How To Make A Board Game

The following is a short excerpt from a guide written by K. Sampanthar, designer of the new Creative Board Game - Storm in A Tea Cup. The guide is titled: So You'd Like To Create A New Board Game. You can read the guide in its entirety here: So You'd Like To Create A New Board Game

There are a number steps involved in creating a new board game.

Step 1: Play A Lot of Games!

Research what is already out there. Find games that you love, that you loved as a child etc.. Play lots of games. Work out what makes these games fun, what’s wrong with these games, what could be better. Look at all different kinds of games from many different genres.

This is the fun part of game design; well if you don’t find this part fun I would reconsider your goal of designing a new board game. I love games and have been playing them for many years from early childhood to my adult years. Even though computer games were my main obsession for many years, the new stream of European Designer Board games drew me back to the board game genre.

I have played many games over the last few years in the name of research. I looked at some of main stream games like Cranium and Pictionary. I went back to some of the old classics Monopoly and Scrabble to work out what made these games "fun." Defining what makes a game "fun" is something that is hard and many times it takes a concerted effort to record yours and other people’s thoughts and feelings while playing a game. This is tough feat since when you are having fun, you are in a state that is called "Flow" (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) and that’s when you are completely immersed in the activity and don’t even realize until you are rudely awakened from that state (hopefully not by the poor design of a game!).

Step 2: Learn About Game Design When I decided that I wanted to design a board game I was a little disconcerted by the lack of available books on board game design. There used to be a few that web sites recommended but most of these seemed to be out of print. Over the last few years, especially this year (2003) there has been an influx of books on board game design.

My first step in researching board game design, since there seemed to be a lack of books, was to read many articles on board game design that I found on the web. Here are some useful sites:

http://www.discovergames.com/home.htm
http://www.thegamesjournal.com/
http://boardgames.about.com/

I also found that the deluge of books on computer game design, that have recently come out, to be very useful reading material. Many concepts of "balancing," "reward schedules" and "economics" are very similar in the computer game genre as well as the board game genre.

The European games really pushed the boundaries when it came to new mechanics for board games. They threw out the clichéd ideas of Monopoly type boards and dice and introduced the world to tile based games, new scoring, movement and redefined what constitutes a turn.

Understanding psychology, economics, mathematics and statistics are essential if you are going to enter the world of game design these days.

You can read the rest of this guide here: So You'd Like To Create A New Board Game

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