I'll admit it - I'm stuck.
I once again have a game design that is, as I sometimes call it, "80%." It's 80% of the way there towards being a 'real game.' It's 80% fun. It's 80% challenging.
But it's Not. Quite. There.
There is something missing. That final 20%. That one rule or that one change to the game board. Removing a certain type of piece or adding a type of piece... But I don't know what it is.
I'm just a novice; A guy that makes board games as the occasional hobby.
Here's a recent example of mine:
I've got a 5x5 grid. Two players can put down 1x1 pieces on the grid. If two or more pieces of the same color are beside each other (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), they can swap those two pieces out for an "L"-shaped piece of the same color that occupies 3 spaces. Once the board game is filled, the player with the most pieces wins.
I've been through countless iterations of this game. I've had a version that added 1x2 pieces; I've had a version of the game with limited numbers of pieces and you have to swap out (or "downgrade" as I've temporarily called it) a big piece for smaller pieces. I've had a version where the goal is just occupying as much of the board as possible. I've even toyed with a 7x7 version.
Each time... It's almost there. It... resembles a game. It doesn't entirely suck. And yet... It's not a game. There's a persistently strong first- or second-player bias depending upon the rule variants. Or there's a strong runaway effect. Or you find yourself adding "patch rules" to force the game to work that, in hindsight, just makes the game more confusing.
This isn't so much a plea for help as it is a question of how do others get through this predicament in game design; When a design doesn't bomb out immediately but also doesn't have that "It Factor" that turns the design into an enjoyable experience.
How often do other designers have this experience? Is this just for abstract strategy games or is there a version of this in card games and party games as well?
And what do others do when they encounter this? I'd be curious to find out because it is frustrating to have a game design that's "almost there" but you can't see why it's "not there."
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I kind of suspected that there is no "one answer" to what is functionally the game designer's equivalent of "writer's block."
However, it just seems to be a cheat to just "work on something else." I'm sure that it works and I do that, too, but I always wondered if the professionals or the prolific game designers had a system that they used or a process when they reach a point in their game design where they go, "Huh. Well that didn't go quite as planned...". It just seems like such a waste to put an aspiring game idea down with the knowledge that the design may NEVER work or that you may never even pick it back up.
The closest that I have ever come to finding a system to overcome "game designer's block" is actually a business exercise more than anything else and involves "killing your children" (not REAL kids, obviously). The theory goes that the best business executives can pivot very quickly when something is not working because they are not 'married' to any one idea. For example, if the company sells umbrellas and umbrella sales are down, they pivot to selling mops even if the company has sold only umbrellas for decades.
And, therefore, I always try to identify the "children" in my game designs that I don't want to kill because I may need to kill them in order to get the game made. The more that you don't want to kill a 'child,' the more likely that it is that 'child' that is holding your game back from working.
And, of course, the problem is that you don't want to kill any of the children because that's the whole point - They are your kids and they are all fabulous in your eyes! And then there is the added wrinkle of the whole "George Washington's Axe" riddle (if you take an axe and you replace the handle and you replace the blade, is it still the same axe as before?) in which you lose the identity of the game itself for the sake of merely publishing a game.
As for the suggestion about partially pushing pieces off of the board... That is the basis of another stalled game design that I have!
I may eventually post the 'rules' for this one just out of sheer frustration. Anyway, if anyone has any more insight, feel free. Thanks to everyone who has posted thus far.