Good idea ... bad implementation

This is a common comment that I make to many game I played because sometimes it's true that the ideas behind the game are good, but once you played the game, it feels Meh!

I seem to suffer from a related symptom that I have good ideas and when I talk to people about it, they seem amazed. But when its time to implement it, either it does not work, either it takes too much time to implement or ether it does not end up as expected.

Now am I trying to find solution to my problem to make game design more fluid.

I once said that I felt sometimes that designing board game was like trying to fit an elephant in a shoe box. The basic idea is to compress reality into a game by abstracting concepts and removing unnecessary ones.

There seem to be somewhat 2 phase to the compression process that cannot be sharply defined. The first compression phase take time X to make the first 75% of the game (1 leg and the trunk are still outside the box). At this point, the game could be implemented as a video strategy game, but not as a board game because some mechanics could not work (ex: fog of war). The last 25% require another amount of time X or even 2X to be able to finish the compression. Not only it takes much more time to achieve less, but it also de-naturise the game so much that it lost it's initial essence.

Quick example: I wanted to make a tactical modern game like Conflict, advance wars, etc. (See my fog of war thread). But after looking at my notes, most of the time spent on design seem to focus on how to implement fog of war in an elegant way. How simplify the management of the game to make sure you do not need to remember which of the 50 units you have had moved, etc. How to trace supply lines, since you cannot keep track of fuel depletion of individual units. These are all obstacles that I would not have to face if the game was implemented as a video game instead. and trying to find a board game solution change the nature of the game.

Same thing for trying to compress master of magic as a board game, I ended up designing something that was not what I was expecting. Not that the results are bad, it's just that they do not fit my primary objectives.

So I think that I could have saved some design time if instead of compressing the concept further, I would have kept the idea for a video game instead. Of course, video game takes time to develop, so I cannot be entirely sure that time is going to be saved at the end. But I could have stopped pushing the idea further and work on other games instead.

Now the problem is that I realize it too late when I spent so much time on an idea and realize I went too far.

I mostly get my mechanic ideas from other video games and board games. I could use the mechanic source as a clue about if it could be transposed easily to a board game or not. For example, using a mechanic idea from a video game could be a warning that it will not work as a board game. But it is never entirely true. Still, using only mechanics from other board games could be a solution.

Another idea would be to define a threshold and know when it's time to stop and not push the compression further. How much prototype-able is a game could be a clue of how well it could be implemented as a board game, but I have been able to make prototypes for game ideas that went nowhere.

I don't know what you think about it. My explanation seems pretty abstract, so I am not sure they make sense. But if you have any suggestion on how to identify ideas that won't make it to the end as a board game, let me know.