How to Become a Board Game Creator: From Idea to Published Game

Most people who play board games have, at some point, thought: "I could design something better than this." Fewer act on that thought. Fewer still take it all the way to a published, boxed game sitting on a table in front of real players who paid real money for it.

The gap between idea and product is long, iterative, and occasionally discouraging. It's also one of the most satisfying creative journeys available to someone who combines analytical thinking with genuine imagination.

This guide walks through every stage—with particular reference to the creation of Smoothie Wars, designed by Dr Thom Van Every from Guildford, as a real-world case study.

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Stage 1: Generating a Board Game Idea

The most common mistake aspiring board game creators make is starting with mechanics rather than intent. A better starting point is the question: what experience do I want people to have?

Dr Thom Van Every started with a different question: what would I have found genuinely useful at a younger age? As a medical doctor who later became an entrepreneur, he recognised that business education was largely abstract and theoretical—students learned economics in classrooms without ever experiencing the pressures of a real market.

The concept for Smoothie Wars emerged from that insight: a game that creates the felt experience of supply and demand, cash flow management, and competitive positioning. The tropical island setting came later, as a way of making the premise feel playful rather than instructional.

Practical exercise: Write down the experience you want players to have. Not "players manage resources and score points"—that's mechanics. Write down the emotion and the insight: "players feel the pressure of making a wrong call in a competitive market and immediately understand why it went wrong."

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Stage 2: Concept Development and Initial Rules

Defining the Core Loop

Every successful board game has a core loop: the fundamental cycle of decisions and outcomes that players experience repeatedly. In Monopoly, the core loop is: roll, move, buy or pay rent, accumulate. In Smoothie Wars, it's: assess the market, allocate resources, price your product, react to competitors, observe outcomes.

Define your core loop before writing any rules. If you can't describe it in two sentences, the concept isn't focused enough yet.

Writing the First Rules Draft

Your first rules document will be wrong. That's not a failure—it's a necessary step. Write it anyway. The process of articulating rules explicitly reveals ambiguities, contradictions, and gaps you couldn't have spotted in your head.

Keep the first draft simple. Resist the temptation to add complexity at this stage. Simplicity is far easier to build up from than complexity is to strip back.

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Stage 3: Prototyping

You don't need professional components to build a playable prototype. Index cards, pens, and whatever tokens you have to hand are sufficient for a first prototype.

The goal of a prototype is to test whether the core loop works—whether the fundamental decisions are interesting, whether outcomes feel earned or arbitrary, and whether the game produces different experiences with different players.

Dr Thom Van Every's early prototypes of Smoothie Wars were built from handwritten cards and printed paper money. The tropical island map was sketched by hand. The game that emerged from those kitchen-table tests was fundamentally similar to the published version—because the core concept was sound—but the specific mechanics shifted considerably through iteration.

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Stage 4: Playtesting and Iteration

This stage takes longer than any other. Expect it.

Playtesting is the process of systematically testing your game with different groups, gathering feedback, making changes, and testing again. The goal is to identify and resolve every significant problem before the game goes anywhere near professional production.

Key questions to answer through playtesting:

Is the game balanced? Can players with different strategies all win, or is one approach dominant? If the same strategy wins every time, the game needs adjustment.

Is the play time honest? Most games run longer than their designers expect. Test the actual play time with multiple groups.

Is it learnable in a session? A good game teaches itself through play. If players are still confused about basic rules in the third round, the rules need clarifying.

Does it produce different games? A game that plays identically every time will exhaust its audience quickly. Variable outcomes and multiple viable approaches are non-negotiable for long-term appeal.

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Stage 5: Production and Publishing

Once playtesting is complete and you're confident in the design, the production question becomes unavoidable: who makes it?

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing gives you complete creative control and the full margin on every sale. It requires upfront capital for production runs, relationships with manufacturers, and responsibility for all fulfilment and distribution.

Kickstarter has become the dominant platform for self-publishing board game creators. It serves two functions simultaneously: funding the production run and validating market demand. A successful campaign proves that a paying audience exists before any money is spent on manufacturing.

Smoothie Wars launched through a combination of direct production and crowdfunding validation, allowing Dr Van Every to maintain creative control while managing financial risk.

Working With a Publisher

Approaching established publishers (Asmodee, Osprey Games, Thames & Kosmos) means giving up a percentage of revenue and some creative control in exchange for their production expertise, distribution networks, and marketing resources. For first-time creators without industry relationships, the trade-off is often worthwhile.

Publishers typically expect a fully tested prototype and a one-page overview. They evaluate hundreds of submissions annually and accept very few. A professional-quality proposal—clear rules, demonstrated playtesting, honest analysis of the market—matters more than elaborate presentation.

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The Realistic Timeline

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FAQs: Becoming a Board Game Creator

How much does it cost to create and publish a board game? Self-publishing a small print run (500–1,000 copies) typically costs £5,000–£20,000 depending on component complexity. Larger runs reduce the per-unit cost. Crowdfunding can offset some or all of this.

Do you need a design background to create a board game? No. Game design draws on analytical thinking, empathy (understanding what players will experience), and iteration tolerance more than visual or artistic skill. Artists and graphic designers handle the visual elements.

How do you protect a board game idea? Protect the physical expression through copyright (automatic upon creation). Unique mechanics can be patented, though this is expensive and of limited practical value. Many successful games use mechanics that aren't legally protected.

How did Dr Thom Van Every create Smoothie Wars? The game emerged from his experience as both a medical professional and entrepreneur—a desire to make business education genuinely accessible and genuinely fun. The development process spanned several years of prototyping and testing before reaching the published version.

Is it worth trying to become a board game creator? If you have a strong concept and genuine patience for iteration: yes. The financial upside is modest for most games; the creative satisfaction is considerable. The skills developed—design thinking, user research, iterative development—transfer broadly.