printf(“Hello World!”);

I suppose that’s video game design rather than board game design, but I do both so it will stay.

Have any of you ever had a great idea for a game, whether it be video or board game, and you just really wanted to get it out there?  So did I, until I discovered how hard it is to design a game.  You can come up with a fantastic idea, but once you start getting into the specifics of the game, you really start to find its flaws and some can be big, gigantic flaws.

So, let’s say you come up with an idea for a space board game.  You love space, so why not, right?  Say you want players to be able to attack each other, but you also want to add an enemy into the game.  You want resource gathering, and building up a colony.  So you want people to choose between attacking others and building up their defenses.  Sounds like the making to a fun game, huh?  That’s when you need to start getting into the tiny details about how the game plays.  This is where you find out problems of your design and how they just wont work.  You may need to remove something from your game design.  I know, you don’t want any little bit of your idea being removed from the design, but sometimes it’s necessary to make the game better.  Who knows, maybe later on down the line of the design process you may come up with a way to add that mechanic back in, but maybe at a limited capacity.  More than likely you are going to fail quite a few attempts at making a board game, but don’t give up!  You are learning from those failures, right? Good, then keep moving forward.

Like cooperative board games?  They can be much harder to design, which is mainly where I am struggling now.  I’ve come up with a few competitive board game ideas, but I would much rather focus on a cooperative board game.  There are already plenty of competitive board games out there.  Balancing what players can and can’t do is much easier than balancing players and a “computer” player for a board game.  You have to design it so that players aren’t too powerful, but also so that the game isn’t too powerful.  If it’s nearly impossible to beat the game, not many people are going to want to play it.  Too easy, and the same effect, it will have. Yoda.  Finding that balance medium is hard.  Play testing can really help with that though.  People will be able to tell you what they like and don’t like, and maybe they’ll even have some ideas on how to improve the game.

This is a lot of the stuff I am learning about in my beginnings of game design.  For the most part I have given up on video game design, I think I actually have more fun with board games these days.  Never thought I’d say that.  I’m not the most sociable person, but there’s more interaction between players in a board game than most video games.

tldr: Board games are fun to design, but don’t give up if your idea fails.  Keep trying, you’ll get there.

Danny out.