Board Game Dev Con

 

On Saturday I headed to North London, braving the rain storms, to attend the UK’s first Board Game Developer Conference! This informal gathering of around 30 designers had been brought together from the local Playtest UK meetup groups and beyond to chat about our favourite subject: board games! I was very impressed by the various talks we had and wanted to share some of the cool ideas and tips that caught my attention.

Also, a big shout out to Bez and Andy Yiangou for the incredible efforts they went to in organising this!

 

Pitching to publishers – Adam Porter

Adam regularly pitches to publishers each year at Essen and he has a few great tips to consider. For non-Essen attendees, these tips are useful whenever you are attending a convention with large numbers of publishers floating around (e.g. Gencon or Origins in the US).

Email – Rather than taking a game around publishers cold, Adam will send around emails to arrange a meeting and after many years of refinement he has found the following format to work 50% of the time (note, Adam is known to publishers so this has an impact)

• 2 line description of the unique features
• Link to a 2 minute video showing core gameplay

3 year pitching process with each game – Adam creates a list of publishers and separates them into 3 tiers according to how well he thinks that game might fit into their catalogue and how large the publishers are. At the 1^st Essen when the game is ready he takes the game around the 1^st tier of publishers. In the 2^nd year, he’ll take it round the 2^nd tier and then the 3^rd tier in the 3^rd year. The reason for this is to avoid getting offers from smaller publishers when waiting to hear back from larger publishers, then missing out on both.

 

Applying Video Game Design Strategies – Callum Langstroth

Callum works in the video game industry and plans to apply some of their approaches to designing board games. After all, prototyping video games with paper in the early stages is a recognised technique in that industry so it is hugely applicable.

• Make many ideas
• Document and write a rough rule set as you make a prototype
• Playtest all these ideas and chose an idea to move forward with
• Then develop that chosen idea into a finished product

Useful tools Callum recommends: articy:draft, Trello, One Note (or any note taking software that enables synching across devices).

Also some books: Challenges for Game Design, Games Bible

 

Collaborative Game Design – Paul Mansfield and Matthew Dunstun

Paul and Matthew both did short talks on collaboration but with different slants. Paul first highlighted why this traditionally solo venture can be improved with a design partner, while Matthew focussed on the how you can make a collaboration work. First up, why you might consider working in collaboration

• Someone to bounce ideas off of, and better yet one of you might have a cool mechanic, the other might have a theme they want to explore, and suddenly you can combine them!
• More chances to playtest when the two of you get together
• When you have an idea for how to improve the design, you need to convince someone else, not just yourself, and that makes you really think through those ideas before you present them. Helps you to be more critical of your ideas.
• All those emails gives you a great record of your ideas!

Now, some ideas for how to approach that collaboration:

• Identify the goals of the collaboration, and do it early on.
• Ideas are cheap – don’t be afraid to share ideas. Indeed, no idea should be considered ‘off-limits’. Be generous!
• When discussing ideas, always add to an idea, rather than detract from it, even if you don’t agree with it.
• Work out your strengths as a designer and find people to work with who complement those strengths.
• Embrace your differences! Accept that you’ll make a game together that most likely you would never have created by yourself.

 

Prototyping in 10 minutes – Rob Harper

Rob gave us a quick introduction to nanDECK, a free to use software package for creating decks of cards. It contains that much desired Adobe InDesign ability to set up the layout of a single card, then import all the information for your whole deck of cards in the form of .csv file and map that data on to your layout. This means you can easily change the layout of your entire deck without having to manually make that change on all the cards. It’s extremely powerful, but Adobe InDesign is quite expensive so the existence of a free to use program is great. Now, it is a little technical to use, and to get the best out of it you need to be comfortable with scripting languages, but once you are set up with a basic script, you can easily knock out a prototype in next to no time purely by adapting an existing script of yours. The creator is apparently very active on Board Game Geek if you do have issues. If you’re looking at making professional looking card decks you will want to be using InDesign and probably professional graphic designers. For early prototyping though, this software could be extremely useful!

Check out nanDECK here.

 

Visual design stagnation in board games – Robb

We had a really interesting talk from a man whose surname appears to be impossible for me to find, Robb, on how graphic design led card design can create unique looking games. He feels that, typically, modern board games see their cards built around the illustrations and artwork. That this drives the visual design of the components, with the graphic designer being brought in to support that artwork. This has in some ways led to a somewhat uniform feel, visually, across many of our games. He showed how a graphic design first approach has resulted in some wonderful and unique looking products.

Check out the incredible work of Heiko Günther, whose re-imagining of Glory to Rome is the picture above: Heiko’s Board Game Geek geeklist.

 

Kickstarter Tips – Caezar Aljassar and Dave Wetherwell

Caezar and Dave gave us a great overview of tips for Kickstarters. Dave is working towards his first Kickstarter, while Caezar is part of the team behind the very successful Lab Wars that recently funded (I wrote a preview on the Games Quest website at the time). He’s now working through the fulfilment for that. Here are some of their tips:

• Read and back lots and lots of other Kickstarter projects
• Backers, not money, are crucial
• Keep it simple, especially for your first campaign.
• Avoid a premature launch – you can always delay until you are ready. That said, don’t hold out forever. You have to bite the bullet at some point!
• Your mailing list is the most valuable thing for gaining backers. Anyone who tests your game, get them to sign up to it! (This is a comment I’ve heard echoed multiple times by Gil Hova, publisher of The Networks).
• Artwork is really important, and it is absolutely worth your time and money investing in high quality artwork.
• Be engaged in the community! And start getting engaged as early as possible. If your game might appeal to a separate community from classic board gamers (as Lab Wars appealed to scientists) leverage that community as well. Caezar went to a lot of effort to get the game featured in the scientific press and believes that was responsible for a lot of the game’s success.
• Don’t promise expansion pieces that you haven’t fully developed. That just adds stress post-Kickstarter and causes delays.

I can’t discuss tips about Kickstarter without telling you to check out Jamie Stegmaier’s comprehensive series of blogposts: the Stonemaier Games blog.

Or James Mathe’s excellent resources: James Mathe’s game design blog

Jamie Stegmaier now has literally written the book on Kickstarters too: A Crowdfunder’s strategy guide.

 

I hope you’ve found something interesting or new here! I found the event to be great, not only for the interesting talks, but for the opportunity to meet and chat with a great number of people. I look forward to where this goes and how it develops in the future!

EDIT: As Bez correctly pointed out in the comments, this is a far from comprehensive list of the things discussed. I focused here on the most actionable pieces of advice but we had a wide variety of other talks including

• Whether board games can be considered art – Andrea Romeo
• How to get a board game reviewed – by me!
• How Playtest UK has helped focus my passion for designing – Andy Yiangou
• Can we use external data sources in our board games? – Willie Bidstrop
• There are only so many board game designs – Ben Piggott
• The past, present and future of Playtest UK – Rob Harris
• A heartfelt talk on discovering confidence through design – Bez Shahriari
• The thought processes in designing Waggle Dance – Mike Nudd

Note, these titles are my own since most sessions didn’t have formal titles! There were also a few discussions at the end of the day, but sadly I had to leave early and missed them.

If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments!