Getting Started With Game Design

I’ve always loved games. At age 8 I was playing Defender of the Crown on Commodore 64. My teenage years were spent playing D&D into the wee hours of the morning. I spent an entire semester skipping Geology class and instead playing Monopoly. Over the last few years, my passion for gaming has only increased. For around seven straight years I played board games every Thursday night with a group of guys that I described as my best friends…and worst friends. We played every sort of game you could imagine. Some games were great. Some games were awful and to be honest, it was the awful ones that got me thinking.

Surely board game design couldn’t be that hard?

Flashback to grade 9. I spent months and months designing a Civilization-style board game. I drew. And wrote. And counted. And erased. And drew again. In the end I was left with what I thought was a really cool game that existed mostly in my head and it never saw the light of. Day.

Ok. Maybe it is hard.

I started experimenting with thinking about game design, drawing on everything I’d learned from the several hundred gaming sessions that we’d gone through over the course of the last seven years. I thought about what I loved about games and I thought about what I didn’t. I threw together a few prototypes for some interesting concepts but just couldn’t pull anything together into a coherent system.

I was starting to think that I had bitten off more than I could chew, until I discovered the Board Game Design Lab…