How Are Board Games Made?

If you’ve wandered around in a bookstore any time recently, browsed Amazon’s underwhelming Prime Day deals, or seen famous Youtubers cater to a specific nerd culture, then you’re probably wondering,

• “When did board games get so popular?!”

• “What are all these games? Where’s Monopoly?”

• “How did they make SO many different ones?”

In the next few posts, I would like to demystify the journey of how these games make it to shelves near you.

First, someone somewhere had an idea. This person or persons with an idea is almost always called the game designer. They are playing a fun, simple game one day, say Codenames for example, and then this thought pops into their head:

“I could’ve made this. I bet I could make a game.”

Then (if they don’t get distracted or just watch Netflix), they write down their idea (or ideas), pieces (like cards, dice, and a game board), and even some possible rules. But what makes it a game?

“A game is a fun activity involving an objective, constraints, and interaction.”

Technically that is up for debate, but I find the following to be a helpful definition: “A game is a fun activity involving an objective, constraints, and interaction.” (Brandon the Game Dev) The game designer attempts to clarify these elements.

• How players might win the game?

• What obstacles or rules do they have to stay within to achieve that goal?

• What kinds of interaction with the game’s rules or each other should players experience?

These are the first few cells of a board game, and they are important because from something’s origin comes much of its life.

Now that there’s a concept in someone’s brain (or preferably on paper), the game can only exist in the physical realm if someone, usually the game designer, makes that game. Now, this is not what you’re probably thinking. They don’t get on Adobe Illustrator and instantly create a gorgeously artistic and graphically clear game and then sell it. That’s actually a no-no in game design. They make what the design world calls an MVP. (No not that kind. They can’t make players, though that would be nice.) They make an Minimum Viable Prototype.

An MVP is the simplest version of the game that can still be functionally played by the game designer and his friends that he convinces (bribes) to play. It can be anything from a bunch of index cards with sharpie text to a digitally crafted set of components using Adobe and then printed. The main point is to spend as little effort on making the MVP as possible because the inevitability of game design is that it will change. It will change! In fact, some of the best games made have had over 100 versions before they ever release on the shelf.

Once there is an MVP there is a long stint in the process called playtesting, which is well described by Gabe Barrett of Board Game Design Lab as:

“...the purifying fire that all games must go

through in order to become more than

just cardstock and components.

It’s the process by which all the unnecessary

parts get burned away and the true fun

of the game rises to the top.”

There are many different stages of playtesting that a game will go through a (be on the lookout for that specific post soon). At GameWeaver Games this process is what we specialize in. Ultimately, the biggest reason to playtest is to refine the gameplay experience. As game philosopher C. Thi Nguyen says “games work in the medium of agency”. So if a game is meant to produce an experience through the agency it gives the players, then playtesting is getting players to give feedback on whether the game is producing the experience it was designed for.

Many other product pipelines have this stage but call it “user testing” or even more popularly “user experience (UX) testing”. In game production, the user is the player. Many times the players will not experience what the designer is hoping for without extensive playtesting of many different versions and rule sets. Often players will give feedback that help change the game toward the experience the designer wants.

Let’s say a majority of players are enjoying the game over the last two dozen playtests, and the designer hasn’t needed to change the rules or components in awhile. This means the game is truly working the way the designer wants it to be. Yay! However it needs to be published for people outside of the playtesters to actually buy and play it. (Isn’t that the point?)

Until this grassroots thing called “Crowdfunding” came around, there was pretty much only one path: pitch the game idea to a Game/Toy Publisher like Hasbro, Parker Bros, Mayfair, etc. This is a lot of work. It requires:

• Networking.

• Attempting to communicate with publishers (who will probably do not know the designer)

• Finding a way to pitch the game to them!

It’s a bit like Shark Tank — only it is someone sending twenty emails or arriving suddenly at a publisher’s booth badgering them to play their game. (If you’re a designer, this is not advice. Don’t do this.)

Now, however, there is another path to getting a game published:

• Crowdfunding.

With big names like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or even a recent board game only platform called Gamefound, there are many ways a designer can gain the money to publish their game. The designer must proceed with caution though — this path turns a designer into a publisher, which is a whole new segment of the board game manufacturing pipeline.

So the game is real and is producing the intended experience, but if it is going to sit on anyone’s table it must be published. In the next post “How are Board Games made? pt. 2” I will explain both pitching to publishers and crowdfunded publishing as well as the many steps of what a board game requires to be a competent product.