Article of tips on Prototyping

I generally liked the article, particularly the bit about the war-chest. I'd add a few useful items there. A big box of old clothing buttons of various shapes, colours and sizes is useful and cheap for counters or resource-tokens. An even cheaper option is a collection of bottle-tops and toothpaste caps. Plastic rhinestones (those glittery, foil-backed fake jems that craft-people use for decorations) are similarly useful (particularly for representing jewels) and are pretty and cheap. And a chess-set under existing board games.

Regarding pretty vs. quick, I do think that once you get beyond solo-testing or testing with a captive audience (spouse/siblings/co-designers), it is worthwhile making it as pretty as possible within your time and financial budget. Time spent on artwork and components for cards or tiles is not always wasted; it can also often be reused from game to game (you can add actual components to your warchest, or have a sort of virtual war-chest of artwork for cards, etc). And if the game looks relatively appealing it is also easier to persuade potential players to play-test it. Also, particularly for themed board or card games, I feel that you as the game designer are trying to immerse players in your game-world (a challenge given that you are already using a semi-abstract representation), and appropriate art-work and nice components definitely help to do that. In other words: I'll try to be lazy where I can do so without compromising the overall experience I'm trying to give the player.