TL;DR
Board game design is a multi-disciplinary craft combining game theory, psychology, economics, and industrial design. The best designers start with a feeling they want players to have — not a mechanic — and work backwards. This piece explores what that process looks like in practice.
The First Question Every Board Game Designer Asks
Before a mechanic, before a theme, before a prototype — the best board game designers ask one question: what do I want players to feel?
Not "what should players do?" Not "what rules will create competition?" The question is emotional. When the game is over and the box goes back on the shelf, what should players remember about the experience?
Dr. Thom Van Every, the Guildford-based creator of Smoothie Wars, describes his design process this way: "I wanted players to feel the specific anxiety of having made a plan and watching a competitor walk right into it — and then the elation of pivoting quickly. That feeling is what real business competition feels like. The mechanics came second."
That approach — emotion first, mechanics second — is characteristic of games that work. Designers who start with a clever mechanic and then try to create an emotional experience around it tend to produce technically interesting but ultimately unsatisfying games.
What Board Game Designers Actually Study
Game design as a formal discipline is relatively young. Most working designers are self-taught or came through the games industry from other backgrounds: mathematics, software development, economics, creative writing. The variety shows in the range of games being produced.
The theoretical foundations most serious designers draw on include:
Game theory — the mathematical study of strategic decision-making. John Nash's equilibrium concept, prisoner's dilemmas, and coordination problems are directly applicable to game design. A game with a dominant strategy (always do X, it's always best) is a boring game. Good design creates situations where the optimal choice varies by context.
Cognitive psychology — specifically, how people understand and learn rules. Research by cognitive scientists including Daniel Kahneman suggests that people learn rules through examples and experience much faster than through abstract descriptions. Designers who understand this write rulebooks with worked examples and design "aha" moments where a rule's purpose becomes obvious through play.
Social psychology — how people behave in group contexts. Why does a player make a suboptimal move to punish a rival? Why do players form temporary alliances? Why does the game feel more fun when one player is dramatically losing and then recovers? These questions have answers rooted in social psychology, and the best designers know them.
Economics — especially the design of incentive structures. Why do players want to do what the game asks them to do? Badly designed incentives create either apathy (nobody cares about the objective) or exploitation (one mechanic dominates all others).
The Prototype Phase
Every game starts as a prototype. Usually several dozen prototypes. The material doesn't matter — index cards, post-it notes, handwritten tokens — because the point is to test whether the idea works at all.
Reiner Knizia, one of the most prolific game designers in history (over six hundred published titles), has described his prototyping process as fundamentally wasteful by design: "Most prototypes are garbage. The goal is to generate garbage quickly and cheaply so you can find the ten percent that has something worth developing."
The key metric at prototype stage isn't enjoyment — it's interest. Does something interesting happen? Is there a moment where players face a genuine dilemma? Do players want to talk about what they'd do differently? Those are signals worth following.
Playtesting: The Difference Between Design and Publishing
A game that's never been played by strangers isn't a finished game. The designer knows the rules, has played the prototype hundreds of times, and cannot possibly see it fresh. Strangers reveal what a designer cannot: the rules that seem obvious but aren't, the strategies that are overpowered but invisible to someone who invented them, the moments where the game loses people.
Smoothie Wars went through extensive playtesting across multiple demographic groups before Thom was satisfied. What he found surprised him: the game's economic lessons landed differently depending on whether players had professional business experience. Adults with corporate backgrounds engaged with the supply-and-demand mechanics more analytically. Teenagers played more intuitively and often made more creative decisions as a result.
That discovery shaped the final design: mechanics that work for both approaches without being optimised for either.
The Mathematics of Fun
There's a concept in game design called "decision space" — the number of meaningfully different choices available to a player on their turn. Too few and the game feels railroaded. Too many and analysis paralysis sets in.
The sweet spot varies by audience. Competitive strategy players want a decision space of perhaps fifteen to thirty viable options per turn — enough that the optimal choice requires genuine thought but doesn't require a computer. Family games work better with five to ten. Party games, one to three.
Smoothie Wars sits in an interesting position: the core decision (which location do I go to, and what do I buy?) feels simple but branches into sub-decisions about competitor psychology, resource management, and timing that can occupy any level of analytical depth.
This "apparent simplicity, genuine depth" is one of the hardest properties to design. It's why Thom describes the design period as "about two years of actual work disguised as two years of playing games."
Theme vs. Mechanism: An Old Debate
One of the most persistent arguments in board game design circles is whether theme or mechanism should come first.
Thematic designers (sometimes called "Ameritrash" designers, after the tradition of American narrative-heavy games) start with a world and populate it with mechanics that feel appropriate. Eurogame designers invert this: they design an elegant system of mechanics and drape a theme over the top.
Neither approach is categorically superior. The best games of the last decade — Wingspan, Gloomhaven, Viticulture — succeed because theme and mechanism reinforce each other rather than pulling in different directions.
Smoothie Wars occupies an interesting position. The tropical island setting is thematically vivid, but every mechanic serves an economic concept. The theme and the mechanism are the same thing: you're running a business, and the game teaches you what that feels like because it simulates the pressures authentically.
From Prototype to Production
For independent designers, the route to publication has changed dramatically since 2012. Kickstarter transformed the economics of indie publishing: a designer can now fund production directly through pre-orders, bypass traditional publishers, and reach an audience of dedicated tabletop enthusiasts.
The trade-off is significant. A Kickstarter campaign requires marketing skills, budget forecasting, manufacturer relationships, and the ability to manage backers' expectations across a production cycle that can span eighteen to twenty-four months. Many first-time designers underestimate this.
Thom Van Every chose a limited-edition approach for Smoothie Wars — a deliberate decision to maintain quality control at the cost of scale. "I've seen what happens when games are rushed to market," he's noted. "The result looks like a game. But the thing that makes it special gets diluted."
Common Mistakes in Board Game Design
Designing for yourself. The designer is the wrong audience. If you're designing a heavy strategy game because you love heavy strategy games, you'll produce something excellent for that niche but inaccessible to everyone else. Know your audience and design for them, not for your own preferences.
Over-complexity as a signal of quality. A common first-designer mistake is assuming that more rules equals better game. In almost all cases, the opposite is true. The design discipline of removing rules without removing depth is harder than adding them.
Not testing the rulebook separately. Someone should be able to learn your game from your rulebook alone, without you present to explain. Until you've tested this, you don't know if your rulebook works.
Ignoring the fifth player. Many games are designed for the "average" group but not stress-tested at edge cases — minimum player count, maximum player count, players who play very slowly, players who play very quickly. Designs that only work in ideal conditions tend to fail in practice.
What Makes a Board Game Designer Successful
The cliche answer is "passion for games." The more accurate answer is stubbornness combined with analytical rigor.
The ability to play your own game badly — to approach your own design as a hostile player trying to find its weaknesses — is the rarest and most valuable skill in game design. Most designers are too close to their work to do this reliably. That's why good playtesters are worth their weight in cardboard.
The designers who sustain careers over decades — Knizia, Antoine Bauza, Uwe Rosenberg — share one characteristic: they treat every released game as a data point rather than an endpoint. What worked? What didn't? What would I remove if I were starting again? That iterative approach to their own history is what makes them better with each project.
🔑 Key Takeaways
- Successful board game designers start with an emotion, not a mechanic
- The prototype phase is deliberately wasteful — the goal is to generate ideas and discard most of them quickly
- Playtesting with strangers is essential — designers cannot see their own work fresh
- "Decision space" — the number of viable choices per turn — is a key variable that separates engaging games from frustrating ones
- The route to indie publication has changed dramatically since Kickstarter; modern designers have more options but also more logistical complexity
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to design a board game?
The range is vast. Simple card games can go from concept to publishable prototype in three to six months. Complex strategy games often take three to five years. Smoothie Wars took approximately two years of active development before Thom was satisfied with the result.
Do you need to be good at maths to design board games?
Helpful but not required. You need to understand probability well enough to avoid broken outcomes, and economics well enough to design working incentive structures. Both of these are teachable — the key skill is analytical thinking, not advanced mathematics.
Can anyone design a board game?
In principle, yes. In practice, the gap between "I had an idea for a game" and "I have a finished game that other people enjoy" is enormous and requires sustained effort. The ideas are the easy part. Execution — playtesting, revising, iterating, solving design problems — is where most people give up.
How do board game designers get paid?
Traditional publishers pay advances against royalties (typically 5–8% of retail price per unit sold). Self-publishers keep the margin but bear all costs. Many designers do it as a secondary income or passion project initially — sustainable income from game design requires either a substantial hit or a large back catalogue.
What resources are available for aspiring board game designers?
The BoardGameGeek forums, the Stonemaier Games designer diary series, the Game Maker's Toolkit YouTube channel, and the Game Design Workshop book by Tracy Fullerton are widely recommended starting points. The tabletop design community is genuinely collegial and helpful toward beginners.
