Podcast Archives - Board Game Design Lab · Gabe Barrett

Your game design questions answered

·44 min·3 clips

His design niche is solo games in a small box that play in 20 to 45 minutes for about $25.

A survey opens the mailbag. The host says the Board Game Design Lab community sent more than 100 questions, so he picks the ones he can answer honestly. He keeps the answers grounded in what he has tried and what has gone wrong, not in some grand theory of design. The episode stays loose in a very real way. There is a side path through shirts, anonymous survey responses, and car washes before the useful problem shows up: how do you stop showing a prototype only to friends and family and get strangers to play it? His answer is blunt enough to sting a little. There is no secret move, no perfect moment, and no way to make that first public test feel tidy. Put the prototype in a box and take it somewhere people play games: a game store, an un-pub, a playtesting event, or a convention. That advice sounds almost too simple, which is probably why it helps. Designers can make the next step feel more mysterious than it is. The point is to stop polishing in private and let unfamiliar players react at the table. Near the end, he pulls back and reminds designers that their games can give people fun far beyond their own table. Even when the work feels hard, that is a decent reason to keep going.

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