New designer looking for tips...

Post a youtube how-to-play video.

Make a print and play version.

Consider the benefits of www.kickstarter.com

Send a prototype around to various game groups for playtesting and feedback.

Consider linking up with anyone in your area: www.meetup.com

Give me a thousand dollars :P

and just keep at it! Good luck!

It’s unlikely that your game is finished if you have only been working on it for a few months. Don’t contact publishers until your game is finished or at least to the point where you’re only doing finishing tweaks. They don’t want to spend all their time fixing the game you made and there are plenty of other out there submitting finished product to them.

If you can manage near professional production quality then go for it. However, that is not the most important thing by far. The game publishers have many more game submissions and good candidates then they can actually publish and make money off of. Remember, that is what they are in the BUSINESS for. Most of them are past the 'hobby' part of it and are trying to make a living. The closer to finished your product is the better. But many times the 'art' and/or 'theme' are redone to make them more marketable. So even if you do have near professional production quality it could all just be scrapped when/if they move foward with production.

On the other side however they do NOT want to fix or design a game. If your submission isn't complete then they won't even look at it. It's a publishers market, not designers, which is why many designers go the self published route. Playtesting is HUGE! Try to play the game so you lose, or so you force someone else to lose, or you make it so the game can't be played (try to break it). Now a game doesn't have to be perfect to make money. Look at all the mass production Milton Bradley/Hasbro games. Is your goal to make money or to have a quality product that you and the hobby gamers who play it will be proud to mention? Sometimes, rarely, you can have both.

As for being a 'pro', sadly far from it. Nothing ever published and only a handful of mostly finished designs. I do enjoy lurking, giving my two cents worth of advice, and flexing my brain muscles to possibly find solutions to others issues. I do it mostly for the hobby aspect. I enjoy playing boardgames and like to be creative, expressing that through design but there are definately others on this thread I would listen to as far as speaking from experience.

Just remember, someone else probably has/had your exact same idea. The business end of it is very different from the hobby side of it. Know YOUR goals and work hard.

It doesn't look like the site does it anymore but they used to have a Game Workshop or something where you submit your rules/game and have all the other designers read through it and provide feedback. Anything ranging from grammar and punctuation to actual mechanics and design. I found it very beneficial for my own development.

Lastly, there does tend to be scepticism with regards to new designers on the forums. Mostly because everyone who comes here always feels that their idea is unique, ranked a 20 out of 10, and is worried about sharing because they feel someone will steal their design. If you have gone through some playtesting and already recieved some feedback great!

Try some blind playtesting where you aren't around to explain the rules and questions that arise. Try your game with different groups. Family gamers, strangers at a cafe, hobby gamers, kids, adults, ect.

oh, and WELCOME TO BGDF!!

Wait, last thing, honest. To answer your question more directly try to know your publisher. What type of games do they sell, who is THEIR market, get in contact with someone in the submission process on either designer or publisher end and ask questions. Some publisher will prefer 'finished' products and others will 'tolerate' prototype quality submissions. There are also some game design competitions which are fairly cheap to enter and could provide your design with recognition and awards or even publishing deals. Hippodice is the first one to come to mind.

Oh, and more lurking/research. K, done.

Heya Zip,

Yeah man, the idea does sound quite nice :)

Have you played Carcasonne? This is a big popular hobby game that is a "build up the board as you play for most points" kind of game that is very similar to your "tile laying" snake idea.

At the moment, check out Purplepawn.com's "kickstarter updates" that list all current kickstarter games.

I spend a lot of my boardgaming time in and around kickstarter and have helped a couple of projects fund their goals. Also I interviewed Emmanuel Aquin on the success of DDay dice (the highest ever earning boardgame on kickstarter - $170,000 .

I would say that CURRENTLY unless a game can break into to party games / hobby gamers / and family games - then it has a chance of succeeding (check out: Creatures) but games that are strictly aimed at the family market don't do to well (See hey mom can I drive, and a host of other failed projects aimed at the family market)

Think about it logically: You are asking for money from parents for their kids (very simplistically) and parents don't hang about in kickstarter looking for family games to buy. They go to toys'r'us instead.

The only people you will get this way round is if they are your own collected and dedicated fans (eg: "Dear Friend, Please buy my game!") or, if they are hobby boardgamers that see a family/party advantage in your game as well as it being fun.

So, going back to my (un)healthy dose of skpeticism : If you are looking for hobby gamerer mums and dads that will see your game to be fun, interesting, worthy of their cash, AND applicable as a family game, you need to peek their already refined interest and have very high minimum standards. And as such, do you know much about the current hobby game market? Because you really, really need to.

Also Taavet IS a pro. A big one.

Perfect!!

That was the kind of post I wanted to hear from you.

Ok great, in which case I would initially say that the scrabble-like tile tray thing will appeal to the "higher thinking" (word game & Misc) crew, but then the "snakes" theme might distance them and get them thinking that it is some kind of fluffy zoo-animal game.

An overegged example would be a deck of texas hold 'em poker cards with comedy pigs on it - might be a bit contradictory. So in this sense I would say the theme and colour of your game will be very important.

If you can "hobby-it-up" a bit more, then that would be cool too. Remember at this level, hobbyists will see your game having come from carcasonne and figure "but in carcasonne there was much more depth in fields / castles and what not, in this it's just one of those elements - a big snake..." So you might need to put a few more clever pieces onto the top of it in order to attract the hobby crowd.

Anygame that has "A load of tiles" as its only components should be wary (not scared, just keep an eye out) as of course the tiles will need to be of "decent handling size" - I can imagine badly printed small tiles being SUCH a pain in a game like this. so you would need to invest highly into your production quality too.

Perhaps you could get in something borne from faimly style games like Uno's mechanics. It is essentially a card game but with clever inclusions, the possibilities stack up and make it actually quite an interesting game worthy of children and hobbysists alike.

This will be done very much with your "draw 3 more tiles" bit and your "take another go" and what not. Perhaps you could get some kind of "play the next piece for your oppoonent as if it was your own" or even "you may place one of you pieces onto your opponents snake"

I would also add that games that rely wholly on a d6 or a spinner with 6 places lack a averaging curve (or whatever the proper term is for it!)

the fact that if I (due to my awful luck) roll a 1 three times in a row - the game will entirely cease to be fun for me. Some kind of weighted distribution (thats it: distribution!) would probably be better for me personally and avoid the "I hate this game because rolls of 1, and 1 mean lose and 6's mean win".

Perhaps 3 tiles can be laid every turn automatically and if you get a 5 or 6 you can lay an extra 2 tiles ? That might be fun?

Again though, in order to be a real hit on kickstarter nowadays you would need some kind of game design award badge, a load of fans already prepared to buy the game, or to be a very very clever hobby game (the biggest kickstarter success have all of these, the unsuccesful ones have none and if you have 1 you will probably make 1,000 to 8,000. If you have great awards and a slick campaign that can go up to 15,000. :)

See "Genegrafter" - it had a super slick kickstarter page towards the end (after I helped Erik out with his campaignthat is ^^). At the start, the games rules were not even finalised.

I like your dice spread more- it has a couple of good things about it, starting with no "lost turn" (something you generally want to avoid in games). The tighter range also means there is less disparity between players turns, both individually and across the game as a whole.

I would actually suggest starting 1 tick higher:

2- with card
3-
3- with card
4-
4- with card
5-

which may make the "bad" rolls feel less punishing.