What is your process when designing games?

I typically think of a theme that I would like to play out - something immersive that I think would be enjoyable.

I then think about the experience I want the player to have and design to that.

however...

to do that I am always pulling from the same box of tricks, largely based on things I've experienced in other games - or if I'm on a good day, a little bit of innovation on them.

So - I'm now deliberately playtesting other games to get more exposure to different mechanics, and ways of thinking, and ultimately add more things into my box of tricks!

Probably because I have no artistic ability (the board for The Singularity Trap and the board and pieces for Alchelemental are the height of my abilities and are just geometry and textures and transparencies) I always begin with mechanics and a "background theme" idea.

The Singularity Trap was a space themed multilevel 3D (like 3D tic-tac-toe) hexmap area control wargame.

Its original incarnation as a cardboard microgame in 1978 was a blend of naval miniature battle rules with Avalon Hill style wargame on a 10 level board (and used the economic points/build/maintain/repair and a cumbersome trade and colonize process to limit fleet sizes and make paperwork reasonable for humans with maybe 10 ships at most in your fleet). Most of the design work there was hammering the rules into submission beating out complexities that had no purpose like an old time smith pounding out bog iron.

The computerized revamp replaced "breakoff" (which was a variant of retreat as a combat result) with going Dark, introduced hidden information, balanced and expanded the board, made movement processing simultaneous, introduced alliance rules, simplified the economic system, made the computer do the paperwork and generate report listings, and replaced combat tables with simple math making the computer generate its own "dice" with the needed number of sides and "bag of chits" to draw damaged systems from.

Most of my design process is tossing out the huge amount of stuff that just does not belong there (cut away all the bits of the block of marble that are NOT part of the horse) and is expressed as Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Alchelemental began as an idea for a 2 player wargame based on geometric shapes with an elemental (fire, earth,water,air) theme which never got past a vague not working rough idea and was shelved - also in 1978.

It worked on itself and came up with the idea of colored hexes and token faces instead of shapes for the geometry. The board layouts developed from initially applying a couple of patterning rules and the token layouts are just simple rules in all possible variations with the "handed" pairs as a 2-sided token that can flip over (thus altering the sequence of the faces from clockwise to counter-clockwise).

But the idea crawled out of the recesses of the brain and jumped me with the mechanics finalized before I got the boards and piece layouts completed - was just typing on my part to put the mechanics into print form. Initial "slave labor" to put game on paper took 2 days and being pretty and PnP and a Vassal module took about a week of drudgery. But a "jumped me and forced binge designing" game is obviously rare - and unless I suddenly gained the ability to draw stuff there is no way my ancient kiddie roll and move game is going to resurface so I should be safe now.

I think Alchelemental stole the idea of calling pieces to the board from some deck building games.

Overall my design process is dump the mass of ideas on the anvil and start pounding till a shape begins to emerge, then keep pounding at that shape until nothing else is left (throwing out about 90% of what you started with).

I pick a theme i want to make a board game around and just start brainstorming from there.

Once I have a few ideas i try them out and find one i like the best then i work on that idea adding/removing parts or rules.

Copious amount of play testing is then done and I use the feedback I gather from the play tests to improve the design.

Repeat the process multiple times and when stuck work on another idea or just actually take a break from designing a board game until I have cleared my head. I once took a month of designing any part of my game and just chilled out.

This helped tremendously as I came up with how to improve my game and everything has flowed well since then.

about the only other thing i do is take a step back look at what i created and see if it matches up with what i intended to make or if I had gone down the wrong path.

Not sure how helpful my design process is but thats what I do with my games.

I do something like you too, but more structured instead. Usually I get inspired from a game that already exists or a theme (like mafia or star wars).

I usually just google around for the visual components and save them into a folder (for example, let s say mafia stuff. I google guns and bad guys and badass. Then tokens and cards that represents stuff for the game).

Then I open up small text files and write down ideas and rules. Then I just leave it and when i have new ideas i write them down. After a few days, going through these with no bias is really helpful in filtering out the bad ideas while getting inspired for new ones.

but very often there's a context in my mind first. It isn't necessarily a theme and sometimes it can even be just a mechanical start point. From there I start to visualize the entire game in my mind and when it feels complete enough, I write it down to a paper or word processing software. Usually the first write down is done with pencil and paper as for me it works like an enhancement of thinking.

After the first write down I must have a special interest to create a playable game from that concept. Otherwise it will end up to a box of game concepts. The current concept - prototype -ratio is around 5:1 and there's around 50 concepts in the box.

If I begin creating a playable prototype, then I usually do some research to enrich the theme as much as possible without adding a lot of rules. Now, as the basic ingredients of supposedly a good game are set to place, it is time to write first the first version of playable rules from the concept. Then I proceed to card/board design and finally to the illustrations. First goal is to put together functional symbols and overall design. Then to make playtesting more enjoyable I usually make it look semiattractive at least.

Playtesting is mostly done with my brother, who is pretty good at developing games whereas I exel in creating new game concepts and basic visual stuff for them. During the initial playtesting phase the rules of the game get completely rewritten a couple of times and partially rewritten most of the time. However, the core of the game never changes, because if such a thing happens, it means that the vision is lost and there isn't any game there - just a bunch of loose ideas. I'm happy to say that this has never happened to me and I wish it never will.

When the game has gone through several development rounds, works great and still feels nice to play, we introduce it to new player groups, get into blind testing and so on. Our first card game Tornado Alert! for example, got through around 100 playtesting rounds between the two of us, several with relatives and friends and finally a couple of blind testing rounds where each tester's individual input was first put on the predefined data collection sheet. After processing the collected data and making necessary adjustments, we took some distance to it, returned to it, examined what we were accomplished, polished it a bit and then went on to publish it. At that final stage we did some mistakes, but that's a different story.