shop but you must play regularly to stay inspired to keep those creative cogs turning number five play test extensively well this is crucial for a professional designer it's optional for an amateur you can play test as much or as little as you like lots of play tests are going to teach you a ton about design but if the lack of a play test group is a barrier preventing you from realizing your vision make it anyway creating a broken unbalanced game is still an achievement and I'd rather it existed in physical form than in your frontal lobe just don't try and sell it to me number six a successful game sells XXX copies well this is short-sighted you define success as you see fit when I was a kid success meant facilitating an enjoyable afternoon flicking cards around the coffee table with my mates a decade ago success meant Faithfully recreating every aspect of my favorite video game these days I stress out over sales figures royalty checks and positive reviews and I wish I didn't always remember the reason you got into game design and try not to lose the sense of childlike Wonder creating your first board game can seem like a daunting task but with the termination and a playful spirit you can turn that squatter in your frontal cortex into a tangible playable game whether you start small with a simple concept or dive head first into a complex immersive world the key is to keep iterating and honing your game until it's ready for the world this has been a refreshing video to make most of the videos on my channel are focused on designing for commercial success and that's a wholly different skill to what I've covered here if you're interested in professionally publishing your games I strongly encourage you to use a design thinking approach identifying a market understanding it recognizing the player's needs ideating Solutions and then prototyping and testing vigorously to learn more about this approach follow the link

Channel: Adam in Wales

Views: 11,569

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Id: y2vpRG0EbrI

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023