Designing a game takes a lot of time. Brainstorming ideas, settling on one, making a prototype, self-testing, adjusting, play-testing, further adjusting, etc.
And at any point in this process you can find out: “No, this isn’t going to work after all”. Meaning you can throw away your hard work and start from scratch.

So anything that can save some time anywhere in this cycle is worth it.

From idea to prototype

After lying awake for a night you get up with a brilliant idea for your next board-game. It’s going to be like Monopoly – but with zombies!

You’ve got the basics of the rules and you know more-or-less what kind of components you’re going to need.

So you start fleshing out a prototype. You grab the pieces from one of your existing zombie games, you draw a board on a piece of paper and you start sketching some cards you need.

Before you know it you’re lost in the minutiae of the work: What’s the equivalent of “Boardwalk” and “Go to jail” for zombies? What kind of rent should you ask for “Zombie-invested-high-school”?

But diligently you push through and after a few hours (days?) you have a prototype, ready for your first play-test. You turn on your schizophrenia and take on four different roles and play your first game.

And guess what? The it sucks! (Because seriously, Monopoly with zombies?!?).

Was there a way of figuring this out earlier?

Ideas are easy

Creating an idea is easy. But most initial ideas won’t stand the test of gameplay. Or perhaps there is something in there, but not enough to actually base your entire board-game on.

Which makes it highly unfortunate that creating a prototype takes a relatively large amount of time. Especially if you need to create 10 before you have one that you feel you actually want to continue with.

If only you could do your initial play-testing without creating a prototype?!

The blank play-test

Recently I’ve been doing “blank play-tests”.
Here you take your vague and un-formed idea and start playing it as soon as possible, without making any components.

There will be a board at some point? Use a piece of white paper.

You’ll be playing cards? Empty ones will do for now.

Need something to represent XYZ? Use tokens borrowed from another game.

With these “blank” components you can play the bare-bones of the game. Every turn you can play a card on a board-space that has some influence on that space? Go ahead and place some empty cards on an empty piece of paper. Imagine what these cards might say. Imagine what could be on the board. Imagine how they interact.

You can place workers on your spaces with cards? Get some cubes from an old game and place them. Take turns doing this for different (imaginary) players.

Of course this won’t tell you everything about your game. But it most certainly will tell you something. And with the minimal investment required it’s a very good way of quickly discarding ideas that don’t work and to preempt problems before making a real prototype.

Let’s take a further look with an example.

An example

I recently started work on a new game, working title: “Pawns of the Gods”. The idea is that you are a fledgling god trying to get people to believe in you so that you can rise in power
In a nutshell, the game has two parts: First there is an “automated” or “AI” part, which controls a number of different groups of people in conflict with each other. Then there is the player controlled part, where you play cards to “help” these groups in their conflicts with each other; help a group be victorious over their opponent and you’ll have gained a believer (or two).

I started out with toying with the AI part. I grabbed a bunch of cubes and had them represent lands, population, food, mercantile power and military might. Land grows food grows population grows mercantile power grows military might. Which would then be used to attack another group.

And just by pushing some cubes around I found that this was way too complicated and took forever (wise lessons: board-game AIs should be very very simple!). So I removed the need for lands and food, still too complicated. Remove population and merchants, but put the lands back in. Lands give military might. If you win a battle you get more lands, which give more military might. Simple and effective. This will definitely need more work in the future (how to stop one group from winning once they start?), but it was good enough to start with.

The second step was the player bit: Playing cards to “help” different sides of a conflict. I imagined generally two types of cards: One type to directly influence the conflict (“give +2 strength to one side of a conflict”) and deck manipulation (“look at the top 5 cards of the deck, put three on the bottom and the other two on top in any order”).

So I played, giving each “player” a hand of blank cards and at a whim deciding whether they would be of one type or another.

Results were quick to come in: Yes, this worked. Adding strength was much more interesting than manipulating the deck (though that might just be because it was a stack of white cards?

Nomeny wrote:
Specifications are pretty standard unless.