Hi everyone I guess it should be no surprise I really enjoy board games. For the last year I've been making prototypes of board games as a hobby in my free time. Now I'd like to take some of my favorite prototypes and develop them further. I'm hoping this site will be a great resource to help me understand the steps of turning a fun prototype to a fun game. I'm new to this side of board games so please feel free to give me any feedback or help you think of, and I promise it will all be appreciated on this end. I have two very basic prototypes (i.e. Index cards of various colors) in particular that I want to focus on and get to the point where I can do blind playtesting.
They are:
Tomb Raiders- A bluffing and memory game of dubious deeds and risky raiding. Trick, steal, and lead your rivals into traps. Remember the haunted tomb can be your greatest ally or your worst enemy.
Hong Kong Hustle- An old school Kung Fu fight throughout the mysterious city of Hong Kong. Every round draft new cards into your deck to change strategies and become stronger. Every card has a move speed and the more powerful your move the slower you are. Use your location's effects to your advantage or force the fight to somewhere new. KO your opponents to get closer to winning but remember no one stays down for long, losing allows you to train harder, and revenge is sweet.
I'll have more detailed gameplay, component, and rule explanation about them coming, for now I just wanted to say hi and thanks for the community being awesome enough that someone like me can do stuff like this and have support and help available.
Another good piece of advice I can give is to keep your rules in Google Documents. That way you can just paste your rules to share them and people can make comments inline. It also keeps a history of your changes in case you ever want to see where your game has come from or revert a change.
Once again, Welcome and don't ever be afraid to ask questions!
Sincerely,
Darrek - Neanderthal Games
How successful designers organize and keep their rules and files was one of my big questions. So thank you that helps me know where to start. I'm going to check out some other designers documents so I can see how they order things within the document.