How do you know if your game will be fun?

Perhaps you have to ask yourself. What is fun?
Not just for the board game. But in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun

Especially the psychology part peaked my interest.

Do some more research on it, if you need to. And then compare your new found knowledge, to your game designs. What is missing? It isn't fun, that is missing. But something that should cause the players to have fun. And this can be pinpointed if you practise it enough.

Some of the best advice I'd ever received was that you can't count on a game "Getting fun". It's either fun as it is or you need to match changes now.

If your feels long, complicated, and meh... then simplify.

Start small get a series of mechanics that are fun to toy with. And then you can scale up.

The other thing to remember is that something like "Settlers" is all about human-human interaction. Of course solo play would be dull.

If your game concept requires other players, then you need to test it with other players... ESPECIALLY early on.

Test it in the ideal situation for actual play as easily as possible because situation plays a major role. You don't want to waste months on solo testing only to realize the game sucks multiplayer.

Don't bother with details, balancing, or even a full deck of cards until you've proven that the core game loop is engaging.

It's hard to put down "designer mode" and get into "player mode" when playing your own games, which can skew your perception of fun.

Also part of the fun of a game is the discovery, coming to understand the system, find exploits, find strategies, etc. The problem here is, as designer, you already know all of that.

I have this problem particularly with my prototypes of simpler games (simple enough that I find the mechanics so easy that I don't really need to think about playing). But when other people play it, they enjoy it because they *don't* know every single rule and detail perfectly and haven't worked out how to win yet.

A few metrics to judge whether it will be fun, I think these are (some of the) handy ways of including fun in a game:
* Does it have multiple ways of winning, multiple strategies, which are all viable and can be reasonably tried out?
* Does it have competition between players? Are they competing between action spaces/resources, or directly competing/attacking each other? And also, importantly, if another player "wins" the cometition do the other players still have viable things to do/don't get knocked out just because of one loss?
* Is there an element of risk-reward assessment? Either by strategies that can hang on taking a (known) risk for a payoff? (if the risk is unknown, it's more annoying than fun)

But playtesting is essential. This isn't a guaranteed measure of fun, but whether testers have fun or not you get valuable information - either they have fun (you win) or they don't have fun (you find out what is wrong OR you find out what sort of player you shouldn't market to).
Playtesting also is good for revealing exploits and holes in your rules. Exploits often sound bad, but they're actually great fun to find and use, as long as they don't completely imbalance game.

I think that this is a big part of making something fun, but perhaps not the whole story, or at least I can elaborate further on this:

You could try to create a feeling of uncertain anticipation based on risk-taking:
"I've committed to my plan X - but is someone going to disrupt it now with Y?"
or:
"If I roll a five or a six next turn, I can do Z which will bring my so much closer to victory - will I have good luck?"
I think that most people enjoy taking risks (which is why gambling is addictive) and non-gambling games offer a harmless way of doing this with no serious repercussions.

Then there's a more certain type of anticipation of a deserved reward:
"My opponent does not suspect that I'm about to drop a giant frozen narwhale on his citadel, crippling his war-effort! Let's see him stop that! Mwuahaha!"
As mentioned by others, people like to feal that they've somehow earned their victory through being more clever or dexterous than their opponent; but while actually playing the game it is the anticipation of this which is important.

And finally, overt or implied humour and absurdity also goes a long way towards adding fun I think (if you lose in a comical way, at least you can laugh about it now and relate the absurd debacle to a third party later). This can be done partially through artwork or theme, but I suspect this will loose efficacy quite quickly if not accompanied by something slightly whacky or unpredictable in the game mechanics (freak chances of powerful effects, big swings, etc). Absurdity helps reinforce the idea that the game is not serious, ie, it is for fun.

Of course you can't combine these all in equal measure in one game, as they are partially contradictory, and which you favour depends on what sort of players you expect to target.

I hope that is useful

It's been quoted and said many times: your early games will suck and as you gain more experience, your later games will be more solid.

I have a whole slew of ideas. Sometimes I work on an older idea - just to see if I can FIX what was wrong with that game. I do it when an idea strikes or I see or read something that triggers something, etc.

First design before prototypes usually tend to be "bloated" with too many pieces or parts to the game. Prototype usually helps in determining IF the game is fun in SOLO playtests. This is where you figure out is the game going to be FUN. How I define fun is something like: are the players taking meaningful actions on their turn? Or is the game open enough to make players feel like there is sufficient strategy and depth??

Not many games get past this stage. Some have more solid prototypes that also failed - but I'm not ready to shelve the game - since I feel there is POTENTIAL even if the game FAILED my solo prototyping/playtesting.

That's the thing. A game may be boring or meh, but it could act as a spring board for another idea which has different mechanics and game play.

In the case of my designs - because I try to keep them as simple as possible, usually there is not enough interaction: either in terms of the cards or in terms of the players.

But the definite reality is that you DO get BETTER at it, the more designs you put out there. You generally get a better understanding WHY some of your earlier designs sucked and as I have already mentioned you can grab ideas from previous failures because they bring something original to the game...

Don't give up, keep on designing and you'll eventually find a balance between simplicity and strategy. That's what I strive for...

Play testers are there to tell you what they like, don't like and how well they understood it. Your job is to keep making changes until everything balances. No one will like all games. If you stop because you don't like where it came from you won't ever design a game.

...ask yourself (as the original game tester) why don't I like this game? what is it missing or in many cases the best question is, what can I remove?

Also go past the idea in your mind. Don't produce a prototype until you imagine playing it. Go through each stage in your head imagine how they interact with other stages. Imagination is my greatest tool!

I very much disagree with Slide. I believe that the number one way to allow fun in a game is to make a overtoppling win possible, BUT allowing an overtopping counter also possible. I believe that it must not be planned that far, and within every piece of the game there must be a way to strategize to break down any other part of the game. If we allow ourselves to control the game but them to have freedom in some parts, they will slowly break away from the game because they don't feel that the game is a true creative outlet. I believe that if we allow the game to have an infinite capability of every perfect strategy and counterstrategy, it will allow for much more play.

I think that fun within the game is shown through the learning of a new piece of the game. When someone plays something as big as MTG, Pokemon, Vanguard, and Yugio, whenever they learn one area of the game well, for example control turn-combo blue MTG, there are others ways to expand in that area of play. If they, for example, want to understand the interactions between turn-combo blue and strong draw, scry blue, they can do so. Within in every small differentiating selection of cards they can find more. If they have memorized 36 cards, found all the interactions, know them from top to bottom, and every that can be played against them and for them, they still don't know what changing one of those cards out for a different type of card will do. Every big fun and addicting game allows for a complete reversal of thought upon new information.

The way I see it, you (mcneipl) may have the feeling that you have to have "fun" in a prototype or an idea as soon as it progresses from spreadsheet to prototype. I totally see where you are coming from - since "fun" is something that we're trying to develop.
I think most of the time - at least in the very initial state of an idea - you can ignore that feeling of the game being "boring" because technically, you're only starting to work at the game. There's a reason they compare a game to a child: in the very early days it's going to be a lot of work and a lot of sh**. But in time it'll get bigger, start talking and grow up and be a ton of fun.

Whenever I start to design on a new idea, I concentrate on the mechanics being as simple as they can be, that they run as smoothly as I can make them in the early stages and try to build the idea as logical and balanced as possible in theory. This is not the "fun" aspect of designing, because it can take virtually forever to get something right.

I do solo testing to find out whether the "technical" aspects of the game are ok and working the way I intended them to. Do the mechanics work in that specific way or do "players" experience trouble? Those questions don't have anything to do with fun yet - but they are crucial for the later stages, otherwise you might up having no "fun" later on with your playtesters and no clue what to look for in order to fix it.

When I have a feeling that the game is "playable", I take it out to the game group or other designers and present the game as is (i.e. with the caveat of it being "not fun" but playable as far as I can tell).
Until that time my idea of how it could be fun is mostly based on other games I've seen the mechanics in, not me having such a great time while solo testing - that may (and hopefully will) come later on.

Your solo testing cannot replace human interaction (which is quintessential for boardgames) - but it is necessary to make sure that your idea at least works and has a chance to face playtesters. After that you can still find out how to add "fun" to the game.

hope that makes sense

I think as a designer we set out to create games that are FUN... but the real fun comes "afterwards".

WHEN? When you assist a playtest in which the players immerse themselves into the game. And then there is banter, people upset about what a player did to them, or how viciously a player used a card combo to his advantage... Or even worst when such a combo is "denied" by a counter card! :)

That's when you see that playing your game is FUN.

But back to the OP, I think at first you need to figure out WHAT kind of game you want to design. Things like theme and mechanics should be your early goals when developing a prototype. Trying to bring together something that is PLAYABLE, but far from finished. And then it becomes a process of more playtesting and refining until you have a solid "core".

Once you have done this - playing the game should be "smoother" and it may not be FUN - YET... But it's on its way to becoming a game people may enjoy playing. And this is the KEY point: some people will enjoy playing.

If you find a niche, and your game fills that niche very nicely, then I would say your game will hit home with that target audience.

So remember the odds are, once you figure out your target audience, that your game will be FUN to people to whom the game was designed to please...

You can also get the deck of lens cards as an app on iPad. A lot of it is more focused to video game & VR (he worked on Disney rides as well as digital games) but they are still really useful. I occassionally do a random 4-card draw just to get me thinking about my game in ways I wasn't before.