How to design boardgames

How to design your own games

I am the kind of guy who likes to make things.When I was young a made plastic models then graduated to making flying models out of balsa and then to building model boats out of wood. I ended up building them from scratch using the bare outlines of the real thing.Those days in a way were an alternate education. I was good at all subjects at school but for math.For some reason I was hopless.None of it made any sense to me no matter how hard I tried. I was able to fool my parents as my father being in the army we were constantly moving about. School reports were missed and my parents were under the impression I was an outstanding student as I was good at English and History. The science teacher thought I knew the stuff which I did so long as no math was required. At one school in the Far East I put  into the remainder class unknown to my parents as  before the school years was up were  posted to Hong Kong . When we arrived back in England I was saved by the English teacher who insisted the fourth form was too lowly  for one having  my mastery in English. A solution was found. I could go to the fifth form  (US equivalent grade 11,12) and be excused math.This was for me a dream come true and in order to thank the teacher  made sure I kept up with her Macbeth Shakespeare assignments.

The lack of math homework left me with time on my hands allowing  me to pursue my hobby of model making. In model maker magazine I read many of  old gaffers articles regarding model building. One that still strikes me as wise beyond the range of model building was a letter dealing with   dissatisfaction with a judgment at a 'concours d' elegence' event. There was disputation regarding the paint job on a Fokker DVII. The model  although painted with a paint  using the original factory formula  was in the letter writers  view inaccurate as the paint job would have been accurate only on a full sized aircraft , not on  a model. His reasoning was that because of size it would be impossible to view the model realistically  due to scale .To view the model one would have to stand at a scale distance of thirty feet  as the  farther  away the viewer is the dimmer the paint job becomes , his argument being that the paint on the model should have been less bright than the full size job in order to reflect this..  

When I set out to design my own games I kept these words in mind

Designing a good game that is playable is an exercise in blood ,sweat and tears.The first big mistake I made was to write too much without game testing it .I would write ten pages feeling inspired with my own  erudition where everything seemed to fall into place with such ease to find with the first test play  I was unable to make heads or tails of what  had just wrote.. 

Some of my designs were  published as magazine games I was paid first publication rights and that was it .Once I was in touch with a game publisher who at first seemed quite enthusiastic but as time went by I realized they were leading me down the garden path ;in fact not only did they have   no intention of publishing my game but were also trying to dissuade me, treating me like a child who was out of his depth .I should have been wise to the tactic as I had gone through the same thing with a will known author who happened to be the writer in residence at the local reference library where I had sent in a sample of my work. She informed me  ' I needed to concentrate on the basics of grammar and spelling' which I found strange as my English teachers had never thought so, not  in the UK nor here in Canada where I had obtained a paralegal diploma.  I realized that it was politics she being one of the then newly emerging saviors  and I with my politically incorrect approach, not only in the field of  writing but life in general, was viewed by her as the enemy who must be stopped in any way possible.

So how does one learn how to design games? It all depends upon the personality of the prospective game designer.Some may be able to take a situation and then write a game around it. I know of a well established gaming  magazine that publishes  a game a month. It is my opinion that they were using a computer program. I have played their games and mate they are sterile, like eating a mass produced burger or watching a computer generated block buster;there is no soul in the thing. My advice to those wanting to design games is to get on the old computer,write the first page, produce the component needed for the particular segment and then test play what you have. Don't make the mistake of writing reams and reams of stuff only to have to revise the whole thing making your head spin so much that you become tempted to delete the whole thing.Game design is not like writing a book. You may have to write five absolutely dud  pages for each good one which can now be revised and polished..

Only you can teach yourself how as no designer can, even if he  wanted to as game design is restricted to those with  a certain mechanistic mind set allied to one that is independent and creative. Don't even think of applying to an institute of higher learning for lessons as even if they could they wont, this  ability too precious to give away.The designer needs to drill himself into the art of designing  games. One of the most important things he must rememberediis  that every modification to a set of rules is more than likely  to have a cascading effect. Automatically take into consideration the affect of adding rules. What affect will it have on the other rules paragraphs?  Do not take it for granted that your readers will automatically know what you are talking about. You may have to lay out things in a way you consider infantile in order to make it -comprehensible to your readers. If you doubt me go and look at some paragraphs  you wrote last week and ask yourself  if you can you really understand this. One of the signs of a novice rules writer is that he automatically assumes the reader knows what he is talking about when in fact the reader is completely blank regarding  the designers intention.

One of the cardinal rules of game design is that you never let two lines describe an action when one line can do the same job or do a better job.The second cardinal rule is do not lean on the player by giving him to many things to do, he is after all your customer , not your employee.Try to make your rules interactive. What I mean by this is  let one set of instructions s have a knock on effect with other parts of the game. When a wind blows up for example let it affect all ships in a given sea. Paint with a broad  brush, define an area by giving it a name such as north east France or the Bay of Biscay rather that a series of map references or hex numbers. And on the question of hex's. Are they always strictly necessary. It has now got  to be a sacred convention that every board game use hexes even when square are sometimes better for example in a game where it is necessary to cross reference a map position.

And last but not least: give the players more than one way to win.A game design should be written  in such a way that not even the designer can  know of all of the ways to win.