Designer Advice

What is a Board Game Designer? 

I often get asked, usually by people outside the industry, what a board game designer is. I've been thinking about it, and I've come up with 3 definitions that I like. 

• A board game designer is a person who conceives of tabletop play experiences. This includes board games, dice games, card games, RPGs, miniature games, or anything else that is intended to be played on a table substantially in analog form. The designer creates the rules to the game, identifies and creates simple versions of the components needed to play, and might do some very light graphic design to make their prototype playable. 

• A board game designer is a person who blends art and science in tabletop game format. One of the things I love about board game design is that it allows me to exercise both halves of my brain. The "art" part of the definition is things like: choosing the theme of the game, expressing your thoughts, values, or ideas through the gameplay, and creating fictional characters, worlds, and situations for the players to engage with. The "science" part of the definition is creating a coherent set of rules, balancing various strategies, ensuring there are no dominant paths to victory, and using best practices of game design to create at a better game faster. 

• A board game designer is a person who tells stories using the medium of tabletop games. One way to think of games is to think of them as stories told in an interactive format. Just like for books, games can fundamentally be broken down into fictional games (what I like to call World-Building), and non-fictional games (what I like to call Systems Modeling). An example of a world-building game is Scythe. An example of a systems modeling game is First in Flight. An example of a game that is very much in the middle between them is Honey Buzz. I do realize that this leaves out purely abstract games, like Blokus. Such games don't really intend to tell stories, but that doesn't make those games any less fun or valuable to create or play. You can hear me talk more about world building and systems modeling on the Board Game Design Lab podcast.

Predictions for Hobby Board Games in 2028 

Making future predictions is, of course, fraught. You're almost always wrong. But, here we go anyway. Here are some predictions I have for the hobby side of board games in 2028. I've tried to mostly discuss how this will affect game designers, but there are general predictions here as well. And overall, while some of these predictions might at first glance seem negative, I want to say that I am still very bullish on the industry overall. The percentage of the general public that even knows modern hobby games exist is quite small, and the percentage that thinks about buying a board game when deciding how to spend entertainment dollars is even smaller still. There is still almost nowhere to go but up for the industry as a whole. So these predictions are about some of the things that will happen as a result of the industry continuing to grow.

• More consolidation of publishers into mega companies. Competition drives consolidation in almost every industry. We've already seen this trend over the last 5 years and I think it will continue into the future. This doesn't mean that new publishers won't still enter the market. I believe that will continue to happen. And I think there will be more publishers 5 years from now then there are today. But, the trend of massive companies buying up medium-sized publishers will also continue.

• Venture capital companies investing to make a quick profit. The tabletop industry will start to be seen as a place to make a profit for people with cash to throw around, even if they themselves aren't gamers. We've already seen this with the Embracer Group buying Asmodee, and I expect it to continue. 

• There will be more full time jobs available as salaried staff game designers and developers, as more and more companies that are small today become medium-sized companies that can support multiple staff. This means there will be at least 3 viable paths to designing hobby games full time: Freelancing for royalties, as a salaried employee, and self-publishing. 

• More people will enter the industry because of financial opportunities, even just to work as salaried employees at existing companies. This includes people who love gaming and people who don’t. What this means is that decisions that shape the industry will be made more and more by people who are not passionate gamers.

• More 3rd party intermediaries. From companies that help you run a kickstarter, like Launchboom, to companies that help you find foreign publishing partners like M.O.B Vanguard, to agents for game designers themselves, this trend of 3rd party companies filling niche roles in the industry who are not themselves part of the normal distribution chain (designers, publishers, distributors, and retailers) will continue to increase. This shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. Specialization of labor is a sign of a maturing and vibrant industry.

• There will be more fraud across the industry as bad actors see the potential to make a quick buck. There will also be more animosity between companies, as more lawsuits are filed because more money is at stake (see Keymaster, Ravensburger vs Upper Deck, and others). Because of this, I fear that the current utopia we experience as designers of "don't worry about protecting your design, just get it out there and freely show it to as many people as possible" may no longer be as true in 2028 as it is today. I certainly hope I'm wrong about that. 

• The industry will be bigger, and therefore less personal. By definition, when a population grows, the percentage of that population you can have a personal relationship with goes down. Therefore, no matter how active you are in the industry, there will just be more and more new people who you don't know. 

• There will be more regulation of tabletop games products by governments as they see potential for more of a tax base in the industry and see a need to protect consumers from bad actors. 

• More opportunity for designers to look outside of the traditional hobby and mass market publishers in order to find work as designers. This could include designing games for corporate training, for government training, and for other non-gaming companies that want to make games to directly support their own consumer products.

• There will be more specialization of products, including gaming-adjacent products and sub-genres of games that don’t even exist yet, which is also an opportunity for all designers.

• There will be a continued simplification of gameplay (the titles that get nominated for Spiel are already getting lighter, in terms of their BGG complexity ratings.

• Art as well as actual gameplay rules will increasingly be designed by or with the assistance of AI. 

• More designers and publishers will come from or move to lower cost of living areas. If you are a designer making royalties from your games, you'll be able to have a higher standard of living if you move to a low cost area, because you are still getting the same royalties regardless of whether you live in New York City or Iowa or Costa Rica. The same is true for publishers. A publisher operating out of Mexico or Eastern Europe or The Philippines will be able to make a much higher profit, because they can hire staff from those lower cost areas and still sell their games in North America and Western Europe for "Western" prices.

My favorite game design resources

Here is a quick list of resources you might not know about that I find most useful in designing games:

1. Noun Project. For $10/month, you get unlimited downloads of a huge range of icons/art assets that you can use for prototyping

2. The Cardboard Edison Omnibus, a weekly newsletter sent out about game design and the industry, and the Cardboard Edison Compendium, a list of publishers that are accepting submissions. Requires a Patreon subscription.

3. Component Studio, an affordable way to design cards and other assets for your prototypes

4. All the contacts.com. This one is sometimes helpful, sometimes not, but it has potential. Some of it is free and some of it requires a subscription.

5. The GAMA Convention Locator. Great way to find small, local conventions to go and playtest at

6. Basically anything that Geoff Engelstein does, including his books GameTek and Building Blocks of Tabletop Design, and his GameTek Substack.

And some other resources that you've probably already heard of but that are still worth mentioning:

1. Board Game Geek

2. The Unpub Network

3. Protospiel

New Designers: Fight the urge to Pitch Now!!

As a new designer who intends to pitch games to publishers, I understand the urge to hurry up and start contacting publishers. I experienced this urge when I was first starting out, and it's still something I struggle with. There are a lot of reasons why you might feel internal pressure to contact publishers sooner than you're really ready to. I'll focus on these:

• Fear that someone else will design a substantially similar game and get it published first

• Desire to start earning money (royalties) faster

• Desire to sign this game so you can move on to another design

• Wanting to get feedback from Publishers so you know if your design is good and on the right path

Let's take these one by one

Fear that someone else will design a substantially similar game and get it published first. You just shouldn't worry about this. With so many games being designed every year, your game is virtually guaranteed to be similar, in various ways, to many other games. But unless you blatantly copied another game from start to finish, it's also guaranteed to be unique in various ways, too. Even if a similar game, in terms of mechanics or theme, comes out around the same time as yours, does that mean there isn't room in the marketplace for yours, too? Consider how many worker placement games there are. Or games about farming, or with a space theme. And if your game really does have a truly new mechanic or theme, having another game come out a few months or a year before yours won't necessarily hurt the chances of yours being successful. In fact, it might help your game to follow up on something that's already proven to be a success. 

You also need to consider that even if you sign your game tomorrow, it's going to take between 12 and 36 months for the game to actually become a product on a store shelf, and you have no idea and no control about what other similar kinds of games might hit the market first. So spend the time you need to spend to make your game truly pitch-ready. Don't rush it. 

Desire to start earning money (royalties) faster. Again, it's going to take 1-3 years until your game starts earning you royalties after you sign it. So what's another couple months? Pitching your game too early, before it's ready to be pitched, won't help you earn royalties faster. In fact, it will hurt your chances. A game that is rejected because it needs more development work earns you nothing in royalties. So take your time, finish your game, and then start pitching it. As a new designer, whether you sign this game or not probably doesn't determine whether you'll be able to buy food. So don't worry too much about the money yet.

Desire to sign this game so you can move on to another design. You should be working on at least two designs at the same time, anyway. Alternating your design time between two or more games gives your brain the chance to rest and reset and focus on a different problem. Working on more than one design at a time can actually help you make progress on both of them faster. If you run into a problem with a design and you aren't sure exactly how to solve it, put it away for a few days and work on another game. Then come back to the first one. Often times a new idea will present itself. 

Wanting to get feedback from Publishers so you know if your design is good and on the right path. As a new designer, you should not use publishers as a way to get feedback on your game. That's what playtesters are for. You should only approach publishers once you are confident you are ready.

Negative consequences from pitching too early

There are many potential consequences from contacting publishers and pitching games before they are ready, including:

• If you pitch a game that has obvious problems and clearly needs more development work, you risk burning a bridge with that publisher. That publisher won't take you seriously the next time you want to pitch to them

• You may lose confidence and the desire to keep trying if you consistently get rejected by publishers because your games aren't ready

• You're just wasting time. Spend that time continuing to playtest and refine your designs instead

So, when is my game ready to pitch?

Your game is ready to pitch when it checks the following boxes:

• It has been playtested consistently, at all player counts, by people you don't know

• After a playtest, your playtesters ask you unprompted questions like "When can I buy this game", or "When will this game be available"

• You have a rulebook that has been blind-tested, revised, blind tested again, and revised again

• You have a TTS or Tapletopia module available for a publisher in case they request it

• You have a sell sheet available for a publisher in case they request it.

• You have made a list of your top 5 preferred publishers for the game