I remember in my capstone business class we read an article by a M.E. Porter, a Harvard professor, about business strategy. The article was amazing and he tears down the idea that strategy is what you do to eliminate the competition. He talks about how being efficient and cheap aren't business strategies and that having a business that does business different than competitors is true business strategy. Ikea is given as an example of good business strategy. Whereas most furniture stores have millions of options to choose from all that once bought must be shipped to your place most times, Ikea made furniture that could be taken home in the back or your car and put together by mom and dad. And while you shop, you don't have employees breathing down your neck desperate for sales. Want daycare, go ahead they have that too.
The point is that Ikea did business differently. Did they destroy their competitors? No. Did they steal some business? Yes, some. Ikea marketed to a different market than traditional furniture stores. Nintendo is a good example of being different. The Nintendo Wii was created to target family and casual gamers whereas Xbox and Playstation marketed their products to male teens and young adults. This allowed the Wii to fly off the shelves despite inferior graphics.
How does this tie into board game design? Make your game different. One of the first pieces of advice being thrown around when I first joined was that you should play games in the same genre as the one you are designing. If you are designing a deck building game, go out and play multiple deck building games. If you are building a trading game, go play some trading games and so on and so forth.
The reason is so that you can get to know how other games work. That way you can see what may work in your game and what may not work. This advice is great and it really helps you learn about your own game but another thing to add is that it helps you know what hasn't been done yet. Someone made a deckbuilding version of chess which makes me laugh because I mean come on...it's chess but hey it worked and it's different.
So one question to ask whenever you're going to make a game is, how will I make this different? What will I do that will make my game stick out? Even if the differences are little, often times that's enough to cause some people to prefer your game over another's.
