Creating Board Games

Florian Hanke 🍎
Florian Hanke 🍎
PhD Computer Supported Collaborative Language Documentation | @refindcom | OSS Developer | @CocoaPods Core | Friend

Refind helps you get a little bit smarter every day. The most relevant links for you, every morning in your inbox. Start with this hand-curated series of 7 time-tested articles from around the web, and we’ll take it from there.

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Creating Board Games
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What’s inside?
Who is it for?

Have you ever played a board game and discovered a mechanic that you liked and that led you to scribble down board game designs in your free time?Β Or do you like designing board games almost more than playing them, but have not yet finished one?


This Deep Dive provides basic steps for creating your own board game β€” from gathering ideas, the design itself, testing it, and finally getting it out there.Β 

  • Steal this Game Idea! and 6 other articles
  • Topics covered: deep dive
  • Read or listen to articles
  • You want to learn something new and are looking for a good, compact introduction.
  • You want to sharpen your skills on something you got into recently.
  • You want to catch up on a topic that has been in the news lately.
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Level up!
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Glad to see you made it all the way through this Deep Dive. We hope you found it useful and can put some of the insights to good use in your own daily life.

How does it work?

Day 1
...
Day 7
Level up!

Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.

We’ll guide you through, one link per day, every morning in your inbox.

Deep Dives come in bites that are short enough to fit in your day...

...but add up to a satisfying learning experience.

Ideas: A great way to get ideas is to "steal" them – by looking at a lot of games, and then letting your brains be inspired. Alternatively, get challenged to come up with 10 ideas and get the creative juices flowing.

Florian Hanke 🍎

Design: This blog is a treasure trove with small morsels of game design ideas (also have a look at the game design checklist in the free resources section).

Florian Hanke 🍎

Design: Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe, documents almost every step of his game design and production steps and thoughts.

Florian Hanke 🍎

Prototyping: Apart from paper prototyping in the previous links, for example TTS provides many basic pieces to quickly try out ideas with your friends online.

Florian Hanke 🍎

Testing: If you know how to program, boardgame.io is a nice framework to get a multiplayer online game up and running.

Florian Hanke 🍎

Crowdfunding: Again, Jamey Stegmaier with a monster list of Kickstarter resources, mostly based on his experiences.

Florian Hanke 🍎

There are many more resources on board game design out there. I hope this Deep Dive gave you enough to get you started. One final tip: Find a local board game meetup and try to get a designer meetup and tryout group up and running if there isn't one already. Good luck!

Florian Hanke 🍎