Board Game Design

Havent we all thought 'mmm that would be a cool game to make'. I have loads of times and have several works in progress. But game design isnt really that simple, the ideas are, the basics are, but taking it to the next level is the tricky part.

I have listened to various podcasts on the subject, my favourite being the Ludology series, which does a great job of going into the different aspects of board game design, I also frequent the board game design forums at Board Game Geek and occasionly drop by the Board Game Design Forum.

Looking at my list of basic game ideas, I tend to float between several different ideas, then come up with some more ideas, write those down and so on.

BUT recently I have been more focused on a couple of designs, AEG have got a great resource available for games designers, its called Tempest. They have created the city-state of Tempest, with maps and characters available, they then allow games designers to submit game pitches to use these resources and design a Tempest branded game, they currently have four games in production. So I have submitted a game idea to them and am currently awaiting news on my idea. The game idea was for a different thematic setting but also worked well with their setting, so a bit of re-jigging some of the mechanics and I felt that I had the beginings of an interesting game.

My other game idea which is proggressing is a dice based game, I am currently in talks with a great artist to design characters for this game and will be announcing more details very soon along with hopefully the first piece of artwork.

For me sometimes the theme of the game comes first, or sometimes the objective of the game enters my head first, then I start thinking about how to achieve said onjective, or what I would like to see happen in such a themed game.

For instance trench warfare, after watching a program about the trenches and playing numerous video games with a trench or tight underground section, I thought 'interesting, how can I turn that into a game, what would be the aim of the game'. Then its a case of thinking it through and fleshing out some details, what era should it be, what would the victory conditions be, what mechanics could it use and much more.

So next time more details on the actual game designs that I am working on...