How to Invent Board Games

Knowing how to invent board games lets you surprise your family or circle of friends with a new, inventive game scenario, or lets you toy around with marketing your own board game. Consider combining the two, coming up with new and interesting game rules for you and your friends to playtest every week. As you tweak your game system, you might find one with market appeal.

Less ambitious is learning how to tweak board game rules, so your usual game nights have special house rules that spice up the evening. Like the scenario above, you might find a rule combination that can be turned into a game with wider appeal.

You would be surprised at how many indie board games there are on the market. Americans looking playing games, but they get tired of playing the same old game with the same old rules. Many are always looking for a new board game to play.

Select from the different genres and game types on the market. There are trivia games, party games, strategy games, word games and resource allocation games, just to name a few. Each comes with its own challenges in the creation process.

When choosing a game archetype to play with, focus on the kind of games you enjoy and the kind of games you’re good at. If you hate math, your game invention shouldn’t be a resource allocation game. If you hate spelling and vocabulary, your game system should involve word puzzles and word building.

Once you finish this process, you should be able to say to yourself, “I’m inventing a new strategy game.”

Select a theme for your board game. A theme is the specific color of a board game, what makes it different from all the others. Themes might be “game of world conquest” (Risk) or “game of cornering the market” (Monopoly) or “game of settling a new land” (Settlers of Catan).

Once you have a theme, it’s going to be a lot easier to come up with a working title. You don’t have to come up with anything yet, but it’s nice to have ideas in the back of your head. With themes and titles, simpler is better. When choosing a theme for your game, try to sum it up in one phrase or sentence.

Another factor to consider is your minimum and maximum number of players. Most games allow between 2-6 players. Some games can be played solitaire, while others (mainly party games) might include 8 to 10 or even more. That two to six range is best, if you want to market your game, because people tend to buy board games to enjoy with a small number of friends, but larger groups are harder to gather.

Winning a game requires attaining a goal. If you don’t have a goal of the game, no one’s going to be interested in winning. Some goals are to get to the other side of the board. Others are the demolish the enemy’s strategic positions, or fill out your pie with pie pieces.

When selecting a board game goal, you are determining the end game scenario. How does someone win the game?

Rules are the nuts and bolts of your game. In essence, the rules of a board game is the game itself.

Write rules to referee the players’ actions and lay down the system that a player attains the goal of the game. When writing these rules, you’ll need to close any loopholes in the game.

Playtesting board game in the second (and third and fourth) step in writing board game rules. You have to be certain there aren’t any gaping loopholes that make the game unplayable, so get your friends together and play the game according to your rules.

Once finished, close any loopholes by rewriting the rulebook. Playtest again to see if this makes it work better.

If there are any game balance issues, address those in the rewrite. For instance, if there is one surefire and straightforward way to win the game, but your game is supposed to involve multiple strategies that could win, you have balance issues that need to be addressed.

When finished with game sessions, ask your players for real feedback. Being nice and giving encouragement does you no good at this point, so encourage real advice.

That last question is essential to answer. If your new game isn’t entertaining to play, then you need to spice up the game by making it more challenging, or move faster, or improved in some way. If this doesn’t work, you need to invent a new game.

Hopefully, you already have something in mind. If not, it’s time to brainstorm names. Once again, keep the title simple and to the point. Try to make your board game’s name describe the game, or invoke interest and mystery as to what this game is. A board game called “Brown” probably isn’t going to sell many copies.

You may want to design the look and appearance of your board game, right down to the game pieces and the game board. If your board game has cards, think of what symbol or artwork would look nice on the backs of the cards. You want your game to be pleasant to look at while you’re playing it, so consider colors and designs that work well with your theme, but are nice to look at.

If you’re really creative, design your own crude game pieces. If you have a friend who is more creative, collaborate with them on this process, or ask them to design something on their own.

Once you have an entertaining board game idea, a good theme, working rules and board game supplies, you have invented your board game. Now it’s time to set up a booth at the next games fair and to start pestering game companies to give your board game a look. Or you can save your brilliant board game for your group of friends, and begin work on inventing a whole new board game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Board Games, Party Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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How to Invent Board Games

Guide to Inventing Board Games

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