Board Game Ideas

Here's a board game idea for your consideration:

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A good idea makes a good game a lot easier to make. Whether you're looking for board game ideas for school projects or want to create your own DIY board games at home, by the end of this article you'll see how this idea was crafted and how you can make your own.

What is an Idea Made of?

A game mechanic is a thing you can do while playing, such as rolling a 4 on a six sided die to move 4 spots. There is an Encyclopedia of Game Mechanics that you can use to define your game. For instance "roll to move" and "bidding" are common mechanics.

Mechanics need Rules

I could bring Monopoly money I bought off Amazon to the family game night for a sick comeback, but that would be against the rules. Rules combine mechanics together into meaningful gameplay. An example rule is "you cannot have a hand of more than 7 cards" or "when you get to the end of the board, move your piece back to the beginning". So far so good, we can pick mechanics we like and design rules around them that create a game.

Keep it Simple

The more mechanics and rules you add the more potential you have to deliver meaningful gameplay, but then your game becomes harder to create and to explain.

Reduce the scope of your game and then reduce it again. Simply adding more cards or content won't make a bad mechanics and rules good.

Using Theme as Shorthand

Games throughout human history needed nothing more than mechanics and rules to get by.

Why do we put the ball in the net? Because.

However, we can use a theme to make mechanic and rule heavy games easier to understand. Theme is what your game is about, for instance "computer part assembly" or "bird watching". Our audiences may be familiar with these activities, but this can backfire if your theme and mechanics don't relate to one another well enough. This is a part of the reason why highly abstract games are hard to market and sell.

How to Brainstorm Game Concepts

Great, game ideas are combinations of mechanics, informed by rules, wrapped in a fitting theme.

There are three methods I use for coming up with my board game ideas, theme first, mechanics first, and hate first.

Theme First

My favorite way of coming up with themes is to incorporate my hobbies, my occupation or an occupation I think is cool.

Beetle fighting? You mean Pokemon?

Apparently Shigera Miyamoto came up with the idea of the Legend of Zelda when he discovered an unmarked lake while roaming the Japanese countryside. Discovering secrets in The Legend of Zelda captures some of this feeling.

If you like amusement parks you might make a game about visiting them. You could add set collection of stamps for each ride, take that mechanics to cut people in line, or grid coverage for visiting every zone of the park.

Mechanics First

From my experience, when you decide that theme is more important that mechanics, the game becomes less fun. A good set of mechanics can be fun on their own, but a theme with bad mechanics is not fun.

Go through the Encyclopedia of Game Mechanics for inspiration. Knock some of these together and something is bound to happen. Playing a lot of good board games is a great way to see how other designers have mixed mechanics together.

Sometimes I like a mechanic but it has weird edge cases. An edge case is where the rules are easy to follow except "when it's tuesday" or "when players are tied in points" or "when your the last player in the turn order". Because you have to keep these edge cases in your head, or worse, look them up each time, they are effectively seperate rules from the mechanics that spawned them. When I come upon a rule that has many edge cases, I often cut the entire rule and start from scratch.

Fueled by Hate

Another great way to find ideas is by trying to resolve problems in the games you like.

Tap to flip the table in frustration.

For example, you might not like how Magic the Gathering's mana system makes turns feel unpredictable, what might you do to change it?

Me encouraging you to use your hate to design games.

You don't have to hate it to change it through, simply starting with a board game design you like and making changes is enough to get started.

The Shortcut to Coming up with Good Ideas

If you want to brainstorm some ideas easily, consider using my Random Game Idea Generator. I use it to generate ideas like the one at the beginning of this article.

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The idea itself is a combination of three mechanics, a type of turn order, and a theme.

Which Board Game Idea to Pick?

So you've come up with a couple ideas that mix up to three mechanics and deliver on a theme. Which of your ideas is worth pursuing? I look for ease of explainability and enjoyment.

Often when I try to commit an idea to a rulebook, I discover that what seemed like a simple ideas was actually several ideas wrapped up together. Maybe playtests show that the mechanics are too slow paced for the theme. Or maybe creating a prototype will require too much content.

Simple and clean is the way you should make games.

A game you don't want to make is a bad game idea. Your players will know that it wasn't made with love.

In general, the sooner you can quit a bad design, the better.

Where to go from here?

Once you have an idea you like, its time to create a prototype of it! A prototype is the simplest version of your game that still feels like your game.