Board games

[Pentegarn]

Originally Posted by Pentegarn

There's a few good "x best board games of all time" books worth looking into. But to get really into how to design a great game you have to learn what works by playing them. Watching the trends is a good thing too. Like right now the co-op games and deckbuilders are scoring huge. Going to both Gen-Con and Origins is a must as well. You can talk to a lot of game developers there and see the nuts and bolts of how it all comes together if you find the right peeps to talk to. Demo anything and everything, not just to see what works, but to see what does not so you don't repeat the mistakes of a poor game design with a pretty finish,

So the other day I was helping a member of the board game club I am in play test a very alpha stage game he made. He wanted to make a space like version of Bang! Long story short he clearly failed to proofread a lot of his cards and some mechanics were missing entirely (like equippable weapon cards) whoch got us stuck in an infinite loop where we could not attack each other.

I bring this up to add yet another piece of advice to the list above. Proofread what you make. It may not seem like much but missing one key component can wreck your game.