Essen Spiel happens every October in Essen, Germany, and it’s the largest board game convention on the planet. It spans 4 days, 8 massive halls, around a thousand exhibitors, and lots and lots of people. If you’ve been to Gen Con or UKGE and thought they were huge, Essen’s even bigger.

2026 is my 8th time going, and every year I watch first-timers get flattened by the same handful of surprises. The scale of it all still feels big to me, but it gets smaller by knowing which booths are worth more of your time.

This guide covers the whole trip and is specific to Essen Spiel: booking, planning, packing, surviving the halls, and ultimately meeting your goals.

What is Essen Spiel?

First and foremost, Essen is a consumer fair, not an industry-only event. That distinction shapes everything about your trip, since it means you’ll be dealing with crowds the whole way.

Predominantly German gamers will be throughout the halls with wheeled trolleys, buying stacks of games. Publishers may have chosen to launch their new titles here, or at least bring the rest of their catalog to sell. The halls open in the morning and close in the early evening, and unlike American cons, there’s no official evening programming in the convention center. Post-event gaming and networking happens in the hotel lobbies, restaurants, and bars, and that’s where a lot of the industry’s real conversations take place.

To designers, this matters because publishers are there to sell. Their booth staff are working retail, their leadership is running demos and doing press, and everyone will be exhausted. Any pitches you want to do with them needs to be scheduled ahead of time (which is far more likely) or squeezed into the gaps (far less likely).

One piece of good news: you won’t need to speak a word of German to enjoy the show. When navigating the rest of the country, knowing a bit of German will help.

In Deutsch, please?

The words I’ve found to be the most helpful:

• Bahn: train

• Bahnhof: train station

• Hauptbahnhof (abbreviated to Hbf.): main / central train station

• Gleis: a train platform (pronounce like ‘glice’, rhymes with ‘rice’)

• Bitte and Danke: Please and thanks

• Eingang and Ausgang: entrance and exit

• Damen and Herren: women and men (most commonly found on toilets)

• Leitungswasser (LY-toongs-vah-ser) - tap water. Order ‘Wasser’ and you’ll get a bottle of water you pay for.

Book your bed and show ticket

Hotels in Essen proper sell out far in advance, and prices climb steeply for whatever’s left. The moment you decide you’re going, book a room. Most bookings can be purchased with free cancellation, so there’s little downside to grabbing one early even if your plans are soft.

If Essen itself is full or too expensive, look at the surrounding cities. Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Bochum, and Duisburg are all connected to Essen by the RE (Rapid Express) regional trains, and a 20-40 minute commute into Essen can save you serious money.

The show ticket is easy enough, but I’ll caution that the way to book tickets seems to be different each year. Just head to https://spiel-essen.de/en/ and you’ll figure it out.

Flying in usually means arriving at Düsseldorf airport, which is the closest major airport to Essen. Cologne and Frankfurt are also workable alternatives (catch the train to Essen from there).

Decide what you’re trying to accomplish

Essen has around a thousand exhibitors, and four days is simply not enough time to see and do everything. What do you want to accomplish at Essen?

Personally, my priorities from highest to lowest:

• Pitching games to publishers

• Networking with publishers, designers, and other industry folks

• Scouting the market to see what’s selling and what’s coming

• Playing and buying games

You can do more than one of these, but one of them ultimately has to win when they conflict. If pitching is the priority, a hot new release demo doesn’t get to run over your 2pm meeting. I’ve written about this in more depth in my ‘secret weapon’ post:

If you’re pitching, the work starts months ahead of the event

My personal rule: start gearing up for Essen shortly after Gen Con has ended. That means researching who’s going, what they make,

As the guy behind Tabletop Publishers, I can appreciate how self-serving this sounds… but if you want to pitch at Essen, you need to book those appointments well ahead of the show. You can’t wait until the last minute to send them, since meeting slots get filled well before October.

In short:

• Research which publishers fit your games

• Reach out with a personalized pitch

• Offer them an easy way to book a time with you.

Plenty more in this post:

What to pack

Not these:

Your feet will log serious mileage each day, almost all of it on hard floors. Whatever shoes you’d wear for a full day of walking, bring those, and ensure they’re already broken in. You will see people limping through Hall 3 on Saturday… and if you don’t, check the mirror.

As a data point, at Essen 2024, my watch logged:

• 15,446 on Wednesday (traveling always takes lots of steps)

• 16,776 on Thursday

• 12,158 on Friday

• 16,186 on Saturday

• 16,786 on Sunday (a shorter day at the fair combined with traveling home)

…for a total of 77,352 steps.

Wear. Comfy. Shoes.

The prototypes I prepped for Essen 2023.

Beyond the shoes, my packing list when heading out from the hotel to the halls:

• A presentation folder with your sell sheets

• My appointment list and stop-by list on a clipboard

• Only the prototypes you’re pitching that day in a wheeled suitcase. The rest stay at the hotel. I pack roughly one prototype for every two pitches of a given game.

• A refillable water bottle, protein bars, and other healthy filling snacks. Food queues get long, and prices are convention prices.

• A portable phone charger.

• Business cards, because Essen still runs on them.

• Hand sanitizer. Con crud is real, people.

• Real cough drops (think Ricola, not Halls). You need something with actual medicinal value here, and losing your voice mid-pitch is a bad time when your whole plan involves talking to people.

Some euros are worth carrying too. Card acceptance in Germany has improved, but smaller booths and some restaurants still prefer or require it. There are ATM’s around, but they’ll empty out quickly. Pick up some cash at an ATM in town after you’ve checked into your hotel.

Working the halls

Thursday and Friday are your business days. The crowds are lighter, booth staff have more bandwidth, and the people you want to meet are fresher. Saturday is the busiest day of the fair, and it’s a poor day to attempt anything beyond pre-booked meetings. Sunday afternoon loosens up again as locals head home, and some exhibitors discount stock they don’t want to ship back.

Build buffer time between every commitment. Crossing from one hall to another can take 10-15 minutes through the crowds, and arriving sweaty and late to a pitch undoes weeks of preparation. I aim to reach every meeting a few minutes early, take a few deep breaths, and pop a mint.

Leave slack for luck as well. Some of my most useful Essen conversations came from stopping by a booth with a single question and staying for twenty minutes. An over-scheduled con kills those moments.

Take care of yourself

Four days of noise, walking, and constant social contact will grind you down, and most first-timers hit a wall on day three. Eat actual meals. Drink more water than feels necessary. Get real sleep, even when the hotel lobby gaming runs late and the fear of missing out kicks in.

An evening or two of lobby games and industry chatter is worth staying up for. All four evenings at full throttle means you’ll be a zombie for your Sunday commitments, and zombies pitch poorly.

Once you’re home, the follow-ups begin

Whether you promised sell sheets or prototypes, deliver it within a week or two of getting home. Prototypes get mailed, rulebook links get sent, and every meeting gets a short thank-you note while your face is still fresh in their memory. Keep an inventory of which prototypes went to which publisher and when, because that record is what makes the follow-up chase manageable months later.

The con itself is four days. The relationships you start there run for years, and the follow-up is where first-timers most often drop the ball. Book the trip, do the prep, and treat everything after Sunday as part of the same project.

Make Essen count

Essen will cost its fair share in money, time, and energy, and the difference between a great trip and a wasted one comes down to preparation. If you want a second set of experienced eyes on your pitch list, your sell sheets, or your overall con strategy, that’s exactly what my consulting sessions are for. We’ll build a plan that fits your games and your goals before you ever board the plane.

Book a one-on-one consultation

Wait, there are different styles of game design?

I think so, yes – they all have to do with how designers put their games together and how they iterate. There may be more than three, but these three correspond pretty nicely to three other ways of creating.

Painter: an additive process

Picture a painter staring at a blank canvas. They squirt some paint onto their palette, select a brush, and imagine the different elements in their head. Maybe they’ve already sketched out the full piece, or maybe they’ll make it up as they go along.

Watch any Bob Ross video on Youtube and you’ll get what I’m talking about:

A painting comes together one element at a time, one brushstroke at a time, one layer at a time. I’ve talked about the Minimum Viable Game (MVG) in my post about self-playtesting, and this is basically where the painter starts from.

If you’re a painter…

The ‘Painter’ designing style tends to be careful and conscientious. Whether this is a habit they’ve picked up or a way of thinking that works for them, they probably already have a pretty good idea of what they want to make.

They can sometimes be too cautious when adding new layers to their game.

Remember that added layers aren’t permanent. If they’re getting in the way of what you want the game to be, remove them and see what happens.

If you want to be a painter…

Keep it simple. Yes, I know, this is an easier said than done sort of thing. Games really don’t need All The Moving Parts to be worthwhile.

Remember game design is an iterative process, not one-and-done. Start simple. Recognize when you’re adding layers (and there are more of these than you think – a new type of card, a way of scoring points, a way of interacting with the components or other players, etc.) and make the choice to add it.

Sculptors: a subtractive process

Sculptors start with a large block of something (like stone clay, etc.) and carefully sculpt out everything that isn’t part of the statue.

Sculptors also have a vision of what they’re making, but they’ll have to get through the rest of the ‘material’ in the way.

If you’re a sculptor…

The ‘Sculptor’ design style tends to throw a bunch of mechanics into one game, which means your game might feel like a ‘kitchen sink’.

You’re going to spend more of your iterative time cutting rather than adding, and each cut is going to have a ripple effect since you’ll be linking mechanics together. This means every cut needs to consider the rest of the game to see what will change… and this is actually a strength of the Sculptor design style… if you actually do this.

As you cut things, remember that all those little pieces and layers are never gone, just removed from this game for now. The more organized your notes are about what you cut and why, the easier it will be to incorporate those pieces and layers back into this game or other ones in the future.

If you want to be a sculptor…

Allow yourself to throw everything in the pot (or throw all the spaghetti at the wall, or pick another metaphor here). It will feel like a jumble of elements, and that’s OK.

Be aggressive when cutting. If you find you miss something, you can always bring it back. Not doing this (or cutting things too slowly) means it’ll take a lot longer to work through what should be cut.

An interlude

These were the two design styles I had pictured for years. It’s a spectrum, to be sure, but designers were typically on one side or the other.

In recent months, I’ve found myself inventing, reinventing, and then reinventing the same concept into completely different things. Either the theme was the same or the mechanic was the same, but something carried through such that I didn’t consider it a new project or a new game.

It led me to realize there was a third design style waiting in the wings.

Potters: an ever-changing process

For a potter, their ball of clay on a spinning wheel can be anything they can dream. The clay is very malleable, and it can become very tall in one second or splat the next.

Some game designers aren’t sure what their vision is for their game, so they try out lots of suggestions for changing it. Add this mechanic, try this theme out, make it for a larger player count. The clay isn’t fixed until it’s thrown into the kiln, after all, and you can keep shaping the same ball of clay indefinitely.

If you’re a potter…

The ‘Potter’ design style has you trying a bunch of stuff, sometimes multiple versions or variants of the same game in rapid-fire succession. You might be adding or removing a number of things, like a DJ trying to find the right mix.

The biggest issue is going to feel like you found the right version or variant. There are so many more things to try, you might think. It’s easy to keep making big dramatic changes and never lock in on one version.

I think the solution here is to acknowledge those other what‑if ideas and allow them to take on a life of their own. Don’t make them compete for the next iteration of this game. Allow them to spin off into their own games.

If you want to be a potter…

Allow playtesters to experiment with your game. Let other designers reimagine it with different components, play styles, etc. Be willing to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The Potter style merits a word of caution, however. The art of creating and re-creating and endless iterating is a lot of fun… but it can mean your game never makes it to the proverbial kiln. At some point, you need to find a direction or you’ll never finish tweaking it. Finishing the game takes more work, but lets you feel a sense of accomplishment, whether ‘finishing’ a game means putting it on the Game Crafter, crowdfunding it, or getting it ready to pitch.

What does an average week look like for a game designer?

More or less like what you’re about to read! This was a fairly representative sort of week in that I didn’t do much of one sort of thing (e.g. editing) and more in the way of another (e.g. development). It’s just the way the work comes in sometimes.

Monday, August 10, 2026

Today started out with a bit of troubleshooting on a technical tool I’m creating to make cross-posting to a BoardGameGeek blog a bit easier. The good news: I can call on a single skill in Claude, feed it one of my Substack posts, and it outputs the BBCode necessary to display well on BGG the first time. I’ll still check it in BoardGameGeek’s preview window, but after several posts added, it seems to be working perfectly.

Over in Virtual Playtesting, I tested a newish game called Poison the Well (press-your-luck card game with some bluffing and table talk). It’s at the stage where I’m throwing some spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and the discussion there helped a bit.

I realized that I want players to bust each other without being afraid of busting themselves… but there needs to be a choice… so I came up with a rule to test at my next playtesting opportunity…

In our new Virtual Playtesting session (6pm Eastern), a playtester tried the very first version of a new game: Grab That Loot! It’s a press-your-luck, dice-rolling, polyomino-drawing notebook game, similar to these notebooks I remember seeing awhile back.

While unrelated to games, Mondays are gym days. Afterwards, it was such a gorgeous days that I walked the 3km home through the park. Good chance to get away from the computer screen.

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Poison the Well has been cut and sleeved, and is ready for real-world playtesting. Each player gets a hand of cards in their color from 1 to 8 (the shapes are mainly there for double-coding purposes). Very boring looking, I know, but relatively abstract games don’t exactly have a lot of art in the first place. I also updated the rules in Google Docs just in case they become necessary.

I assembled a prototype for another new game Roads of an Empire (think Carcassone meets Ticket to Ride - worker movement with a bit of area control).

The prototype you see is actually the prototype getting tossed because after a couple of playtests, enough stuff needed to change that necessitated a near-complete reprinting. A few elements didn’t strictly need to be reprinted, but past a certain percentage of pieces, it’s easier and faster to just remake the whole thing. We have enough cardboard boxes (frozen pizza boxes and Amazon boxes are both great BTW), and sticker paper is cheap enough given how versatile it is.

Took Poison the Well to a game night here in Birmingham – one thing on the to-do list is to reduce the downtime for what’s trying to be a casual / party game…

Beyond game design, it’s hill sprint time! This did not go as well as I’d have liked, mainly from the heat and running later in the day…

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

More brainstorming / iterating / self-playtesting on Poison the Well:

It’s slowly evolved from my initial self-given brief of ‘Flip 7, but better’ to ‘Incan Gold meets Cockroach Poker’. The card design has barely changed, it’s more about tweaks to rules, finding how to elicit emotions / table talk while creating a press-your-luck experience.

Part of my reason for pushing on this one is Essen – I think it’s nearly at a point where it can be pitched.

A meeting with a development client – I really love that this client is incredibly sharp, has done the reading, and I appreciate his ideas.

Gym day – Wednesdays tend to be a little high voltage, a little more focused on full-body stuff.

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Speaking of Essen…

I booked the flight and AirBnB awhile back, and finally got around to getting the last piece of the puzzle: the actual ticket to get into the convention. 4 days at 25 Euros apiece just for the right to enter the building… Just three years ago it was 58 Euros for all four days…

Two Thursdays a month, I co-lead the Birmingham chapter of Playtest UK. When it was my chance to playtest, I started with Bing Bang Band, a co-operative music-making where everyone collectively plays a xylophone. The game doesn’t require any musical knowledge or music-reading skills, just the ability to follow the emoji and hit your notes at the right time…

Since most of the other participants are designers, we brainstormed some ways to keep the beat and introduce some scoring to a game that feels more like an activity. One tester had a great idea that was a twist on a thing I’d considered but hadn’t implemented – a conductor…

Since that test was more of a brainstorming session, we had enough time to try Poison the Well. Enough had changed from Tuesday’s feedback to solve the downtime issues noted. The next iteration will need relatively minor tweaks, along with a new card for each player to help track the game state.

Did an easy run of about 9km - Thursdays are usually a tempo run, but the orange weather warning and temperatures in the mid-30’s (low 90’s in Fahrenheit) dictated otherwise.

Friday, August 14, 2026

Speaking of Essen, the exhibitor list for the 2026 event dropped – don’t know exactly when it went live, but it wasn’t live earlier this week when I checked it. I look for this list partially to update Tabletop Publishers (my database of publishers to help designers pitch better), but also to begin getting my own pitching going.

The Essen list is “almost 1.000 exhibitors from over 55 countries”, but not all of those are publishers, and not all of those publishers are seeking pitches. Working through that list took most of the afternoon and a part of the evening before stopping to call it a day.

Fridays are usually a rest day workout-wise – my wife and I will usually do some yoga at home to stretch a bit.

Saturday, August 15, 2026

Parkrun! Got the workout of the day done and dusted - a 25:43 5k run is a solid start to the day.

I finished updating all the Essen Spiel records into Tabletop Publishers, then started researching the publishers that were new to me. These are primarily the folks debuting at Essen with their first game, which usually means they’re not looking for outside designers, but it’s not always the case. As I’m reviewing them, I’m making notes on which ones I want to stop by and chat with during the con.

The European Championships are wrapping up – ordinarily, this is a sporting event I wouldn’t have been much (if any) attention to… but the fact that it’s being held in the city I currently live in (and more accurately, is being held at a stadium within walking distance) means I’m more curious about it than normal. The BBC has covered it in their typical admirable fashion, and the British and Irish athletes have performed quite well…. and yet I’m humbled by the fact that the men’s 10,000 meter run is completed in just a few minutes more than it took me to cover 5k earlier today.

My wife and I tested a new iteration of Roads of an Empire (think Carcassonne meets Ticket to Ride with a Roman theme) - I will neither confirm nor deny that this game was made more or less for her, except to say that it just happens to coincide with her love of history and travel…

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Slept in.

A bit more work on Tabletop Publishers.

A long easy run in the afternoon (about a 15km loop all told).

I started work on a new game, but it’s far too new to say anything about it. If it goes anywhere, you’ll just have to tune into a future blog post or playtesting session to see it for yourself…! To me, what matters is that I have a pretty core loop to play with, along with a ruleset that has been written and a spreadsheet that’s documenting everything…

Over to you

Comments are open.

• Luck - I got dealt a card, or it's my turn and this card is available in the market row.

• Merit - Because I'm leading on this track or in control in some way, I get to do this thing.

• Choice - this is an action I can always take, as long as I have the resources or ability to do so.

After the playtest, I asked my fellow designers on the Board Game Design Lab on Facebook what other ways came to mind... and wow, they delivered!

In the end, I added a couple more categories - to round out the main categories, then sorted through dozens of comments to find the different ways you can gain a power or action. There's a lot of nuances here, and there's no chance this list will ever be complete - leave a comment with what's missing!

Luck ('Fate allows it')

• Contextual - An action has now become possible because of the changing game state.

• Die roll - I get this or do this because of a die roll.

• Draw a card / token - I get this or do this because I draw a card / token.

• Inherited - I land on the resources left behind by a player who got knocked out.

Merit ('I earned it')

• Auction - I paid the most for it.

• Control - I have a thing because I am in control of something.

• Cost - I paid for it in some way.

• Creative - I performed, rhymed, or otherwise did something creative to get this.

• Dexterity - My fingers, body, or pieces got into the right positions.

• Earned - I successfully completed an objective and earned resources / points.

• Exclusivity - I am the only person with access to resource X or the only one who took action Y, I have the exclusive power to use this.

• Hard skill - A game might reward reaction speed/dexterity/rhyme/spelling or a thousand other things you can use as a core mechanic to power a complex game.

• Income - each turn I gain X income and resources based on something I’ve done.

• Knowledge - I answered the question correctly.

• Location - I am in the ‘correct’ location so I get something as a result.

• Memory - e.g. you remembered where a certain card was.

• Player Elimination - you gain the resources/abilities of a player you eliminated.

• Sacrifice - I gave something up or destroyed / trashed something to get this new thing.

• Secret Objectives - I can do the thing on my secret card to gain a bonus.

• Speed - I was the fastest to react, the first to reach the right spot.

• Synergy / efficiency - I can do it better or collect more things because of a synergy or efficiency.

• Unlocked - I now have the ability to do this thing / access this market because I’ve leveled up or unlocked that power in some way.

Choice ('I chose it')

• Leftovers - I get this because someone else did not choose it.

• Non-Zero-Sum Draft - I have this action because I chose it, but my opponents still have access to it (or some version of it)

• Press-your-luck - I chose to take a chance (although the outcome will be, y’know, luck)

• Time - because it's the Nth round/my Nth turn/etc., I can do X.

• Zero-Sum Draft - I have this action because I chose it, and now my opponents don't have access to it.

Opponents ('My opponents helped me get it')

• Betrayal - I’ve decided to break my alliance and take everything for myself.

• Bluff - I can take this action, so long as no other players call me out on it.

• Cheat - the game allows me to break its rules, as long as I don’t get caught.

• Deceive - but I might also trick someone else into completing a goal or thing for me, then I get the resources or points.

• Follow - Your opponent did X, now you can also do X, or some version of X. This may require you to also have the resources to do X.

• Influence - I’ve convinced another player/other players to do something that gives me power.

• Offer - Another player offers me a power or ability because they gain a benefit from doing so.

• Remaining choices - Because my opponents did X, I am now able to do Y.

• Social Voting - someone gets to be in charge, and the other players chose me.

• Share - I can give another player access to my power or thing for some amount of time.

• Steal - when I do something to another player, I can take their resource / thing.

• Teamwork - My ally gave me what I need for our mutual gain.

• Trade - with another player or the game in some way.

Fairness / equality (‘the game gave it to me’)

• Allowance - I am granted this power or action a set number of times each turn.

• Asymmetry - I get this action because my role or character is different.

• Catch-up mechanic - you are losing in some way, so the game gives you some help.

• Consolation - I got outbid on a card, thus I get an action instead of the card itself.

• Headwinds - you are winning in some way, so the game makes it harder for you to score

• Milestone - a game phase or event that happens at known intervals

• Turn - It’s my turn to get a thing or do a thing.

• Turn order - I go first in the round (or last in the round), so I get an additional power.

Over to you

What did I miss? Comments are open.

Between editing dozens of rulebooks for other designers and writing many more of my own, I’ve been really impressed with the many different styles of formatting, writing, and general organization. The more rulebooks you see, the more you’ll see what they have in common.

The rulebooks from some of my published games.

There is no One Format To Rule Them All, but there a lot of easily correctable things you might find in your rulebooks (and yes, I’ve found many of these in my own rulebooks at one point or another).

1. Forgetting how people read rulebooks

Think about the last few published games you played where someone read the rules from the rulebook. Did you read the rulebook completely through before you started playing?

I’d bet you got through setup, talked through a turn, then aimed to set the rulebook aside and play. Whenever people had a question, they probably flipped through the pages, scanned the headlines, sidebars, or bolded text to find the answer. They found it, read it out loud, then hopefully got on with play.

The other time rulebooks feature prominently is when a player returns to play it a second or third time, but it’s been a minute.

I’ve come to really admire the thought process behind the Exploding Kittens games. Yes, they’re simple games by design, and the box design makes it sound simple as well (which itself is a great way to design for the mass market):

2. No visual examples or sidebars

You already know to avoid the dreaded ‘wall of text’, and paragraph breaks are easy enough… but it can’t just be text.

Think about the parts you’ve found difficult to teach during a playtest, or the parts that feel clunky to explain. Sketch out what’s happening, what’s moving, or what players have been missing. Think about showing the progressions or order of operations.

Best practice: when the rulebook reaches the stage where someone else is going to see the rulebook but I’m not teaching the game, it needs visuals.

3. Burying how to win

Players read rules through the lens of two closely-related questions: ‘how do I win?’ and ‘how does the game end?’. If the answers don’t show up until page 4, everything before it lands without context. The reader has no way to judge whether an action is good, bad, or worth remembering.

Mention how you win as early as possible in the first paragraph, in plain language. Bonus points if you can combine them: ‘The player with the most points after 7 rounds wins’ does more work than three paragraphs of setting. Your reader can now file every rule that follows under ‘this helps me win’ or ‘this stops my opponents’.

4. Using thematic terms before mechanical ones

Your rulebook says ‘the Archmage may banish one Familiar per turn’… but what’s the Archmage and what’s a Familiar?. Your reader has no idea the Archmage is their pawn and the Familiars are opponent tokens. Thematic terms feel evocative to you because you’ve lived in this world for months. To a first-time reader, they’re a second language layered on top of the rules they’re trying to learn.

Anchor every thematic term to a mechanical one the first time it appears: ‘your Archmage (your pawn)’. Better yet, pair terms throughout – Resource tiles, Scoring tiles, Action cards, etc. It might be the ‘boring’ name, but it’s the one that actually teaches the game.

5. Calling the same thing by different names

What happens when page 2 calls it a ‘discard pile’, page 5 calls it a ‘scrap heap’, while page 7 casually mentions ‘the trash’? You know they’re the same pile, and while your reader might infer they’re the same thing, they shouldn’t have to guess.

Pick one consistent term per component and per action, then build a mini style guide as you write. For me, this is usually one of my dry erase boards that’s propped up, but use whatever is easily updated and seen. Whatever it is, check it as you update the rules. Consistency here is worth much more here than clever variety.

6. Writing long sentences that need two breaths to speak

Before: ‘On your turn, after drawing a card from either the main deck or the discard pile, you may play up to two cards from your hand, unless you played a Storm card last turn, in which case you may only play one, and then discard down to five cards.’

Ugh.

Anything this long is both difficult to say and difficult to follow. Shorten the sentences and avoid combining the rule with the exception.

After: ‘On your turn, draw 1 card from the main deck or the discard pile. Play up to 2 cards from your hand. (If you played a Storm card last turn, you can only play 1 card.) When done playing cards, discard down to 5 hand cards if needed.’

The one-breath rule from my earlier post applies here: if you can’t speak the sentence in one breath, split it into smaller sentences. The order of operations should read like steps, since that’s how players will execute them.

7. Making players jump around the book

You’re writing a rulebook, not a treasure hunt or a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

‘Resolve the market phase (see page 6)’ followed two lines later by ‘then check for the Herald bonus (see page 9)’ turns your rulebook into a treasure hunt. Every jump breaks the reader’s flow and their confidence that they’re playing correctly.

Explain things in the order players need them. What do they need to know, and when do they need to know it? If a rule genuinely belongs elsewhere, ask whether it could live in a sidebar right where the question comes up instead. The one jump that makes sense is the ‘End of round’ section pointing to the ‘End of game’ section, but even then they’re usually right next to each other.

8. Explaining edge cases before the basic rule

Some designers are so worried about ambiguity that they front-load the exceptions: ‘Move your pawn up to 3 spaces. If a space is occupied by 2 or more pawns, and it is not a Sanctuary space, and you have no Boots tokens, you may not enter it.’ The poor reader hasn’t even taken a normal turn yet.

Teach the normal / typical case first, then place each exception directly next to the rule it modifies. Frame it as an ‘if-then’ sort of statement: ‘If you end your turn with more than 7 cards in your hand, discard down to 7.’ Edge cases handled where they occur means fewer questions down the line.

9. Letting flavor interrupt the flow

A joke in the middle of the setup instructions costs more than it gives. The player reading your rules for the first time feels like they’re working, and every sentence that isn’t teaching is friction. The player checking a rule mid-game, with three friends waiting, probably resents your pun about goblins.

Flavor still has a home, but it should be clear what’s flavor and what’s important. Sidebars, the intro paragraph, and card text can all carry story beautifully without slowing the teach.

If you want to imbue some flavor in a section, start the section with a short, italicized paragraph before jumping into the rules:

You never know who’s gonna show up at the castle after dark, after all. Keep your defenses up and the portcullis down and you should be fine.

Bonus points if your flavor text has a different style / tone of voice to further distinguish it. If you have a prominent character in the game, have the flavor come from them.

10. Using the passive voice

Before: ‘Cards may be discarded at any time, and points are awarded when sets are completed.’

After: ‘Discard cards at any time. When you complete a set, score its points immediately.’

Using the passive voice hides who’s doing what, and rules exist to tell specific player(s) to do specific thing(s). Lead with verbs whenever you can. As a bonus, active sentences are typically shorter, which helps with point #6.

11. Repeating rules in multiple places

State each rule once in the place players need it. Repeating yourself doesn’t make things clearer. If you’re not sure of a rule’s best place, ask your playtesters. When does it most help them, and is it easier to understand ‘A, then B’, or ‘B, then A’?

12. Using a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section

This isn’t meant as a spicy take, just reality. Why is this a frequently asked question? If you’ve heard the same question come up frequently, take a moment to identify when it’s being asked and why. It might be easy enough to add a graphic or callout to the appropriate space on the map. Better still, move that info earlier to a more appropriate space in the rulebook.

Want a second opinion on your rulebook?

You probably know I do editing and proofreading, but I’ve recently started offering a ‘rulebook audit’. This covers dozens of questions, points out what’s working and what isn’t, then steps back to let you fix things your way:

Get your rulebook audited

My notes were organized. They were clipped into a clipboard alongside my flipbook of sell sheets, and the rest of the game bag was packed. It was a fair bit of prep, but I was ready to rock.

This wasn’t a dream, mind you – this was Friday morning of UKGE 2026:

My secret weapon was the contents of that clipboard.

Introducing my ‘stop-by list’

My first problem at conventions was remembering everyone I wanted to meet:

• Who I wanted to connect with

• Why I wanted to connect with them

• Where their booth was at the con

I had all the information, of course, but no one place had it all… and of course you need it to be easy to access in a busy, loud, crowded environment that may or may not have working internet… so I decided to make one.

What is a stop-by list?

A stop-by list is a list of booths, people, or games I want to connect with at a convention. It starts as a Google Sheet file that gets filled in as I prepare for a convention. This is how it starts:

Each row has the company name, the booth number, my goal for stopping by, a checkbox for marking them visited, and a space to add notes before or write new notes during the convention.

What sort of goals do you have on your stop-by list?

Learn more, Network, See what’s new, and Looking for?:

• ‘Learn more’: I’ve learned something about them online, but want to learn more from them at the convention.

• ‘Network’: Chat, hang out, and otherwise get to know the person.

• ‘See what’s new’: Check out the new games or offerings.

• ‘Looking for?’: Ask them what sort of games they’re looking for.

These are my goals, of course – yours will be different. Decide them ahead of the convention, then fill them into the sheet.

While I won’t show a completed list out of privacy concerns, I’ve set this up so that once all the info is in there, sort everything by booth number (the best way to sort so you’re not riffling through a ton of pages), then print it off.

Part of the design process here is thinking about what parts are filled out ahead of time (like the company, the booth number, the goal), and which ones are handwritten in (the checkbox, the notes section). As such, the rows are wide enough to leave plenty of room for writing by hand.

What about pitching / appointments? How do you track those?

That’s a different tab in the spreadsheet:

The ‘Day of con’, ‘Day of week’, and ‘Time’ columns are part of the basic organizations, while ‘Who to meet’ and ‘Booth’ is self-explanatory. I use another tab to track the games I’m pitching (which also helps me track how many copies of a game to print).

Stopping by and taking notes

Yes, I’m absolutely going to be That Guy taking notes at a con, and for good reason. Getting ready for a con, along with the time / money / energy it takes to attend, means I don’t want to be reliant on my memory for anything critical.

I take paper notes as already discussed. I’ll type notes into Simplenote on my phone. I’ll scan QR codes and keep the tabs open in my browser. I’ve paid a fair bit to hear or learn this stuff, and I’d be a fool to not capture it in a way I can use later on.

When the dust settles…

After the con’s over and you’ve caught up on sleep, it’s time to do something with all of the info you collected.

If you’re using Tabletop Publishers, you already know what to do:

This isn’t my secret weapon, but it is the tool I use myself in lots of ways. I’ll let tabletoppublishers.com speak for itself if you haven’t seen it in action.

Do I really need to be this organized? This sounds like a lot of work…

Yes, it’s a fair bit of time and energy. Yes, it’s worth it.

How many times have you gotten home from conventions and wondered ‘what do I do next?’ and found yourself going ‘uhhhh’… You got some great business cards and met some great people – what’s the next step with them? ‘What games did we talk about again…?’ And of course you’ve been away for awhile, it’s time to get back to work, catch up on everything you missed, etc. etc.

You tried to rely on your memory. You met lots of people, and your memory naturally got overwhelmed with data.

The convention is the start of that connection, and unfortunately it’s too often the end of the connection since few follow-ups are ever done well (or done at all). It’s on you, dear designer, to keep that conversation going. Present yourself professionally.

Make it yourself, or get it here

$7 via Paypal

A few other moving parts

The ‘Games to Pitch’ tab focuses on ensuring your game is ready before the con:

The ‘Games to Pack’ counts how often you’re pitching a given game to help you figure out how many copies you want to make. Check the box when they’re packed:

If you have lots of appointments, the sheet can sort them by day as well.

$7 via Paypal

Over to you

How do you prepare for a convention? Comments are open.

Rooftop Roses started out in January 2026 as my entry into our first PnP Bundle (which arrives to Gamefound on July 21, 2026 - follow, back, or get the late pledge depending on when you’re reading this).

I had several self-given goals / constraints when putting this together:

• It needed to be a low or no assembly print-and-play

• It needed to be a stand-alone sort of game (there are 2 other games in the print-and-play bundle, and each of them would be its own stand-alone experience without a ton of add-ons / different ways to play)

• It needed to work as a solo game and a multi-player game

• It needed a minimal ‘ask’ of printing and components

I had a couple of other ideas around the same time as this one, but I liked the simplicity of this core loop the best:

1. Roll 3 dice

2. Use 2 dice to make 1 mark in an empty square at the intersection of those 2 numbers.

3. Use the remaining dice to… do… something else…

The first version of central sheet started very mechanically:

Whoever had the most marks in the row or column would score that many points.

The first ability sheet had six different abilities, based on your remaining die:

A few things became quickly obvious:

• No one spent much time trying to win the top row or leftmost column for a whopping 1 point, especially since there was no way to make it worth more.

• There was some analysis paralysis in considering which powers you wanted, and when you should use them – more than I wanted in a casual / family-friendly dice-rolling print-and-play.

• The heuristic was too simple: just go for the highest two numbers since those rows / columns were worth the most points. (The higher numbers powers were better, but it was easier to see the points on the board.)

A bit of math presented an opportunity: whenever you roll 3 six-sided dice, you have a 41.67% chance to roll doubles and a 2.78% chance to roll triples (3 of a kind). This made way for a new scoring sheet with a few rule twists:

You now had the chance to make 2 marks in an empty space, but doing so gives other players another power. You also had the power to manipulate your way into doubles or out of doubles. 3 rerolling powers felt a little samey, and 3 extra ways of scoring points was still a little too much to comfortably hold in your hand.

I also self-playtested a few new scoring systems on the common sheet:

6’s were wild, and making the rows / columns worth 2, 3, or 4 points narrowed the scoring range a bit… and showing the maximum number of marks in a space made it easier to track whether you could go there or not…

It’s worth pointing out most of the core loop and the end of the game has been essentially unchanged since version 1. If you cannot make a legal move, mark one of the spaces in the upper left corner. The game ends immediately when the third mark is made.

A breakthrough

The biggest breakthrough was deciding to make the leftover die matter in a new way: cross out the lowest-numbered star in the leftover die’s row or column to make it worth another point:

Sure, those higher-numbered rows / columns are worth more at the start, but it means you’ll probably be boosting the lower-numbered rows / columns… which means they can be worth more by the end of the game… It also gave you a reason to consider whether it was better to choose the intersection first or where you wanted to boost.

After some feedback that simply marking the corner felt like a wasted turn, I added some points as a consolation prize of sorts. That they were guaranteed points felt better, though they got a small buff in a later version.

A couple of iterations on tiebreaking rules later and I had that sorted: control the row / column to score points, but if there’s a tie, look to see who boosted that row / column the most.

The scoring sheet needed another few playtests to find the right balance of manipulation, but also to confirm a rule change: you’ll start with one of each power, but the only way to get more was when other players used their doubles or triples to make two marks:

Retheming to rooftops and roses

A few themes were suggested by playtesters: gold prospecting, constructing buildings along the grid of city streets, mushrooms in a forest and garden plots of some sort.

I liked the idea of garden plots and communal gardens, then thought of some unusual places for them. England has plenty of allotments, but I loved the idea of a communal garden in a very urban environment. What to plant in those communal gardens? Vegetables seemed fairly cliché, but flowers came in most colors of the rainbow… roses are iconic and conveniently alliterative to ‘rooftop’, so away we went.

I have Parker Simpson (my illustration partner on many other print-and-play games) to thank for bringing the 75th floor roof to life:

Check it out / learn more:

See the PnP Bundle on Gamefound

Step 0: know the goal

(I promise I’m not creating a rhyming scheme on purpose BTW)

When making a pitch video, my goal is to show the game’s fun in a short period of time. It is not a rulebook, the full teach of the game, a ‘how to play’ video, or anything so complete.

My audience is publishers (and more specifically, the publishers I’m trying to pitch, not necessarily every publisher on the planet), and to some extent fellow designers and players like yourselves.

Beyond those two basics, my goal is to shoot these in a way that enables me to make them with clear video and audio without needing a ton of extra equipment. Videos are shot with my phone and things I already own (with one exception, which I’ll get to later). I’m shooting in my office, not some fancy studio.

With the goals out of the way…

Step 1: know what to show

You might be thinking “Well, I want to show the entire game off, complete with all 27 dice, all 250 cards, and of course all 58 tokens…”

Let me dissuade you of that for a couple of reasons.

At any given time, most of those pieces will not actively be in use on camera. That means the action is only happening with a small number of pieces or in a small number of places. Focus on those.

Also, showing all of the pieces on camera means having to zoom out with whatever camera you’re using, or setting it up so it shows a wider angle / a wider field. It makes the part that’s actually showing the action a smaller portion of the screen, which makes it harder to see.

As an example, observe how the board would look if I was setting up my game, Downward Facing Panda, with everything on the table in its ready-to-play sort of look:

A decent enough table shot, but it’s hard to know what to look at, even if I gesture well. I’d have to pick up cards to bring them closer to the camera, which risks disrupting everything and having to reset things between takes. The less that has to change / move, the better.

Now here’s a freeze frame of the opening setup from my pitch video for that game:

Hey, you can actually make out the details now. Awesome! The eagle-eyed will also note I’m not showing every single card in the game here. The decks aren’t the full deck, but a demonstrable pile of cards, followed by a selected few cards face-up to show what they look like. (The rulebook and sell sheet both have exact component count, for anyone curious enough to get there.)

It goes without saying that the action can shift from one set of cards or player boards to other pieces. That’s when you change the shot. We’ll come back to that in a future step. For now…

Step 2: know what to say

The average human can speak about 150 words per minute. That means in a two‑minute video, you have about 300 words. For most games and most pitches, I’d recommend a one to two minute video for the best chances of using it near universally. There are exceptions, of course: some mass‑market companies want videos to be on the 1-minute-or-less side, while larger games might need significantly longer.

Personally, I script every every video I make these days. Since you have about 300 words or so for a two‑minute video, script, sculpt, and consider that your budget of words. You’re not going to teach the full game in that time, which is good because it’s not the point (see step 0). Showing the hook, what’s unique about the game, and a general sense of the type of game it is will be all you’ll have time for. Think about the decisions you make or what happens on your turn.

Once you’ve written it, make it extremely easy to see as you speak it. You might have the script on a second monitor, a tablet, or you might want to print it off and attach it to the wall. Resist the temptation to ad lib. If you find yourself stumbling over your script, go back and rewrite your script.

If you want to shoot the video and then record the voiceover, that’s always an option as well. (I don’t do this personally since it requires a fair bit of coordination between how long the video clip is and what you want to say. It then requires you to pair them up in post-production.)

Step 3: know how to shoot

You’ve probably heard the advice ‘You don’t need anything fancy to shoot’. I’ll agree with that, but I’ll definitely encourage you to spend at least a few bucks.

Behold, my ‘game-making table’:

This is essentially the top of my dresser, just with a board purchased from a hardware store and a black neoprene mat put on top of it. If I’m self-playtesting a game or want to lay a game out to take pictures or do videos, this is my dedicated space for that. Even if you don’t have a dedicated space for making games, a neoprene mat still goes a long way to making a thing easier to look at and work with.

The only other elements that I use to make a video are the following:

• Smartphone: for recording video and audio. Protip: put your phone on airplane mode before you start recording so notifications and calls don’t interrupt a take. The built-in mic has been good enough for dozens of pitch videos, but keep reading for more about audio.

• Let there be light: A gooseneck clip-on selfie / influencer sort of LED lamp – it’s clipped onto the right side of the board. You can get fancy or keep it low key here. It should be white light and not the more yellowish, incandescent sort of light so it shows the colors of your game off well.. If you’re looking at light bulbs at the store, it’s usually referred to as ‘cool white’ as opposed to ‘warm’.

• My three-legged friend: a tripod tall enough to get the overhead / mostly top-down view:

After making the last batch of pitch videos, I realized I might have benefited from another thing found on influencers: a wireless lav mic. These are typically paired with a receiver that physically plugs into your phone. DJI and RODE are two of the big brand names, but there’s no shortage of similar tech for a fraction of the price.

Step 4: know how to edit

I know you’d like to think your shots will go perfectly in one take and won’t require any post‑production editing. I’d like you to wake up from that dream right now. Yes, it can happen. Some of my videos are one‑take wonders. Part of that comes from having carefully scripted what I want to say and having very little motion happening on camera.

You can make your editing job a lot easier by doing a few things beforehand:

• Record in the order of the script. Don’t skip around.

• If you flub a take, delete it from your phone immediately and try again. Don’t save it for later, or think there’s a piece of it you might use. Picture that junk drawer you have with all of the tools, cords, and so on.

• Get the take and move on. Hollywood will do multiple takes and multiple cameras and then consider which one was better. You don’t have time for that. If the audio is good, the video is good, you delivered what the script says, good job, move on.

My main tool here is a program called Shotcut. It’s a free, open-source video editing tool that has more tools than I’ll ever use. All I’m typically doing in it is putting different takes into the main film strip and carefully dragging them together to make a built-in transition, then exporting. In the past, I’ve also superimposed text in some cases.

Again, come back to the tools influencers are using these days. CapCut is a solid tool from everything I’ve heard, and there are tons of free browser-based tools.

Step 5: know how to get it online

I’ll assume you’ve used YouTube before and can create a channel if you haven’t already. Don’t worry too much about branding for the moment. Just know that this channel is where you’ll be uploading your pitch videos. You can then embed them in your website or share to social media as you like. By all means feel free to use Vimeo or some other hosting service if you like, but YouTube is a solid standard.

While the video is uploading, take a few minutes to fill out the text description. You don’t need to put your contact information out there if you’re not comfortable with that, but at a minimum, add a one paragraph description of your game, the player count, the age, and the play time in minutes. (If you’re still waiting, take a moment to confirm your channel has the correct links to your website and social media, along with your email address.)

Once it’s up, copy and paste the link into your notes or wherever you track your pitching video information. It may be worth taking a moment to bookmark it somewhere on your computer so it’s easier to access.

The final step: know how to use it

These things have a shelf life, either because the game will change over time, or because a pitch video from 5 years can scream ‘no one’s interested’ or ‘I haven’t actually pitched this at all’. Research and approach publishers, then be ready to follow up with rules, a demo, or a prototype.

Want some help figuring out who to pitch? I can help with researching:

Find the best publishers for your game

Habit 4: Integrity – Doing What You Say You’ll Do

While Integrity is closely related to Respect, I’ll say that Respect is what you give, and Integrity is what you have. Both can and should be on display, and honesty is still the best policy. Do what you say you’ll do, when you’ll do it, and how you’ll do it. The previously mentioned habits of Empathy and Respect both expect - and demand - Integrity.

Developing integrity in board game design involves maintaining honesty, transparency, and ethics throughout the design process. Let’s talk about a few specific ways to develop and show integrity.

• Represent your game honestly and accurately, both in marketing materials and during gameplay. This includes providing clear and truthful information about the game’s mechanics, components, and theme to potential players and publishers. Respect the trust that your players have placed in you when they engage with their games. This involves delivering on promises made during crowdfunding campaigns or pre-orders and being transparent about any changes or delays in production.

• Designers should ensure that the gameplay experience is fair and enjoyable for all players. This includes avoiding mechanics that promote cheating or exploitation, and balancing the game to prevent dominant strategies or unfair advantages. This could even extend as far as to remove strategic decisions during setup, which could give an unfair or unwelcome advantage to returning players. In dexterity or knowledge-based games, or other types of games where players will naturally have different levels of skills, there might need to be different ways to catch up, score points, or have fun.

• Ethical Business Practices: Designers should conduct their business affairs with integrity, including fair contracts, timely payment to collaborators, and transparent communication with backers and colleagues. I mention this here both as an expectation for you, the board game designer, but also an expectation to have with the people you work with. Joining groups like the SaZ or the TTGDA can help the industry grow in a number of ways beyond the scope of this presentation.

• Community Engagement and Feedback: Designers should engage with the gaming community in a respectful and open manner, soliciting feedback, responding to concerns, and fostering a positive and inclusive gaming environment.

• Crowdfunding: Running a crowdfunding campaign is a balancing act between many factors, but the habit of Integrity helps to form a structure for you. Updating backers on a regular basis is one of the basic ways to show you’re working to create what you said you would create. Take the time to craft your offer, get quotes, and add in some time for the inevitable unexpected things. Underpromise. Overdeliver.

All of this really comes back to being treated how you’d want to be treated as a backer, a business partner, and a player.

Habit 5: Patience - Know What’s Worth Waiting For

Time for a slightly different direction, but one that probably sounds obvious enough. Patience is a virtue, since things never move as fast as you’d like them to. Developing patience is crucial for board game designers as the design process often involves numerous iterations, setbacks, and unexpected challenges.

• Embrace the Iterative Process: Remember that game design is an iterative process and that creating a polished and engaging game takes time. Embrace each iteration as an opportunity for improvement and refinement rather than expecting immediate perfection.

• Set Realistic Expectations: Establish realistic timelines and expectations for the design process, recognizing that it may take months or even years to develop a game from concept to completion. Avoid rushing through stages of development and instead focus on making steady progress over time. These expectations are important to have for everyone helping you to make the game - artist, publisher, manufacturer, and so on. We’re all human, and no one has it all figured out.

• Take Breaks and Rest: Recognize the importance of taking breaks and allowing yourself time to rest and recharge. Stepping away from a project for a while can provide fresh perspectives and prevent burnout, ultimately leading to better decision-making and creativity. Having to be creative under pressure saps energy from even the most creative person. I’ve heard it most commonly said as a running joke, but working on multiple projects at the same time really does give you the opportunity to bounce between them back and forth.

• Practice Persistence: Understand that setbacks and challenges are inevitable in game design. Instead of becoming discouraged, view these obstacles as opportunities to learn and grow. Practice persistence by persevering through difficult times and maintaining a positive, optimistic mindset. It’s the iterative process that makes games great, not just a spark or idea.

• Focus on the Process, Not Just the Outcome: Shift your focus from solely on the end goal of completing the game to enjoying the process of designing and creating. Embrace the joy of brainstorming ideas, experimenting with mechanics, and collaborating with others, regardless of the outcome.

• Seek Support and Feedback: Surround yourself with a supportive community of fellow designers, playtesters, and mentors who can provide encouragement, advice, and constructive feedback. Having a network of support can help you stay motivated and patient during the design process. There are plenty of communities both online and offline to talk about game design, or to show your designs to whenever you have questions.

• Celebrate Small Victories: Acknowledge and celebrate the small victories and milestones along the way, whether it’s completing a prototype, receiving positive feedback from playtesters, or reaching a development milestone. Recognizing your progress can help maintain motivation and patience during the journey. Along the way, remember to celebrate the victories shared by others in your community. They’re a reminder of how the creative process often moves forward in anything other than a straight line.

Embrace the iterative nature of game design, set realistic expectations, practice persistence, seek support, and focus on the process. All of these things will help keep you going when things go slower than expected.

Habit 6: Charisma – Show Off Your Sparkling Personality

As the old saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Look for ways to remember people and their preferences, and find ways to add humor or fun where appropriate. We make board games, after all - this is what we do.

Developing your charisma helps in so many ways, from pitching ideas to publishers, engaging with players and playtesters, and building a supportive community. Here are some strategies to develop charisma.

• Exude Confidence and Enthusiasm: Show your confidence and enthusiasm for your game designs. You are proud of what you’ve created, and you probably can’t wait to get it to the table again. Believe in your ideas and express your passion for gaming when presenting or discussing your work with others. Confidence and enthusiasm are contagious and can help captivate the attention of publishers, players, and collaborators. If you can’t say that about your designs, it’s usually indicative of other issues, such as burnout, fatigue, or a desire to work on something else.

• Communicate Effectively: Work on improving your communication skills by practicing your public speaking, active listening, and storytelling. This helps whether you’re teaching the rules to a game or brainstorming ideas with other people. Clear and engaging communication can help convey your ideas effectively and connect with your audience on a deeper level.

• Connect Genuinely: Be authentic and genuine in your interactions with others. There’s little need to put on airs. Show empathy, sincerity, and warmth when engaging with players, fellow designers, and other industry professionals. Building genuine connections can foster trust and support within the gaming community, and it also helps remember the human on the other side.

• Be Adaptable and Flexible: You never know when looking at a game mechanic or concept from a different perspective will completely change how a game might play. Show openness to feedback, willingness to explore new ideas, and readiness to adapt your designs based on player preferences and market trends. This flexibility can help you stay relevant in a constantly evolving industry.

• Have a Charismatic Presence: Pay attention to your body language, facial expressions, and vocal tone when presenting or engaging with others. You are happy to be here, after all, doing whatever it is you’re doing. Yes, there are times when you may not want to be here, and some people have to be more conscious with their energy levels, but the goal is the same. Maintain a positive and engaging demeanor, make eye contact, and use gestures and expressions to convey enthusiasm and energy. A charismatic presence can captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression.

• Look for Ways to Continually Improve: Dr. Covey called it ‘Sharpen the Saw’, the 7th Habit of Highly Effective People. The idea is the same here: Continuously seek opportunities for self-improvement and personal development. There are always opportunities to improve your skills, expand your knowledge, and learn from experienced mentors. Be proactive in finding them, but balance them against keeping your existing obligations. Sometimes new stuff has to take a back seat in order to honor your existing obligation. If you find yourself overcommitting and getting overwhelmed, ask a close friend or partner to help keep you from making new commitments.

Charisma is a combination of confidence, effective communication, authenticity, adaptability, presence, empathy, and continual improvement. As a board game designer, developing charisma enhances your ability to connect with others, pitch their ideas, and create memorable gaming experiences.

Habit 7: Professionalism – Standing Out From the Crowd

Being taken seriously by others means focusing on how you present yourself and your games. Amateurs come and go, but professionals stick around.

Developing professionalism is essential for board game designers to be taken seriously by industry stakeholders, collaborators, and players.

• Commit to Quality: Commit to producing high-quality games. You’re not just making games for money, you’re making games to bring people joy and fun. Don’t settle for the first draft - iterate and keep focusing on the experience. Prioritize excellence in all aspects of design, including gameplay mechanics, artwork, components, and production value. Strive to deliver polished and well-crafted games. This doesn’t mean spending a fortune on making prototypes look pretty, just functional. If self-publishing, this commitment means ensuring that the final print run is typo-free, formatted correctly, fits in the box, and so on.

• Reliability and Consistency: Establish a reputation for reliability and consistency by consistently meeting deadlines, delivering on promises, and maintaining open and transparent communication with partners and stakeholders. Build trust and credibility by demonstrating that you can be counted on to follow through on your commitments. This comes back to Integrity, naturally.

• Communicate Professionally: Whenever you’re communicating as your brand or business, put on the professional hat. If I’m wearing my brand’s shirt, or if I’m being seen by others in the industry, I’m much more conscientious of how I speak in things like emails, meetings, presentations, and on social media. Use clear and concise language, maintain a respectful tone, and adhere to professional etiquette and standards of conduct. That rule you heard as a kid still applies: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’. Put on your professional persona and keep your brand in mind.

• Network and Build Relationships: Build and nurture professional relationships within the gaming industry by networking with fellow designers, publishers, distributors, retailers, and other industry professionals. Attend industry events, join professional organizations, and engage with the gaming community to expand your network and build valuable connections. Create and offer value and time whenever you can, and take the time to offer a thoughtful, considered response. The world has plenty of knee-jerk responses, after all.

• Cultivate a Professional Image and Brand: Cultivate a professional image and brand identity that reflects your values, personality, and design style. Develop a professional portfolio showcasing your work, maintain a professional online presence on social media and Board Game Geek, and present yourself and your games in a professional manner at industry events and conventions. Personally, I have some purple polo shirts with my name and logo embroidered on them for cons, and I always try to have some business cards handy. You never know when you’ll need them!

I saved this habit for last because it’s the most outward-focused of the 7 habits. It’s the one everyone sees, but it’s very much based on all of the other internally-focused habits we’ve been talking about. All of these professional’s features - a focus on quality, reliability, communication, ethics, learning, networking, adaptability, and so on? They all come from the habits you’ve built: Empathy, Creativity, Respect, Integrity, Patience, and Charisma.

Over to you

That’s all 7 habits, and yes, this was a lot to talk about. Hope it’s been helpful - comments as always are open =)

I’ve spent years in this industry, observing what makes designers successful. Inspired by Dr. Stephen Covey’s life-changing book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I’ve adapted his framework for the unique world of game design. These seven habits build upon each other, creating a powerful foundation for a sustainable and successful career. Whether you’re just starting or have a few designs under your belt, embracing these habits can elevate your craft.

This post covers the first three habits – next week, we’ll cover the remaining four.

Habit 1: Empathy – The Foundation of Great Design

The first and most fundamental habit is Empathy. At its core, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It’s the foundational skill that allows you to step outside your own head and see your creation from a multitude of perspectives. As a designer, it’s easy to fall in love with your own ideas, but a game only truly comes to life when it connects with its players. Empathy is the bridge to that connection.

You must be able to see your game not just as its creator, but as the first-time player trying to understand the rules, the seasoned strategist looking for depth, the publisher weighing its marketability, and even the backer on a crowdfunding platform deciding if your vision is worth their hard-earned money.

How to Actively Cultivate Empathy:

• Become an Active Listener: When you playtest your game, are you truly listening, or are you just waiting for your turn to speak and defend your design? Active listening means absorbing everything—the words, the frustrated sighs, the excited shouts, the confused looks. Pay attention to body language and the emotions people express. When a player says, “This part is confusing,” resist the urge to immediately explain the rule. Instead, ask, “What about it felt confusing to you?” This approach gives you deeper insights than simply correcting them.

• Develop Player Personas: A practical way to apply empathy is to create “player personas.” Before you even design a mechanic, imagine who you’re designing for. Is it for “Casual Carly,” who wants a light, social game to play with her family? Or is it for “Strategic Stan,” who loves heavy euros with complex decisions? By designing for these imaginary players, you’re forced to consider their needs, preferences, and pain points, making your game more focused and accessible.

• Read Voraciously, Especially Fiction: Immersing yourself in stories is great practice in empathy. When you read a good novel, you live inside a character’s mind, understanding their motivations, fears, and triumphs. This practice directly translates to game design, where you are creating a narrative and an emotional journey for your players, even in the most abstract of games.

• Ask Open-Ended Questions: During feedback sessions, avoid simple yes/no questions. Instead of “Did you like it?” ask “What was the most exciting moment for you in the game?” or “Was there a point where you felt the game dragged? Tell me about it.” These questions invite stories and detailed feedback, giving you a much richer understanding of the player experience.

Empathy is your compass. It ensures that the game you are so passionately building is also a game others will be passionate about playing.

In much the same way Dr. Covey’s first habit was ‘Be Proactive’, Empathy is the foundation for the other six habits I’ll be talking about today. It requires some effort to accomplish, of course, and it’s a habit, not just a thing you can do once or twice. Believe you’re capable of growing in the skill of empathy as you continue learning about the other habits.

Habit 2: Creativity / Curiosity – Where Great Ideas Start

In short, Creativity and curiosity go hand-in-hand. Ask “what if?” Imagine the results, then make things come to life. Cultivating creativity and curiosity is essential for board game designers to create engaging and innovative games.

How to cultivate your curiosity:

• Explore diverse interests and experiences. Immerse yourself in various hobbies, interests, and experiences outside of gaming. Draw inspiration from literature, art, history, science, and even everyday life. All of these can spark new ideas and approaches to game design.

• Find ways to become a continuous learner about the industry. Choose a game mechanic from Board Game Geek, read some designer diaries, answer people’s questions about game design on social media, study the classic games, analyze successful modern designs, attend workshops, and participate in game design communities. Go beyond playing games - analyze them to discover what makes them tick.

• Embrace experimenting, and feel free to make a bunch of stuff and playtest it yourself. Don’t worry about manufacturing considerations at this early stage. Explore unconventional ideas, take risks, and iterate on your designs. This process of trial and error can lead to unexpected discoveries and innovative gameplay mechanics.

• Collaborate with other creatives. This includes fellow designers, artists, playtesters, and even potential players. By seeking feedback and engaging in discussions with others, you can gain new perspectives, identify areas for improvement, and refine your ideas.

• Embrace Constraints and Challenges: View constraints and challenges as opportunities for creativity rather than obstacles. Whether it’s limited resources, time constraints, or specific design requirements, these limitations can easily be transformed into springboards for innovation.

While the first habit of Empathy encouraged you to focus outwards at others, Creativity and Curiosity encourages you to focus inwards. Give yourself permission to explore, experiment, and collaborate with others to cultivate those skills.

Habit 3: Respect – Deserved and Expected

Everyone in the industry deserves respect. Respect is crucial for board game designers as they navigate various aspects of the design process and interact with different individuals and entities. Let’s focus on some of the specific categories of people.

• Players: Whether self-publishing or pitching, players are the ultimate audience for board games. Respect your players by considering their preferences, needs, and experiences. Respecting players also involves creating games that are engaging, accessible, and respectful of their time and intelligence. Avoid patronizing them or gatekeeping when talking about your game. My ultimate goal is to make a game that players will buy and enjoy for years to come. The players, in my mind, become the ultimate ambassador for my game, since they’re the ones taking the time to learn how to play and share it with their friends and other players.

• Fellow Designers: You stand on the shoulders of the games and designers that came before you. Respect among peers in the game design community is essential for collaboration, mutual learning, and the advancement of the industry as a whole. Designers must respect the work of their colleagues, offer constructive feedback, and acknowledge the contributions of others. You will have many opportunities to playtest the games of fellow designers and give back your time and energy that they may have given you.

• Playtesters: Over the last decade, playtesters have offered me literally thousands of hours of their time and energy. They play a crucial role in the game design process by providing valuable feedback and insights. Respect a playtester’s time by having a game ready to playtest, setup and ready to go. It’s also a basic expectation to listen to their feedback, consider their suggestions, and express gratitude for their contributions. I’ll aim to collect their names and email addresses partially to add them to the list, but also to credit them in the rulebook when the time comes. You don’t have to use all of their suggestions, of course, but they are worth listening to and writing down for posterity.

• Publishers: If designers are seeking to have their games published and distributed, it’s important to respect the role of publishers and distributors in the industry. This involves understanding their business goals, adhering to their submission guidelines, responding promptly to their questions, and maintaining professional communication. Respect a publisher’s time by pitching correctly. If self-publishing, consider publishers as colleagues in the same space, and look for ways to work together or learn from each other.

• Other games: While mechanics and themes can’t be copyrighted, there is still a sense to develop about what is too close to an existing game. While no one has played all of the games, one good question to ask playtesters might be ‘what games does this remind you of?’. If some specific games come up over and over again, it’s worth studying them to understand the similarities, and whether changes might be needed to make your game more different. Avoid putting other games down just to make yours sound better, or using hyperbole to make your game sound better than it actually is. Emphasize how your game stands out from other games.

Over to you

Comments are open – I’ll be back next week with the remaining 4 habits.

Most designers settle into a groove faster than they notice. You find a weight of game you enjoy making, two or three mechanics you trust, a playtest group that meets on a regular cadence, and a workflow that reliably gets a prototype onto the table. It works, so you do it again… and again.... Give it a year and the groove has quietly become a rut, and the trouble with a rut is that you’re sitting too low inside it to see the walls.

What follows is a tour of the ruts I run into most often with the designers I see and/or work with, each one paired with a single concrete change. Start with the one that stings a little when you read it, and come back to the rest later.

Start by spotting your defaults

It’s time to look in the mirror. Pull up your last three or four projects, whether they’re finished or not, and look for what they share. Check for a few things in particular:

• The weight (filler, mid-weight, heavy)

• The player count

• The core mechanics

• The themes / types of themes (animals, historical, trains, sci-fi / fantasy

• The play length you aim for

If you find some of these are similar, you’ve found your default(s). A recognizable style is a real asset, so this isn’t automatically a problem. It curdles into a rut once the pattern runs on autopilot and you’ve stopped choosing it.

Try making multiple kinds of games

Two of the most different games I have on my personal shelf of published games.

Uwe Rosenberg built his name on big, hungry farming games – Agricola, Le Havre, Caverna – the kind that fill a table and an evening. Then he released Patchwork, a quick two-player game about sewing scraps of fabric onto a board. It’s small and tense, and it became one of his most-played designs.

Vlaada Chvátil does the same trick across his whole catalog, swinging from the brain-melting Through the Ages to the party-night simplicity of Codenames.

Designing a range of games like that needs to be deliberate. Each of them stepped outside the lane they were known for, on purpose.

The change to try: Try designing one project at a weight you’ve never touch. If you live in mid-weight Euros, build an 18-card microgame in the Button Shy mold, or something as lean as Love Letter or a nine-card nanogame. If you only make quick fillers, attempt something with a real arc or some real crunch to it. Working under an unfamiliar constraint shows you, fast, which crutches you’ve been leaning on without realizing.

Look past your favorite mechanics

We all have a few favorites. Maybe prototypes often start as a modular board or tile-laying game, or somehow turns into set collection. Maybe you can’t start a design without a worker-placement spine holding it up. That instinct is efficient, but it also narrows the kind of game you can imagine.

The change to try: ban your go-to mechanics for your next project. All of them, whatever 2 or 3 you’ve used in your previous project or two. Whatever your reflex is, take it off the table and brainstorm through any of the hundreds of other mechanics out there. The first few design sessions will feel clumsy or hard, but that clumsiness is the point. It’s the feeling of building new design muscles.

‘Play more games’ is classic advice, but it’s also surprisingly easy to play 50 worker placement games and call it research. Instead, play a more diverse set of games. Old, brand new, simple, challenging, games you like, games you don’t, good games, bad games…

The same people test everything you make

Your regular group is wonderful. They show up, they’re nice, they hopefully give good feedback… but diversity in playtesters makes a world of difference.

In a perfect world, your game is being seen by multiple playtesting groups, by players of different ages and backgrounds, by folks newer to games and veterans… and ideally, by folks learning it for the first time and some playing it several times.

The change to try: find more playtesters. Try to teach the basics of the game, then refer folks to the reference cards. Remember MAINS. Try not to be a cheerleader. I don’t have a great term for this yet (comments are open if you do). This isn’t an unguided test, but one where players are discovering the game and the fun for themselves rather than hearing it from you.

Bonus: run some unguided playtests. Hand a fresh group nothing but the rulebook, then go quiet and take notes if they flail. A table at a convention, a Protospiel or an Unpub works, or in online groups (yes I’ll plug Virtual Playtesting here). It’s uncomfortable to watch. It’s also the most honest hour of feedback you’ll get all year.

You keep playing the same version

Plenty of what passes for playtesting is really iteration theater. You set the game up, play a full session, have a pleasant time, and change nothing of substance before the next one. It feels productive because the cards hit the table. You learned almost nothing. Remember the definition of insanity? =)

The change to try: before every session, write down what you’re testing and what you expect it to do. ‘Dropped starting gold from 5 to 3, expecting turn one to feel tighter and the leader to pull ahead more slowly.’ Now the session has a job. You’re testing a specific hypothesis, and the result either confirms it or surprises you, which is the only way a playtest earns its time.

You pitch the same publishers

When it’s time to pitch, it’s tempting to email the same ten publishers you always email. They know you, the form’s easy to fill out, and it feels like progress. But your game has a specific shape, and the right home for it might be a smaller studio, a publisher in another country, or someone who just opened submissions last month.

The change to try: research more broadly before pitching next time. (Yes, this is an easy plug for Tabletop Publishers, but if you want the research done for you, I offer that too.)

Want to do it yourself? Start by considering what sorts of publishers you’d like to work with. Consider who you’ve heard about but haven’t researched before. Which publishers are on your shelf? Have they localized this game into your language, or were they the original publisher?

Change and iterate with a purpose

All of these changes are meant to make you challenge your defaults. Change it up, keep notes, and see what happens. Your defaults are invisible to you precisely because they’re comfortable, and the surest way to find the walls of your rut is to walk into one on purpose. Choose one swap this month and run it properly. You can always return to the groove later once you’re satisfied it’s not a rut. The difference is that going back will be a decision you made with open eyes.

Now: Get fresh eyes on the ruts you can’t see

The hard part about your own defaults is that you can’t spot them from inside the rut – that’s the whole problem. I’ve sat on both sides of the pitch table and spent years developing other designers’ games, and an hour of outside attention usually surfaces the habit you’ve stopped noticing. If you want a direct, honest read on where your design or your process has drifted onto autopilot:

Book a one-on-one consultation

Think back to your last playtest. You opened the box or bag, began to put the components on the table, and people just got it. The components weren’t getting in the way, weren’t increasing friction, and were actively helping playtesters get into the spirit and fun of the game. It can be one of your proudest moments as a designer… but that doesn’t mean you have to jump to that stage.

Here are the four phases for making physical prototypes.

Phase 0: the ‘quick-and-dirty self-playtesting’ phase

This as-yet-unnamed game was started at Fastaval 2026 during their Game Rush. We had access to tables full of board game components, way too much sticker paper, and enough markers to satisfy a classroom of art students.

The rule I encourage people to follow: if your game is in self playtesting, handwrite everything while in this phase. This is just you, playtesting by yourself, and only seen by you. The sorts of cards, tiles, boards, or other printable components you’ll need will change quickly.

The only exception: if you have a workflow that allows you to layout cards on your computer very quickly and you don’t mind spending some time printing and sleeving (then re-designing and re-printing and re-sleeving), then by all means run with it.

Why is self-playtesting so important?

Phase 1: the 'still-changing, just-get-it-to-the-table' phase

This picture of Crazy Travel Stories is actually a little deceiving, since it’s a text-only game that’s received a bunch of playtesting and is very pitchable. I chose it since it’s an image-less vibe that matches this phase.

Once your game has graduated self-playtesting, you’re ready to make a version that’s ready for other playtesters. This is sometimes the first version that will be laid out on the computer and printed off, but it should be done in a way that lets you make changes easily and quickly.

Maybe you’ve added some icons or public domain pictures / graphics:

Maybe you've considered the best fonts for it. In any case, it’s still quick and dirty in many ways, but it’s functional. That’s the goal here – it doesn’t need to be a complete card yet.

This framing of function over form also sends a message to playtesters. It will look a little rough around the edges, which means your thoughts can definitely change the game.

As physical prototypes go:

• Cards are almost always printed on normal paper and sleeved with a playing card, Magic the Gathering card, or a Pokemon card. The cards aren’t as fancy, but they’re still designed on a computer and sleeved since it makes handling them easier.

• Tokens / tiles are typically ‘off-the-shelf’ pieces, such as cubes, meeples, pawns, or the like. I won’t typically know how many of them I’ll need, or whether the icons will need to change. I’m not printing or creating cardboard tiles yet, just using something similar that works.

• Boards are typically printed on paper, then taped together as needed. It’s a bit more fragile, but once it’s down on the table it rarely matters.

Phase 2: the 'it's taking shape' phase

Seashells is full of color, labels that fit perfectly on poker chips, and some custom dice to track how many shells your net can hold. The clear sleeves hold two distinctive styles of backs and fronts.

The game has received more playtesting and is coming together. It’s time to ensure the graphics, colors, and fonts are more consistent across the set of cards. Cards often get background graphics, and I’m usually spending a bit more time and thought on the types of components so they better match what might go in the real box.

Almost 100% of my personal pitching is done while their physical prototypes are in this phase.

As physical prototypes go:

• Cards are almost always printed on normal paper and sleeved with a playing card, Magic the Gathering card, or a Pokemon card. The biggest difference is that they’re more fully designed now.

• Tokens / tiles are typically printed on sticker paper, then attached to cardboard. If they’d work better as poker chips, I use a different type of sticker paper (37mm circular labels) and stick them to poker chips to give them a premium look. By this point I’m more confident on how many I’ll need and what they’ll look like.

• Boards are typically printed on sticker paper, then attached to a board from a thrift-store game (Monopoly, Ludo, and so on are great for boards). Aim to design the sticker paper with the board size in mind – I’ll try to avoid cutting the boards if possible so as to avoid losing the finished edge.

Phase 3: the 'look what I made, everyone!' phase

There are plenty of reasons to get a professional quality copy made:

• Gifts for friends / family / yourself

• Final prototype copies before a crowdfunding campaign launches (great for getting pictures on social media, doing playthroughs at a convention, etc.)

• Reviewers and influencers (they’ll note it’s a prototype and that things can change, but the closer this is to the final game the better)

Whatever the reason, you want your game to feel like a game. Y'know, nice-feeling cards, a board that's not a sticker sheet of another board. It looks complete.

This is where print-on-demand companies come in. Pay attention to their MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) and at what point discounts for ordering more than a few copies kicks in. Be aware that different companies have many similar offerings as components go, but anything custom at a small scale will be expensive.

For designers in the US

While most of these ship worldwide and will work for anyone around the world, the focus

• thegamecrafter.com has a ton of components, a lot of printing options, and the capacity to create custom pieces. Also, contests, a crowdfunding platform, a store platform, the excellent component.studio design tool, and the new Playtest Parlour tool for playtesting online.

• boardgamesmaker.com has plenty of printable offerings and a wide selection of game pieces, including randomized booster packs.

• herotime1.com offers both short runs and traditional runs of manufacturing. Be aware the prototype MOQ’s are listed as ‘low’, which is presumably not ‘1’.

• makemygame.com is run by Cartamundi. Be prepared for some sticker shock, and I couldn’t figure out if they offer the same sort of quantity discounts that others do.

• makeplayingcards.com offers over a dozen card stock options. They also ship worldwide and offer a selection of other offerings, such as boxes, sleeves, and so on.

• drivethrucards.com though it’s for cards only, it offers a sales platform for your game (or cards for other games).

For designers elsewhere in the world

‘Ships worldwide’ usually means paying more and waiting longer compared to a more local option, and most of the above ship from the US.

• zwargame.com/prototyping - Robb Butler is the man for most any prototype needs for designers in the UK. Reach out with your project for quotes.

• ivorygraphics.co.uk is another ‘made in the UK’ option, though they only offer playing cards.

• launchtabletop.com has roots in “Hong Kong SAR, Australia, and China”. I’m not sure how that translates to shipping prices, to be honest. It’s a full-fledged shop with a lot of options. They do both short runs and traditional runs of manufacturing, along with plenty of parts and cards. See their TCG Smith page if you’re looking to make a collectible card game.

• tipia.es/en/ludotipia-inicio is a Spanish company that’s part of AGR, a traditional manufacturer. Their focus is anything printable, meaning cards, boxes, boards, cardboard tokens, and so on. It doesn’t appear to offer anything plastic or wood, so you may to look elsewhere if you need wood or plastic pieces).

• eprintonline.com.au is Australian-based printing company with a board game printing section for cards, boxes, boards, and cardboard tokens (but not a place for wood or plastic pieces).

• azaogames.com/en is a Belgian-based company looking to offer a bit of everything. Reach out for prices, or see their templates for an idea of their offerings.

Over to you

Who or what have you done to make your game look amazing?

This UK Games Expo was the biggest yet, both in terms of people visiting (51,196 unique ticket holders), the number of exhibitors (over 900), and the amount of floor space (44,000 sq meters, or 40% larger than Gen Con). It was my 7th time, and as always there was plenty to take in.

First up, the preview night. I ended up with very few pictures since I was so busy saying hi to old friends, making new ones, and otherwise seeing some of the games on preview… The picture above was one of a couple of ‘stack these familiar but hard-to-stack items’ that I saw, but there are cats. This one wins =)

Since I’ve written about UKGE several times before, you probably already know it’s huge, spread out over several halls, and is a general smorgasbord of stuff to see. Because it’s such a smorgasbord, there’s simply no way to see, enjoy, or cover it all. As such, consider this one tale among many others.

The meta-games at the convention

The Pin Collective was back for the second year. Although I didn’t get any pictures of the extensive pin collections people were building, this single quest could easily occupy the better part of your con if you wanted it to. Dozens of exhibitors offered a special pin (usually of their game, their company, or a related logo) in exchange for completing a demo or winning at their game. I saw more than a few people running towards the stands offering them when the halls opened on Friday and Saturday…

The table above was a slightly more organized way to get the pins you needed, though supply and demand was still a thing. Tucked back in the corner of hall 4, you could trade pins on a one-for-one basis, and it served as a great place to meet other pin traders.

I came across the Revelation Games’ offering before even arriving to the hall on Friday morning. Someone was handing out a small plastic bag of four same-colored poker chips. Trade poker chips with others, then come back to the Revelation Games booth with four different-colored poker chips and win a free game / gift. The sticker on my shirt was a way to say you’re playing and looking to trade for other poker chips.

Cardboard Alchemy and the Flamecraft game worked with 8 other booths to provide ‘stamping stations’ like this one. Collect your ‘passport’ from the Cardboard Alchemy booth, then get self-served stamps from around the convention.

I didn’t see many people engage with this one – not sure if it was because getting a stamp had a minimum purchase, because there were only 5 participating booths, or because the ‘exclusive prize’ felt a bit vague.

Know your audience

No, Mörk Borg is not a Norwegian cosplayer of iconic Star Trek villains. To help set the vibe, the booth selling this apocalyptic RPG had some metal blaring from a Bluetooth speaker. Even though I haven’t (yet) personally played many RPG’s, I love the way the cover (and the vibe of the handwritten notes) tells you exactly what to expect.

It wouldn’t be a convention for games without some amazing metal dice. Anomolia Games / Livia Manufacturing had dozens of distinctive sets on offer, all just a little different from each other.

Several booths had a visible representation of their views on AI. At least one publisher had a flipbook handy, ready to show skeptics a number of steps the artist took along the way to completion.

The Bastion Indie Market on Saturday night was a highlight! Shortly after the main halls closed, the Indie Market opened up to reveal about a dozen indie designers. Each had a table to demo and sell copies of their game. While some had the look of well-made homemade prototypes, you were guaranteed to get a limited-edition version of a game you may never see again… sold to you directly from the designer.

Presenting CHEF!, a semi co-op card game about making recipes.

The line started forming before the halls even closed. I arrived 20 minutes before it opened, and watched as the line gradually wrapped around the hallways of the Piazza Suites before continuing out their entrance… Definitely a thing UKGE should bring back next year.

Saturday night in the open gaming hall – just because the exhibition halls are closed doesn’t mean people went anywhere further than hall 5…!

And then there were the games…

Wait, UNO had a booth at UKGE?

Yup – and more than a few people were playing some of the iconic game’s more modern versions.

UKGE 2026 saw the debut of the ginormous version of Magical Athlete - a fantastic, chaotic roll-and-move game that’s as crazy to play as it is to watch.

Aster from Midnight Trading Co. – some great graphics here and fun pieces for an abstract game.

One of the few games I played from start to finish: Towers of Ra by Ocean City Games. Players cooperatively build the tower (singular) by drawing and placing cards, people, and the occasional tower.

14,000+ followers on the Kickstarter for the board game version of the BAFTA-nominated video game, anyone?

7 takeaways for fellow designers

1. As already mentioned, this was the biggest version of UKGE. It’s been the biggest convention in the UK for most of its existence (and second in Europe only to Essen), but I hadn’t realized it has now passed Gen Con (the biggest in the US) for size. Next year will only be bigger in terms of visitors, exhibitors, etc. If you’re looking to release your game at UKGE 2027, planning should start now.

2. Planning and organizing yourself to make the most of the fair’s 3 days is not an option. Know what you want to accomplish while there, who you want to pitch or meet. The common wisdom of making your meetings is to do so some 6-8 weeks in advance. While there, take notes as you learn stuff (this connects with point #6 below).

3. Connect face-to-face wherever you can. The Thursday night preview event, the Friday night networking event, the Saturday night Indie games event, the open gaming, catching up with folks at their booth…

4. From the Big Table ‘State of the Industry’ talk on Sunday, the majority of panelists and attendees perceived the industry as growing. While large, expensive games were suffering the biggest decline, retail games at £25-£35 and party games were growing. To one panelist, RPG’s were growing in a way he said was the best he’s seen in 40 years. There were plenty of indie RPG’s around the halls proving that point correct (though I can’t speak to whether their presence at the con correlated with sales).

5. If looking to get / make / create a booth for your game, booth presence matters. Pixelated art, a lack of background banners, or a single person at your stand is amateur hour at best. Having tables, chairs, and a professionally-made version of your game are table stakes – how is your game shown from afar? Whether it’s carpet or foam interlocking tiles, changing the floor is a great way to delineate your space and otherwise be more comfortable to stand in / on.

6. Follow-ups! Your notes should be telling you who to follow up with, and why. Did you chat with a publisher about a game, and they were like ‘send me a print-and-play’? Get to it. Make sure it’s up to date, then send it out. Did you think of that question you wanted to ask your exhibitor friend? Find their card (you did get their card, right?) and send a quick email.

7. Along these lines, have and bring business cards. It’s never too early to begin creating a way for people to connect with you (and I’m sorry to say that an Instagram account where you have 5 followers and no other method for communicating with you is… not a good look). QR codes are helpful, as are links to your website, some hints as to your current projects, etc.

Over to you

What were your takeaways from UKGE 2026?

As some of you may have seen, the 2nd edition of Dragon vs. Kingdom is now LIVE on Kickstarter:

Presenting Dragon vs. Kingdom with a… hex grid?

The first edition came out in 2024, and I’m still really proud of the pass-the-sheets-around mechanism. It ended up being the last game we made as No Box Games, and since then, my partner in crime, Parker Simpson, and I had talked about doing a second edition.

If you haven’t played Dragon vs. Kingdom yet, here’s the brief introduction:

You’re all Leaders, and while reports of a dragon approaching have been confirmed, you’ve still got a kingdom to grow! As a Leader, you’ll draw buildings on the map in front of you to score points, then pass your sheet to the next player and start planning in a new section of the kingdom.

On one sheet, you’re the dragon instead! Move and attack the buildings that everyone else is building to score points.

This 2nd edition adds in two new types of map sheets and two new scoring sheets - along with the base sheets, this gives you 9 ways to play!

Each player has two sheets to play with: a map sheet (which will rotate around the table after each turn) and a score sheet (which stays in front of the player).

In the first edition, there were slight variations between the various map sheets, but they were essentially the same way to play. Still lots of fun, but basically one way to play.

I started thinking about ways to add some more replayability to the game, and ended up coming back to one of my favorite ways to do so:

Multiplicative combinations.

In the 2nd edition, there are now 3 different types of dragons you can control and 3 different ways to score points as the kingdom builders. You can mix and match any way you like, giving you 9 different ways to play. The types of dragons correspond to the map sheets, while the score sheets correspond to how the builders score:

• Three types of dragon sheets: the OG dragon themselves, the dragon mama and their fire-breathing baby, and a SWARM OF DRAGONS (you play FOUR different dragons)

• Three types of score sheets for the builders, each with a trio of ways to score points. Each sheet lets you draw a Tower (some guaranteed points when you draw it, plus the chance to attack the Dragon), but from there the sheets differ…

And then there’s the hex grid…

The first edition had a square grid, and while a couple of playtesters suggested a hex grid, I wanted to keep the game family-friendly and simple looking. Hex grids always made a game feels more like a ‘hobby’ game in my mind.

Parker pitched the hex grid for the 2nd edition, mentioning that it made the game feel a little cleaner. We talked about it some more, confirmed the range for the various buildings, then got it moving.

Parker has typed up plenty more on our Kickstarter campaign, which has already funded:

Check out Dragon vs. Kingdom 2nd edition

Order from chaos

Also illustrated by Parker Simpson, and in partnership with Florian Fiedler, I present to you Rooftop Roses:

Rooftop Roses is an area control game where you’re out to plant the most roses in the rows and columns of the 6x6 grid. Each turn, you’ll roll 3 dice. Use two of them to mark a rose in the space where those two numbers intersect. Use the third die to increase the value of that number’s row or column.

In other words, you’re taking control in one area and making another area valuable.

But what happens if you roll doubles? I know I wanted doubles to do something a bit different – when you roll 3 dice, you’ll get a pair of the same number about 40% of the time.

The rule: when you roll doubles, mark two roses instead of one. Double your control over a row and column

The catch: if you keep your doubles, all other players get a special ability based on the number of the doubles:

There are pros and cons both ways – you can manipulate the dice both into doubles or out of doubles, since you may not want to give opponents more powers.

Learn more about Rooftop Roses

And now, some nightmare fuel

The PnP Bundle is a trio of games: Rooftop Roses as you’ve just seen, a top-secret game from Florian (follow the Gamefound link to see it first), and the winner of the contest, Alec Hoptroff’s Echoes of Tomorrow:

Complete with art by Vittoria Pomplani and development by yours truly, Echoes of Tomorrow is an 18 card game for 1 or 2 players. It’s all about defeating the monsters you see in your nightmares – the Cyclops, Vampire, and others – then recruiting them to help in future nights. If you fail, you’ll get to put one card into your Memory, which gives you an ongoing power for the rest of the game. Build up your Courage and Strength to overcome the final creatures before you run out of cards.

You’ll use one side of the cards if playing solo and the other side if playing the 2-player version. Complete with some keywords to describe basic actions, it’s a tense bit of fun with some surprisingly crunchy decisions to make.

During development, I worked with Alec to create a two-player version that changed as little as possible from his solo-only mode. Your opponent plays a defender that you’ll have to overcome, rather than it coming randomly from the deck. A bit of a metagame can come out to play – you can see what cards your opponent has they play, so do you choose an opponent that’s harder for them to defeat (knowing they’ll collect the card if they beat it), or throw off a card that’s not helping your own build.

Go check out Echoes of Tomorrow

The print-and-play space is alive and well – several titles during Kickstarter’s Micro Game May were PnP’s, and there’s more coming out all the time.

Over to you

Which one’s your favorite?

Fonts are the part of board game design most designers think they understand and most designers get wrong. You picked something that looked nice, you laid out a card, and now someone is asking why the rules text turns to mush at 8pt or whether you can legally sell the thing.

This post answers a number of questions designers actually ask about fonts, in roughly the order they show up in a project. At the end, I’ll get to the question you didn’t think to ask – which is the one that matters most.

A quick note on kerning, since it’s in the subtitle…

Kerning is the space between two specific letters.

Tracking is the overall spacing across a word or line. Think of how different ‘left-aligned’ looks vs. ‘justified’ text. Look carefully at the space between words on this card from a Choose Your Own Adventure game,

Leading is the space between lines of text. (Pronounce it like ‘ledding’, as in the metal, if you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about – back in the days of printing presses, strips of lead were inserted between lines of metal type.) In Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, you know this as ‘Paragraph spacing’.

Designers (including, admittedly, yours truly) conflate these constantly, and your layout software treats them as separate controls. When someone says ‘the kerning is off,’ they may mean tracking. Both of these matter.

What is a font?

A font is a specific digital file that contains the instructions for rendering letters, numbers, and symbols at a specific weight and style. A ‘typeface’ or ‘font family’ is the broader design – Helvetica, for example. Helvetica Bold and Helvetica Light are different fonts within the Helvetica family. The ‘font face’ is the visual identity of the typeface (the shape of the letters), while a font is the actual file you install on your computer.

People use these terms loosely and you’ll be understood either way, but knowing the difference helps when you’re licensing fonts or troubleshooting why one weight isn’t showing up in your layout software.

What is a font weight?

Font weight is the thickness of the strokes that make up each letter. The standard scale runs from 100 (Thin) through 400 (Regular) to 900 (Black), with stops at Light (300), Medium (500), Semibold (600), Bold (700), and Extrabold (800) along the way. Not every font has every weight – some have only Regular and Bold, others come with the full range.

Weight is one of the four levers for building hierarchy on a card (along with font size, UPPERCASE vs. lowercase, and color). It’s also the lever most designers underuse. If your card title doesn’t pop, try going from Bold to Black before reaching for a different font.

What’s a serif again?

Serifs are the small projecting strokes on the ends of letters – the little tail at the top of the lowercase ‘g’ above, for example. The style traces back to Roman stone carving, where chisel marks at the ends of strokes became part of the design language. Serif typefaces dominated printed text for roughly 500 years, from Gutenberg through to the early 20th century.

Sans-serif (literally ‘without serif’) came into use in the early 1800s but didn’t become mainstream until the 1920s and 1930s, when typefaces like Futura, Gill Sans, and Helvetica’s predecessor Akzidenz-Grotesk pushed sans-serif into advertising, signage, and eventually body text.

In general, serifs read well in long-form printed body text, while sans-serifs read well on screens and at small sizes. Card games tend to favor sans-serif for rules text because cards are read at a glance, not at length.

Why do we have so many fonts?

Three main reasons:

• Type design is a craft with hundreds of years of history, and every era added new styles to fit new technology – metal type, photo typesetting, digital, the internet, etc.

• Fonts are optimized / designed for specific goal – think body text, display, signage, code, accessibility – and each of those purposes pulls the design in a different direction. A font chosen for a highway sign at 60 mph is not the same font used for a paperback novel at arm’s length.

• Font design is a living industry. Foundries release new families every month because designers and brands want typography that hasn’t been used on five other Kickstarter games this season.

The good news for game designers: you only need two fonts to build a clean card. The other 200,000 are not your problem.

How many fonts is too many on one card?

More than two, almost always. One font with three weights and styles will read as more polished than three different fonts trying to coexist.

What two fonts do I need?

One ‘display’ / ‘header’ font and one ‘body text’ font. That’s it.

When is a ‘display’ font appropriate, and when is it seen as amateur-hour?

Display fonts are for the title text, faction logos, chapter openers, the title of the rulebook, the back of the box. Anywhere the text is large, brief, and atmospheric.

It’s amateur hour as the rules text, card body text, anything a player needs to read quickly.

The test: would a respected book publisher set a paragraph in this font? If no, neither should you.

Where can I find some commercial friendly fonts?

I would make my first stop Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com. Three reasons:

• As of publication, they have over 1,900 different font families.

• They’re all free and available for commercial use.

• You can easily sort by ‘Feeling’, ‘Appearance’, and plenty of other ways.

I would only look elsewhere after thoroughly searching Google Fonts and not finding one you like. There are plenty of other sites, but I feel like it gets harder to know for certain that a font is free for commercial use on third-party sites (especially if it’s on sale at a foundry’s website). Each font has its own license, so it depends. Read the license file in the download carefully.

https://www.fontspace.com/commercial-fonts

https://befonts.com/free-for-commercial-use

https://fontbundles.net/free-fonts

https://www.creativefabrica.com/freebies/free-fonts/

https://fontesk.com/license/free-for-commercial-use/

https://fontmeme.com/fonts/free-fonts-collection/

What does an ‘embedding’ license cover, and does my PDF for the manufacturer count?

Most commercial font licenses include an embedding clause. Embedding means baking the font into a PDF so it displays correctly without the font being installed on the receiving machine. There are three embedding levels: no embedding allowed, preview/print embedding (the recipient can view and print but not edit), and editable embedding (the recipient can edit the document with the font).

For a print-ready PDF going to a manufacturer, you almost always need at least preview/print embedding. Most paid fonts include this. Many free-for-personal-use fonts don’t, which is one of the reasons they’re free.

Check before you send the file. If your software warns you that a font ‘cannot be embedded,’ stop and pick a different font.

If a publisher picks up my game, does the font license transfer, and who pays?

Licenses attach to people and organizations, not to files. When a publisher signs your game, they take over the artwork, layout, and production. They will typically replace your fonts with ones they own licenses for, or ones they have a corporate-wide license to use. This is fine and expected. It may change the look of things, but try to go along with it.

If the publisher specifically wants your font for the final product, the publisher needs to pay for the commercial license.

I downloaded this font from DaFont five years ago. Is that even traceable?

Yes, more than you think. Many commercial fonts have unique identifiers in their metadata. Foundries do search for unauthorized commercial use, especially when a product gets visibility on Kickstarter or in a retail launch. Lawsuits are rare for indie game designers but cease-and-desist letters are not.

The reasonable rule: if you can’t produce a license proving you can use the font commercially, don’t use it on a game you’re selling.

Print and production questions

Why does my body text look fine on screen but look like crap on the card?

Three reasons:

• First, screens render at anywhere from 72-110 PPI (points per inch). Print runs at 300 DPI (dots per inch). What looks crisp on a 27-inch monitor at 100% zoom is much smaller and much less forgiving when printed. Print at actual size on your home printer and look at the result with the same lighting you’d use at a game table.

• Second, you’re probably looking at it zoomed in. Zoom out to 100% or smaller in your layout software and judge it there.

• Third, fonts have minimum legible sizes that depend on the design of the typeface itself. A geometric sans like Futura at 8pt is harder to read than something like Source Sans Pro at the same size, because Source Sans Pro was drawn with small text legibility in mind. Body fonts with slightly taller x-heights (the height of lowercase letters) generally win at small sizes.

Test fonts by looking at them on printed paper in real-world lighting conditions.

How thin is too thin for uncoated stock?

Anything under regular weight is risky on linen finish or uncoated card stock. The texture of the card breaks up thin strokes, and what you see on a glossy proof printed at the manufacturer is not what you’ll see on a matte card with linen finish.

For body text on linen or uncoated stock, stick to regular weight or heavier. Reserve light and thin weights for large display text where the strokes are physically thicker.

If you must use a thin weight at small sizes, get a printed sample on the actual stock before signing off.

Legibility and accessibility questions

Does this font support Polish, German, Czech, French, and other diacritics for localization?

Check the font’s glyph coverage before you fall in love with it. On Google Fonts, click ‘Glyphs & Languages’ on the font page. In your operating system’s font book, browse the character set.

The Latin Extended-A range covers most Western and Central European languages, including Polish (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż), Czech (č, ř, š, ž), and the German ß. Latin Extended-B and Latin Extended Additional cover more. Many free display fonts cover only basic Latin and will fail the moment a publisher asks about a German edition.

If you’re hoping for international publishing, pick fonts with broad Latin coverage from the start. Source Sans, Lato, Open Sans, Inter, and most well-maintained Google Fonts cover this. Many DaFont specials don’t.

Should I use a dyslexia-friendly font like Atkinson Hyperlegible?

Atkinson Hyperlegible is a pretty amazing sans-serif font. It was designed by the Braille Institute specifically to maximize legibility through differentiated letterforms. It’s free, well-supported, and often a stronger choice for rules text and reference cards than whatever Google Font your designer brain landed on first.

It’s a solid option, and I’d consider making it your ‘default’ sort of font.

Is there enough contrast between my card name, type line, and rules text without using three different fonts?

Almost always, yes. Hierarchy on a card comes from four levers: size, weight, case, and color. You can build a clean hierarchy with one font family that has multiple weights.

Magic: The Gathering uses Beleren for card names (display weight, all caps for some sets), a different size and weight of body type for the type line, and another for rules text. The visual variety is real, but it’s mostly the same typographic system.

Two fonts maximum on a card is a safe rule. Three is suspicious, while four or more is too many.

Should I pay for a pro font, or is Google Fonts fine?

Google Fonts is fine 90% of the time. The other 10% is when you’re trying to look distinct from every other indie release using Bebas Neue, Montserrat, or Lato.

That being said, it’s worth looking at paid fonts from foundries if the budget is there and the game’s art direction can carry it. There are plenty of great free fonts, as already mentioned.

Should I commission a custom font for my game’s identity, the way Magic has Beleren?

Unless you’re about to develop a flagship product with hundreds of millions of cards in print, don’t bother. Custom typeface design starts in the low five figures and only makes sense when the typeface will appear on enough surfaces to amortize the cost.

For an indie game, license a strong existing typeface and use it consistently. Strong identity comes from how you use type.

The question you didn’t think to ask

In game design, the font question is usually a word-count question wearing a font costume.

When a designer asks me about font choice for card text, the real problem is usually that the card has too many words and the hierarchy isn’t doing its job. Rules text that needs an 8pt condensed sans serif font means there’s too much text on the card. If you can’t cut the text, you’ll need a bigger card.

The single most useful piece of typography advice for card game designers: cut the rules text by 30%. The layout problem usually goes with it.

Most rules text on cards has ‘shall’ and ‘must’ and ‘a player’ and qualifying clauses that read like contract law. Players don’t need that. Players need verbs. ‘A player may, at the start of their turn, optionally choose to discard up to two cards from their hand’ becomes ‘Discard up to 2 cards.’ That’s a 70% reduction with no loss of meaning.

Theme is the same trap. ‘I want a font that screams 1920s Cairo’ is a worse question than ‘what’s the simplest typographic system that lets a player parse this card in under three seconds, with one or two small thematic flourishes for atmosphere.’ Players absorb theme from art, color, and component texture far more than from font choice. Font-as-theme is mostly the designer’s vanity.

Pick a workhorse body font with strong language coverage. Pick one display font for titles. Cut your rules text by 30%. The rest is finishing.

Stuck on a layout that won’t quite resolve?

If your card is fighting you – the text won’t fit, the hierarchy feels off, the typography is at war with the art – a 60-minute consulting call can usually find the issue inside the first 20 minutes. I work with designers on layout, hierarchy, and the whole pre-pitch package, with the same business-side lens publishers will bring. Bring a card you’ve already iterated on five times and we’ll figure out what to cut.

Book a consulting session

When you sit down to design a new game, you might have a theme in mind before you have a single mechanic. Other places to start: mechanic-first, component-first, limitation-first, even gimmick-first.

That’s not a problem.

Theme is a great starting point… but there are certain themes that have become stereotypical… they’re overused to a point that using them as your primary hook is almost a guarantee your game gets lost in the pile at conventions and on crowdfunding platforms.

Presenting some overdone themes, and what people like about them to try instead:

1. Zombies

We need to talk about zombies.

There was a time – roughly 2008 to 2015 – when zombie games felt fresh. Dead of Winter came out, Zombicide exploded on Kickstarter, and everyone wanted a piece of it. That time has passed, and players have more options in this space than they could ever play through. (Yes, some of them are out of print, hard to find, etc., and nostalgia will cause zombies to come back around.) Unless your zombie game has a genuinely new mechanical hook (‘co-op survival’ doesn’t count), move on.

What to do instead: The things players actually love about zombie games are tension, resource scarcity, and moral dilemmas – all of which can be done in the land of the living… or maybe the dead…

2. Spaaaace

Not all space games are guilty here. Space is enormous, and there’s a lot of design territory still left to explore. The problem is generic space – the kind where you’re building an empire, colonizing planets, and fighting alien races with vaguely Latin names. It’s been done so many times that it barely registers anymore.

Specific space settings, on the other hand, still have legs. A game about the politics of a single space station. A game about the economics of asteroid mining. Narrowing your scope makes it memorable.

What to do instead: Pick one specific aspect of space and go deep on it rather than wide. What is it about space that intrigues / fascinates you? A real getaway from it all, the economics of the future, aliens…?

3. Trains

Look, I love Ticket to Ride. I really do. It’s earned plenty of accolades and been produced in dozens of editions. There’s a reason it has earned its place as one of the handful of modern classics everyone should play. Then there’s all the 18XX games… you could easily play a new train-themed game every day and not repeat a game for a very long time.

Trains are basically their own genre and have their own conventions and deeply devoted fan base… which is precisely why you should not casually slap a train theme onto your route-building game and expect it to stand out. The train gaming space became so crowded that it’s basically a rush-hour commute.

What to do instead: If your mechanics are route-building and network connection, consider whether a different setting could carry those same ideas more freshly.

4. Generic Medieval Fantasy

Swords. Wizards. Dragons. Taverns. An evil dark lord lurking somewhere off the board.

This is arguably the most common setting in all of board gaming, and arguably all of fiction. It is not inherently bad. But it is the path of least resistance, and publishers know it. If your pitch could describe fifty other games already on the shelf, it’s going to be a hard sell.

What to do instead: Borrow the structure of fantasy but shift the specific cultural lens. Mythology-based settings, folkloric traditions, or non-European historical inspirations offer a lot more differentiation.

5. Pirates

Pirates had a moment, largely thanks to a certain film franchise, and that moment has firmly ended. The fundamental problem is that pirate games tend to promise swashbuckling adventure and often deliver fairly dry resource management. The theme and the gameplay rarely match up, which makes players feel cheated regardless of how good the mechanics actually are.

What to do instead: players expect adventure, so give them some adventure! Whether this is press-your-luck / you versus the game, some take-that gameplay in pursuit of that treasure, or perhaps some backstabbing, those are things players have come to expect from pirates.

6. Vikings

Vikings are basically pirates with slightly better PR. They’ve had their own wave, driven by television more than anything else. The theme has become shorthand for “aggressive worker placement game with a lot of grey and brown in the color palette.” You can do better (and yes, I say this even as Champions of Midgard remains one of my favorite hobby games).

What to do instead: I’m tempted to say ‘see pirates above’, but that’s just lazy writing. Instead, come back to the feelings / vibes. Pirates plunder (mostly) on sea, but vikings didn’t just plunder (mostly) on land. ‘Vikings’ as a historical reality and ‘vikings’ as a stereotype used in games has diverged even more than pirates have, so maybe it’s time to bring some of that historical context back in…? Failing that, creating aggressive gameplay can be done with plenty of different themes.

7. Lovecraftian Horror

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most Lovecraftian games don’t actually engage with what makes Lovecraft’s ideas interesting. They take the aesthetic – tentacles, sanity tracks, cults, ancient gods, etc. – and treat it as a skin rather than a source of genuine design inspiration. Arkham Horror exists. Eldritch Horror exists. This space is thoroughly occupied by well-resourced publishers with established licences.

What to do instead: If cosmic horror genuinely excites you, ask yourself what specifically about it you want players to feel. Design toward that feeling, not toward the IP.

8. Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

Radioactive ruins, scavenging for resources, factions fighting over what’s left. This theme became enormously popular on the back of video game franchises and hasn’t lost its grip on designers even as it’s lost its grip on players. The market is saturated, the aesthetics are bleak, and it can be genuinely hard to make a post-apocalyptic game feel fun rather than depressing.

Sometimes ‘fun’ isn’t the point with a theme, though. Escapism comes in many forms, after all, and there are still chances to work together… or stab each other in the back through your radiation suit…

What to do instead: what emotions are you interested in eliciting? Deep dive time – fortunately for you, good reader, I’ve recently written about eliciting emotions in board games.

Beyond that, come back to my favorite e-word – experience – and ask what kind of experience you’d like players to have? Games set in a post-apocalyptic theme often force you to work together to make hard choices. If that’s where your mechanics are leading you, see what other themes come to mind.

9. Dungeon Crawl

Dungeon crawlers occupy a strange space – they have an incredibly dedicated fanbase, but that fanbase already has more dungeon crawler games than they can play. Breaking into this genre as a new designer requires either a dramatically innovative mechanic or an already-established audience. Without one of those two things, the odds are against you.

To be sure, there’s a reason it’s endured as long as it has: it’s a simple setting where the ‘dungeon’ can be anything, so long as it’s a somewhat dangerous place you want to loot instead of escape.

What to do instead: brainstorm other places where ‘exploration’ and ‘battle’ can come into play. Tailor a place / time / theme around the percentages of ‘exploration’ and ‘battle’ there are in your mechanics.

10. Heist

Heist games promise Ocean’s Eleven and frequently deliver a fairly fiddly co-op puzzle. The fantasy of the theme rarely survives contact with the tabletop. That said, it’s not impossible to do well – it just requires the mechanics to actually feel like a heist, rather than just being labelled as one.

What to do instead: think about whether you want to create a semi co-op game (one where you fear your fellow heisters may stab you in the back) or a pure co-op game (one where you’re all actually working together). The former is surprisingly hard to balance, while the latter doesn’t actually feel like a heist game.

11. Farming / Agriculture (Generic)

It’s all Agricola’s fault. It wasn’t the first farming game, but it helped to create a genre that has spawned a hundred imitators, all promising a warm pastoral experience and a crushing sense of never having quite enough grain. Cosy games are genuinely popular right now – but the farming wrapper specifically has become the new zombie.

What to do instead: The cosy, low-conflict experience players are craving doesn’t need a farm. Bakeries, bookshops, community gardens, small towns – all of these offer the same emotional register with considerably less competition.

So What Should You Do?

None of this means you can never use these themes. It means you need to earn them.

If you’re going to use one of these settings, you need a clear answer to the question: “Why does this game need to be set here, and not somewhere else?” If your answer is “I just like zombies” or “trains feel right for route-building” – that’s fair… but I’ll challenge you. It’s not enough. Publishers have heard it before.

The designers who break through with familiar themes do so because their theme and their mechanics are genuinely inseparable. Take a hard look at your game. If you could swap the theme for something fresher without losing anything essential, you probably should.

The good news? There are infinite settings still waiting to be explored. The best theme for your game might be one nobody has thought of yet.

Go find it.

Over to you

What are some overused themes you’ve seen in board games?

If a game has both, it’s almost always a good time. If a game is missing one – or worse, both – it usually shows, and it shows fast.

Let me break down what I mean.

Pillar one: player interaction

Player interaction is what makes a board game a board game. It’s the thing that separates the experience from sitting alone with a puzzle or a single-player app.

When I say player interaction, I mean moments where what you do directly affects other players, and what they do directly affects you. Not just ‘we’re all playing the same game at the same table’ – that’s not interaction, that’s coexistence.

Real interaction has teeth. It creates tension. It creates stories.

There are a few different types of ‘interaction’ worth considering:

• Direct conflict – you’re attacking, blocking, stealing from, or otherwise acting against another player

• Indirect competition – you’re racing for the same limited resources, spaces, or goals

• Negotiation and deals – you’re making agreements, trading, or forming temporary alliances

• Reactive decisions – what you do on your turn is shaped by what other players just did on theirs

Most games include at least one of these. The best games tend to include two or three. What matters is that the interaction feels meaningful, not cosmetic. If you could remove it from the game without losing much, it probably wasn’t doing much in the first place.

I ran into this problem early on with Travelers: Tokyo. An old version of the game gave players points for visiting a destination when another player was also present. On the surface, that’s interaction – you’re paying attention to where others are. In practice, it created weird incentives. Players were making odd detours just to chase someone else’s location, and it added a layer of complexity that didn’t feel rewarding. I cut it. The interaction that stayed in the game – competing for the limited spaces on cultural experiences, trying to be in the right place before someone else – felt far more natural.

Good interaction should feel like a natural part of what the game is trying to be. Not a bolt-on.

Pillar two: interesting decisions

Would you rather have $10 or $20 in your pocket right now? Unless you’re overthinking this, more money in your pocket is usually better than less money.

This is an objectively correct sort of decision - it might present itself as a choice, but it’s not really a decision. This usually happens because the decision space is one-dimensional (just about one thing) or resolves to one dimension. Other things don’t factor (like time, other resources, opportunity costs, or other limitations).

An interesting decision is one where you have meaningful options, you can reason about them, and there’s no objectively correct answer. All three of those things matter.

Meaningful options means the choices in front of you actually lead somewhere different. If all roads lead to the same outcome, or if one road is clearly better than all the others, the decision is an illusion.

You can reason about them means the game gives you enough information to think it through. Pure guessing isn’t a decision – it’s a coin flip with extra steps. There’s a place for some uncertainty in games, but players should feel like their thinking matters.

No obviously correct answer is where it gets interesting. This is what separates a game from a puzzle. A puzzle has a solution. A game should have a space where smart players can disagree, where the ‘right’ move depends on your situation, your style, and what your opponents are doing.

One of my favourite tools for creating interesting decisions is what I think of as the ‘three good options’ test. If a player sits down to take their turn and has three reasonable things they could do – and all three have some merit – you’ve probably done your job. You haven’t given them too much choice (which leads to analysis paralysis) and you haven’t given them too little (which leads to boredom). Two also works, but three (or more!) is better.

The flip side of interesting decisions is trivial decisions. Trivial decisions feel like decisions but aren’t. Drawing a card when your hand is empty. Paying a cost when you have plenty of that resource. These slow the game down without adding any richness. Cut them wherever you find them.

Why these two pillars, specifically

There are plenty of things that make a game good. Theme. Artwork. Clever mechanics. The right component count. Satisfying physical components. Good pacing. I care about all of those things.

But player interaction and interesting decisions are the two things I won’t compromise on. Here’s why.

A game without player interaction is, at best, a solitaire experience with a leaderboard. You can have a great time, but you’re not really playing with anyone. The other players at the table could be replaced by a score tracker and the experience wouldn’t change much. That’s not what I want to make.

A game without interesting decisions is a game where players feel like passengers. Things happen around them. They move pieces, follow instructions, collect points – but they never feel like they’re really the ones driving. After a game like that, nobody says ‘I should have played that differently.’ And that’s a missed opportunity.

When both pillars are present, something else happens. Players start thinking about each other. They’re not just optimising their own position – they’re watching what everyone else is doing, reacting to it, and making smarter decisions because of it. That’s the sweet spot. That’s the game I want to be at the table playing.

In Mint Tin Monster Mashup, every card you draft is public knowledge. Other players can see what you’re building toward, which means they can try to cut you off – or pivot themselves. The decisions you make are interesting partly because of what other players might do in response. Neither pillar works as well without the other.

One caveat

These two pillars won’t make a great game automatically. You still need everything else to hold together. But they’re the first two questions I ask when I’m evaluating whether a game idea is worth pursuing – or when a design isn’t quite working and I need to figure out why.

If the answer to both is yes – real interaction, real decisions – I keep going. If the answer to either is no, I usually aim to stop and fix it before anything else.

Over to you

What are the design values you come back to most often? Do player interaction and interesting decisions show up in the games you love? Comments are open.

When designers talk about emotion in games, they usually reach for one of two organizing principles:

• The first is to sort by mechanic: worker placement produces frustration, deck-builders produce satisfaction, hidden role games produce paranoia.

• The second is to sort by emotion itself: here’s joy, here’s tension, here’s relief – now go find mechanics that deliver each one.

Both approaches break down the moment you try to use them. Mechanic-first gives you a toolbox with no labels on the drawers. Emotion-first gives you a target on a wall with no idea how to throw the dart.

Emotional triggers

What is the player reacting to when the feeling lands? Their own actions? Another player’s actions? A piece of information changing hands? The tension of not knowing what’s next? Where they sit in the arc of the game? Their attachment to the thing they’ve built?

Sort by trigger and the design decisions start lining up with the emotional goals. You stop asking ‘what feeling do I want’ and start asking ‘what do I need to put in front of the player for that feeling to happen’.

What follows are dozens of emotional moments, grouped by trigger, along with some example games that create these feelings.

Self-directed achievement

These feelings come from inside your own head. The trigger is your competence – your planning, your execution, your craft. The game may have allowed you to do it, but you actually did it.

Planning ahead and seeing your plan come to fruition

You set something up three turns ago, the board shifted, and the piece you needed is still where you left it. This is different from winning. You can feel it in a losing game, and that’s the design clue – the moment has to be legible, or it never lands.

• Brass: Birmingham rewards network planning that pays off across the whole arc of a round.

• Great Western Trail lets an entire engineered route click on one cattle delivery.

• Terraforming Mars makes you plot three terraforming jumps ahead and watch them trigger in sequence.

The perfect combo click

Two or three cards or mechanics synergize in a way that feels almost accidental, even though you set it up on purpose. The pleasure is that the player had to notice something – not just follow the path of least resistance.

• Race for the Galaxy is built on this, since your tableau produces cascades nobody else saw coming.

• Ark Nova chains zoo cards into point engines that may surprise even you.

• Dominion’s best moments are combos stitched together two reshuffles ago that fire off in a single turn.

Making something aesthetically pleasing

This is a quieter, almost craft-like, satisfaction. A great example is any tile-laying game where your board ends up looking beautiful even as you were playing to win. It’s not the primary reason most people choose these games, but it’s often why they stay.

• Azul gives you a mosaic that photographs well at almost any stage of the game.

• Calico rewards color and pattern arrangement in a way that looks like a quilt.

• Cascadia lets you build a little diorama of a biome, and the prettier ones tend to also be the higher scoring ones, which is good design.

Completing a set

The collector’s satisfaction. Getting 7 of 8 things is a very different feeling from collecting all 8, and the gap between them is where the emotion lives.

• Ticket to Ride captures this when you close the final route on a long ticket you’ve been quietly working toward.

• Sushi Go! produces this satisfying feeling in a single turn by drafting well.

• Splendor has plenty of ways to complete sets, but most satisfying in my mind is collecting that 3-point Noble another player had their eye on.

Engine hum

The mid-to-late game moment when your engine clicks into gear and starts producing more than it costs. It’s quieter than a combo – less ‘gotcha’, more ‘ah, there it is’.

• Wingspan has one of the cleanest versions. By round four, some bird combinations start laying three eggs per turn and you sit back and watch the tableau work.

• Dominion’s better decks reach this state around the halfway mark of the game.

• Terraforming Mars engines produce the feeling when your plants-and-heat chain starts cycling without any input.

The sacrifice

Voluntarily giving up something good in order to get something better. It feels like wisdom, and that’s an underrated pleasure.

• Puerto Rico gets this right when you pick a role that benefits everyone else slightly more than you, because the timing is what you needed.

• Scythe asks you to spend resources that feel precious for position that’s worth more.

• Race for the Galaxy lets you discard cards you’d love to play in exchange for a tempo advantage, and when the trade pays off the feeling is very specific.

Social and interpersonal

The trigger here is another human at the table instead of the game state. This is where the messiest and most memorable feelings live, and it’s also where designers most often chicken out.

The ability to break a rule

I get to do something you can’t do. Whether it’s a special power, a one-shot ability, or a role that ignores normal restrictions, the asymmetry is delicious. It works better if the other players can see you doing it – hidden asymmetry trades a social feeling for a private one, and the social one is almost always better.

• Cosmic Encounter is the original home of this feeling, with alien powers that bend the rules in specific public ways.

• Root gives each faction its own grammar.

• Vast pushes further, letting each role play an almost entirely different game.

Take-that

I deal damage to you, or I take something from you. Designers get nervous about this because it can feel mean, and the nervousness often leads to overcorrection. A game with no take-that is a game where players barely notice each other.

• King of Tokyo makes take-that the whole point, and the tone keeps it fun.

• Smash Up thrives on it because the asymmetry means everyone’s being mean in a different way.

• Munchkin is the divisive version – some tables love it, some tables file for divorce.

Being blocked

Someone takes the spot you needed, and the frustration is sharpened by the fact that it was probably deliberate. It’s frustrating, but may increase your resolve to do what it takes so you’re not blocked again. Blocking has to be worth doing, however – if the blocker pays no price, it just feels cruel.

• Agricola is the canonical example; the action you wanted is gone and you have to rebuild your whole turn.

• Caverna does it more gently.

• Lords of Waterdeep makes blocking a viable mid-game strategy rather than just an accident.

Schadenfreude

Watching someone else suffer a consequence, especially one they brought on themselves. It’s distinct from take-that because you didn’t cause it. It’s uglier than designers like to admit, and also one of the most reliable feelings in the hobby.

• In Mint Tin Monster Mashup (yes I’m going there), when a player overcommits to a monster type and the draw turns against them, nobody at the table is sad about it.

• Catan produces it whenever the robber lands on someone who had it coming.

• Citadels delivers it by the bucket when a predicted role gets assassinated.

Kingmaking

Someone that can’t win decides who wins. The emotions depend on which side you’re on – power, guilt, resentment, relief. A lot of designers treat kingmaking as a bug to be eliminated, and often they’re right. To push back a bit (just a bit), kingmaking becomes a problem when it’s arbitrary. When it’s the consequence of a relationship built up over the game, it can be the most interesting thing that happens.

• Survivor (the reality TV show) has cast-off players vote for the winner – kingmaking by popular vote.

• Twilight Imperium lives with this.

• Diplomacy has tons of kingmaking.

The grudge

A specific emotional thread you carry across multiple rounds or games. It’s distinct from take-that because it’s retrospective and personal. Good games create the conditions for grudges to form without mechanically needing to track them.

• Diplomacy is the grudge Olympics – betrayals get remembered not just for the current game but the next one.

• Catan produces grudges when one player blocks your settlement spot three turns in a row.

• Risk creates them when an opportunistic attack leaves a player too weakened to fight back for several turns.

Negotiation and deal-making

The emotional rollercoaster of being persuaded, persuading others, and watching deals fall apart. It’s interpersonal drama with rules around it, and when it works it’s the thing people remember for months.

• Sidereal Confluence turns every round into a negotiation phase where the whole table is making and breaking deals at once.

• Chinatown is almost pure negotiation, with trade as the only meaningful action.

• Bohnanza disguises deep trading underneath a light bean-farming shell, which is part of its charm.

Teaching a new player and watching them thrive

A specific parental-like satisfaction. It’s most frequently found in gateway games, since party games shouldn’t have a learning curve, and more complex games may not reach this moment in the first game.

• Ticket to Ride is the classic teaching game because a new player can beat you on their first play without feeling like you let them.

• Carcassonne produces the same effect.

• Splendor is compact enough that a new player can focus on strategy rather than struggling with the rules, which is exactly the balance you want.

The auction spiral

Bidding more than something is worth just to deny it to someone else. The emotion is somewhere between spite and commitment.

• Modern Art is built around this – knowing when to drop out is half the skill, and the other half is making your opponent pay.

• Ra produces auction spirals because each bid affects three different scoring categories at once.

• High Society strips auctions down to their meanest essence, where losing an auction can still cost you if you spent everything trying to win it.

Watching someone’s plan unravel

This is distinct from schadenfreude – it’s specifically the moment when you see the other player realize their strategy has failed. It can be uncomfortable if it’s a friend or ally, but delicious if it’s a rival. The design requirement here means the plan has to have been visible by others in the first place – if nobody knew what the other player was trying to do, nobody can see it collapse.

• Agricola produces this when the harvest round catches someone short on food.

• Scythe does it when an encroaching neighbor cuts off a planned expansion.

• Twilight Imperium runs on this feeling for eight hours at a time.

Information and hidden knowledge

This category is about what is known and unknown at the table, and who holds which. The triggering event comes as the result of the status of information itself.

I know something you don’t know

This plays out exactly as it sounds. It’s typically passive, since it doesn’t require you to do anything with the information. The pleasure is just in holding it, and it’s more powerful than most designers credit.

• Hanabi flips this into cooperative tension; you see everyone’s cards except your own, and the whole game is about what’s known by whom.

• Sheriff of Nottingham weaponizes the feeling into a bluffing game.

• Secret Hitler makes knowledge asymmetric in a way that drives every conversation at the table.

The reveal

Hidden information made public, usually at a specific dramatic beat. The traitor is unmasked, the final card is flipped, the role is exposed. Reveals reframe everything that just happened, which is why they’re a tool that’s best used sparingly – use one per game, maybe two.

• Betrayal at House on the Hill builds its entire structure around one reveal that splits the game in half.

• The Resistance hangs on the accusation-and-reveal cycle.

• Shadows over Camelot uses its traitor reveal to recontextualize every previous round.

Betrayal in co-op

A nuclear option. It takes the shared triumph feeling and flips it into something much more uncomfortable. It works because it weaponizes trust, and it’s a great mechanic… but it’s badly misused in more than a few games. The question is whether the betrayal reframes the earlier cooperation as meaningful or just makes it retroactively feel pointless.

• Dead of Winter handles it well, and combines nicely with the reveal.

• Shadows over Camelot handles it well (also has a nice reveal).

• Battlestar Galactica handles it beautifully, but demands a lot of time to do so.

The discovery

Flipping a tile, exploring a new area, revealing a card from a deck you haven’t seen. Your curiosity is satisfied, then immediately replaced by new curiosity. This is a tight loop and it’s the engine of most exploration games – if the loop stops firing, you’ve lost the whole thing.

• Sleeping Gods runs on discovery almost exclusively.

• The 7th Continent stretches it across dozens of hours.

• Gloomhaven layers discovery on top of a tactical combat game and uses it as the primary reward structure.

Risk and tension

The emotional trigger here is uncertainty with stakes attached. The player doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and it matters.

The cycle of building tension and releasing it

Tension rises, something resolves, tension drops, tension rises again. Games that don’t manage this rhythm feel either flat or exhausting.

• Pandemic is the textbook – each turn stretches the outbreak risk further, then a cure pays off and the tension briefly resets.

• Flash Point runs the same rhythm with fire spreading.

• Most co-ops lean on this cycle because it’s the easiest way to keep a game that could otherwise feel like a spreadsheet emotionally alive.

The near miss

Press-your-luck moments where you almost lost everything create relief, but also the urge to push again. The feeling isn’t just relief – it’s intoxicated recklessness, and it’s what makes press-your-luck a genre.

• Can’t Stop is the platonic form: three dice, four numbers, one bad roll from losing everything.

• Quacks of Quedlinburg (or just Quacks if you like) stretches the feeling over twenty minutes of bag-pulling.

• Incan Gold gives you the cleanest version – press on, or take the gems and leave.

Real-time pressure

A timer, a flipping sand timer, a ticking mechanism, a song on a phone. Panic is an emotion too, and games that manufacture it deliberately are doing something turn-based games can’t touch.

• Escape: The Curse of the Temple uses a ten-minute soundtrack, and it’s remarkable how much it changes behavior at the table.

• Space Alert compresses decision-making into impossible windows.

• 5-Minute Dungeon does what it says on the tin, and is better for it.

The photo finish

A one-point margin, a tiebreaker, or a last-card victory. Winning by a lot feels different from winning by almost nothing, and the latter is more memorable.

• Ticket to Ride often finishes within a point or two at the end of a tight game, and those sessions get talked about more than the blowouts.

• Scythe ends when someone hits six stars, and the last turn before that often swings on a margin.

• Agricola almost always finishes within a handful of points when everyone knows what they’re doing, which is part of why it has such staying power.

The lucky break

A dice roll or draw that saves you. Pure relief, but tinged with guilt because you didn’t earn it. That guilt is part of the pleasure, which is something designers forget when they try to engineer luck out of their games entirely.

• Catan produces this whenever you need a six and you get a six.

• Risk builds whole games around lucky streaks.

• Munchkin thrives on the absurd last-minute card draw, and the tone of the game makes the guilt feel like part of the joke.

Scarcity pressure

Running low on resources, actions, or time. A slow-building dread that forces prioritization and makes every decision feel heavy. It’s less acute than real-time pressure, but it lingers.

• Robinson Crusoe is the masterclass – you never have enough actions, and every round the island pushes back harder.

• Agricola gives you two worker actions when you desperately need four.

• This War of Mine: The Board Game uses scarcity to drive every moral decision the game forces on you, which is most of them.

Momentum and position

The trigger is where you stand in the arc of the game. Rising, falling, or watching others.

Big number gets bigger

It’s simple, and I don’t mean that dismissively. The pleasure is primitive and it’s real – a well-designed score track that ticks up visibly does more work than most people credit.

• Splendor’s score tiles build in a satisfying pile.

• Any incremental video game taps into this – see Universal Paperclip as one of the earliest examples.

• Wingspan’s egg count feels like it’s always going up, because it mostly is.

• Terraforming Mars lets you watch terraforming markers march across three separate tracks at once, each click a small reward.

The comeback

Being behind and closing the gap. The specific feeling is hope, which is different from actually winning. Hope is what you feel before you know the outcome, and games that let players hope credibly are games that get replayed.

• Scythe has catch-up mechanics built in through popularity and combat.

• Terraforming Mars rewards late-game bursts through well-timed card play.

• Catan allows comebacks when the dice finally cooperate, though it also allows losing players to know they’ve lost by round three, which is the flip side.

The table story

Moments so unexpected or dramatic they become a retelling after the game ends. You can’t design these directly. What you can design for is the conditions that make them possible – big swings, unusual combinations, permission to do something ridiculous.

• Dead of Winter is a table story factory because the crises are specific enough to become narrative.

• Twilight Imperium produces them by sheer length and scope.

• Battlestar Galactica’s traitor-reveal moments get told and retold years later.

Identity and investment

The emotional trigger is attachment – to your role, your pieces, or your game state.

The physical/tactile trigger

Think heavy poker chips, custom meeples, or miniatures with real heft. The weight or texture of a component creates emotional attachment before a single rule is read. Cheaper components don’t just look cheaper; they feel emotionally lighter, and that’s measurable in how seriously players treat them.

• Scythe’s metal coins do an enormous amount of work the moment they hit the table.

• Rising Sun’s miniatures convey clan identity before the game starts.

• Gloomhaven’s sheer box weight is part of the ritual of playing it.

Personalization

Naming your character, choosing your faction, or picking your color. These small acts of identity investment start before play even starts. Losing then stings more, which sounds like a downside until you remember that caring is the whole point.

• Gloomhaven characters get names, backstories, and retirement goals – you build a relationship with them over months.

• Root’s faction choice defines how you’ll experience the whole game.

• Scythe’s faction-and-mat combinations make your opening moves feel personal even before the first round.

The legacy moment

Writing on a card with permanent marker, tearing a card up, applying a sticker. Permanence creates weight that disposable game states cannot match. I’m cautious about legacy games because the weight is double-edged – if the permanence isn’t earned emotionally by that point, it just feels destructive. But when it lands, nothing else in the hobby comes close.

• Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is the benchmark.

• Risk Legacy is the game that proved the category could work.

• Charterstone builds its world slowly enough that the first permanent change feels like a commitment.

Shared triumph in co-op

Winning together produces something closer to relief than pride, especially after a hard-fought game. The emotion is social, not individual. You survived the thing.

• Pandemic in Heroic mode produces this more reliably than almost any other co-op.

• Spirit Island delivers it after a three-hour fight where everyone contributed something essential.

• Gloomhaven scenarios produce it at the end of a boss fight that nearly went sideways, which most of them do.

Deduction and social dynamics

A few triggers earn their own heading because the design requirements are different. These aren’t about passive information or internal achievement – they’re actively performative. They’re aimed at doing something with another player’s mind in real time.

The bluff that worked

This is not the same as simply having hidden information. Hidden information is a game state, but a bluff is a performance. The feeling when it lands is smugness with a side of disbelief – you might ask yourself ‘did I actually got away with that?’.

• Coup is the compressed version; one turn, one claim, one challenge.

• The Resistance and its descendants run the entire game on iterated bluffs.

• Sheriff of Nottingham puts a bluff at the centre of every turn, which is why the same group can play it for hours.

Reading another player

Correctly predicting what another player will do before they do it. In social deduction games, it’s the entire loop. In other cases it’s a bonus reward for paying attention, and games that let it happen without forcing it are the ones that feel alive.

• Poker is the purest form, but it’s not really what most players mean by a board game.

• Coup produces the read on almost every turn.

• Blood on the Clocktower elevates reading other players into an art form, with the storyteller orchestrating conditions for deduction over a one-to-two-hour game.

Now, the important part

If you’re designing a game and you want it to hit a particular feeling, don’t start by asking which mechanic delivers it. Start by thinking how it’s triggered. Ask yourself what has to be in front of the player – what has to be visible, what has to be hidden, what has to be at stake, what has to be shared – for the trigger to fire.

A checklist I use when reviewing my own designs:

• Which of these moments do I want my game to produce?

• Which can it produce reliably, and which are happening accidentally?

• Are the triggers I’m relying on spread across multiple categories, or bunched in one?

• Have I accidentally designed out a whole category by making the game too solitary, too random, or too legible?

Most designs I look at – including my own early drafts – cluster in two or three categories and leave the rest empty. That’s fine if the emptiness is intentional. It’s a problem when it’s a blind spot.

Over to you

Which of these moments do you want to put into your game? Is there an emotional trigger I’ve missed? Comments are open.

Sunday, April 26, 2026 is a day that will live with me for awhile.

I ran a marathon:

I signed up for this particular marathon back in September 2025 – about 7 months prior. After doing my fourth HYROX in October, doing the usual Parkruns (and a fun 5k around a park at midnight to ring in the New Year), I started a marathon training plan at the start of 2026.

I did not, of course, just take some random plan off the internet and blindly follow it. It needed to work within my schedule and desires – I still wanted to go to the gym a couple days of the week, and Parkrun on Saturdays needed to fit in there.

In any case, the training went pretty well. I didn’t get to every single run or do the prescribed distances every time. In some cases, I did a bit more running than prescribed.

(This happens to have been the same day where the London Marathon saw two men break the two-hour barrier for a marathon for the first time ever. Sabastian Sawe (1:59:30) from Kenya set the new world record, and Yomif Kejelcha (1:59:41) from Ethiopia both made history with their incredible achievements.)

On the day

Me and a few thousand madlads that signed up for either the half-marathon or the marathon.

All good tips.

Even more good tips.

Plenty of hilarious signs along the way…

I didn’t see that many costumes here – it’s entirely possible the costumed runners could safely be costumed since it wasn’t their first rodeo… and they were likely far faster than me.

Culmination

April 2026 was also the culmination of a couple of other things that took time to work towards:

Winning a golden penguin at Fastaval in Denmark:

While the work on The Touch of Hope began during Essen 2024, my desire to win an Otto began in 2022 when attending Fastaval for the first time…

The process of getting a game ready for Fastaval is similar enough to other games you might develop, but Fastaval’s focus being on interesting / unique experiences without worrying about commercialization means optimizing for the former. My co-designer and I then focused on making the game as easy as possible to learn, iterating the core loop of the game to be intuitive, and even crafting the teach to be more of a demo than an abstract teach.

Seeing my first expansion be successful on Kickstarter:

Work on the expansion began a year-plus ago, and I can’t wait for my author copies to show off some of the twists / mechanics inside…

A couple more development projects completed:

No links for this one since (AFAIK) both games are unannounced. Suffice it to say I’m happy to see the games be ready for their next steps towards getting published and out there for the world to enjoy.

Lessons learned

You already know big things take time to accomplish. I don’t personally have a Gantt chart or any sort of pipeline graphic showing my projects (mainly because my role is usually just one part of what needs doing).

Two things are still true, though

Everything’s a pipeline

Looking ahead to the rest of 2026, I see a few other games I created coming to Kickstarter, opportunities to pitch games at conventions, other projects moving forward, games being playtested, new clients booking in consulting calls…

Everything’s a pipeline in board games.

Just think of all the steps in a typical tabletop game: create, iterate, design, pitch, sign, further develop, do art for, market, crowdfund, manufacture, distribute… and ultimately, play. Each of these is a necessary step in most games, and if one step creates a delay, everything downstream is delayed.

In other words, everything’s a process. Like running a marathon, running a crowdfunding campaign, or designing a game. The more seriously you go down this rabbit hole of making games (and really, anything creative and complex that requires multiple skill sets), the more you’ll see this for yourself.

Keep going

I mention the pipeline because for most publishers, they’ll have games at different stages in the pipeline. A few publishers share their pipeline and categories openly in some way. Stonemaier Games shares theirs here:

Lots of stages – and this is after they’ve signed a game. It doesn’t take into affect the stuff you, dear designer, did just to get it to that point.

What are you working towards?

If you’re stuck in a loop of patching symptoms without solving root causes, or your playtests keep raising more questions than answers, consulting can help you cut through the noise.

I offer an outside perspective and bring a decade of design experience to every meeting. Let’s chat one-on-one to make your game amazing:

Book a one-hour consultation

When I started building Dustin’s Designer Den, I wasn’t thinking about launching a product. I was trying to fix a feeling I kept running into every time I worked on a game.

Designing was fun. Playtesting was not.

That might sound backwards, because playtesting is where the game actually becomes real. It’s where ideas prove themselves or fall apart. But getting to that point always felt heavier than it should. There was too much friction between having an idea and actually seeing it played.

The process was always fragmented. I’d lay something out in a spreadsheet, maybe mock up some cards, then hit the wall. Now I had to turn that into something playable. That meant printing, cutting, sleeving, organizing, or trying to recreate it inside some other tool that wasn’t really built for rapid iteration. Then the playtest itself would happen, and afterward I’d have notes in one place, feedback in another, and a vague memory of what actually happened during the game.

Nothing connected.

And when every iteration feels like work, you naturally do fewer of them. You wait until something feels “ready” before testing it, which is usually the worst possible time to test it.

That was the problem I wanted to solve, but I didn’t approach it as “build a better tool.” I approached it as “what would make me run one more playtest instead of putting it off?”

That question shaped everything.

What I ended up building isn’t just a tabletop or a component editor. It’s more like a hub that sits in the middle of the entire design process. A place where you can move from idea to playtest to insight without constantly switching context.

The tabletop is the obvious starting point, but it’s really just the surface layer. It needed to feel right. If interacting with the game felt awkward or artificial, everything else would fall apart. So it behaves the way you expect. Cards flip, decks shuffle, dice roll, players have hidden information, and everything updates in real time. There’s no installation, no onboarding for players. You send a code, they join, and you’re playing.

That simplicity matters more than it sounds. The easier it is to get people into a game, the more often you’ll actually test. And frequency of testing is where good design comes from.

But the bigger shift happens around what comes after the playtest, because that’s where most workflows break down.

Normally, you’re relying on memory and scattered notes. You remember that something felt off, or someone said a card was too strong, but the context is already slipping. You’re reconstructing what happened instead of observing it.

So I built the system to capture the session itself, not just the feedback around it. After a playtest, you can step back and actually watch how the game unfolded. Not as a video, but as a reconstruction of the game state. You see the decisions, the draws, the interactions that led to a particular moment. And more importantly, you can drop back into that moment and interact with it again.

That changes how you iterate.

Instead of replaying an entire game to test one adjustment, you can jump to the exact point where something broke and try a different approach. You’re no longer guessing based on memory. You’re working directly with what actually happened.

At the same time, I found that feedback itself needed to be anchored more tightly to the design. Vague notes like “this felt unbalanced” aren’t that useful on their own. So the system lets you tie thoughts directly to the components they relate to. You can mark up a specific card, flag a problem area, or save an action item that’s connected to the exact piece of the game it refers to.

Over time, that builds a much clearer picture of what needs to change and why. You’re not just collecting opinions, you’re building a trail of decisions that connect back to the actual design.

What started to emerge, almost unintentionally, was less of a single tool and more of an ecosystem. Everything feeds into everything else. The components you design are the ones you play with. The sessions you run become the data you learn from. The feedback you collect turns into actionable changes that loop directly back into the design.

There’s no handoff point where you leave one tool and enter another. It’s all part of the same flow.

One of the more interesting side effects of this has been how it changes your mindset as a designer. When the cost of testing drops low enough, you stop treating playtesting as a milestone and start treating it as a normal part of thinking. You don’t wait until something feels finished. You test earlier, break things faster, and iterate more often.

And that’s really the point of all of this.

The value isn’t in the tabletop itself, or the component system, or the replay tools. It’s in reducing the friction between having an idea and improving it. Because that gap is where most games struggle.

I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years, and a video game developer for a good chunk of that, so building systems like this is familiar territory. What’s changed recently is how much faster you can move if you’re willing to bring AI tools into your workflow.

I’ve been using tools like Claude pretty heavily while building this, mostly to speed up the execution side of things. Boilerplate, refactoring, exploring edge cases, sanity-checking approaches. Used correctly, it can compress a lot of time out of development.

But there’s a line there, and it’s a real one.

The architecture, the systems, the way everything connects, that all still has to come from you. AI can help you move faster, but it doesn’t understand intent in the way you need it to for something like this. And more importantly, it’s not consistent. It will give you something that looks right, sounds right, and is still wrong in subtle ways.

If you don’t have the experience to evaluate what you’re getting back, it can actually slow you down or introduce problems you don’t catch until much later.

So for me, it’s become less about “using AI to build things” and more about knowing exactly where it fits. What to delegate, what to own, and how to verify everything that comes back. It’s a tool, not a replacement, and the value comes from how you use it, not the fact that you’re using it at all.

This whole project still came from going through the design loop myself, over and over, and getting frustrated with how disconnected it felt.

So I built something that keeps it all in one place.

At the end of the day, Dustin’s Designer Den is just trying to make one thing easier: running the next playtest.

Because better games don’t come from better ideas. They come from more iterations.

Learn more at https://dustinsdesignerden.com.