Sometime in 2016, I jumped on the table top game band wagon. The main culprit was Pandemic. I had heard about the game, and the complexity intrigued me (compared to the games I grew up with…. Risk, Mancala, Monopoly). I picked a copy up from the local game store, and drove home excited to try the game out with my roommates. We read through the rules together, setup the board, and played our first game. I still remember our first game. The world was thoroughly infected within fifteen minutes, and we lost miserably, but we were consumed. We quickly reset the board, and played again. We ended up playing every night until we were able to beat the game on it’s hardest difficulty consistently.
Since then I have had my eyes opened to the many different types of board and card games out there. It’s like a whole new world has been opened to me, and I am loving it!
The Goal
Now not even a year later, I have made it my goal for 2017 to design a game from scratch and get it published. Yes, that’s right, twelve months to fully dream up, design, and publish a game from scratch. I think it’s possible, but will require a good amount of time.
It should be mentioned that this is something I will be doing on top of my regular responsibilities in life. I have a full-time job and am recently married. It seems like most game designers dream of doing it full-time, but for me right now, this is secondary to life’s main duties.
More than anything I view this goal as a fun exercise into trying something new. As I have been researching game design I realized that there are lots of guides and opinions on game design, but few “Here’s How You Really Do It.”
As I seek to accomplish my goal, I want to help the game design world by documenting my entire step-by-step process of game design and publication. My hope is that my journey will aid others who are dreaming of designing a game but are having a hard time figuring out how to start. I’ll include photos, a number of hours it takes, and go as in-depth as I possibly can.
Do you want to join in?
As I have been sharing my goal of creating and publishing a board game there have been some of you who have asked if you can join in. The answer is YES! Let’s make 2017 the year you make your first board game! Chime in down in the comments, if you’ll be making this your 2017 challenge.
The Next Step
So what’s the first step? You have to start somewhere, and for me it was dreaming up what the game would be about. It was envisioning what a game of my creation would be. In the next post, I’ll show you have I came up with what my game would be all about.
And so the journey begins…
