Reflections on a Career

I've been doing this for more than ten years now. I'd like to give you an insight into the where I've come from, and where I am now, as of 2025. This might be a look into where you're going too.

2025

2025 has been a great year, as I finished a publishable game that I believe will outsell Radlands. It's being evaluated by a great publisher right now.

It wasn't all positive, however, as I spent five months working on a game that I eventually abandoned.

I still have a whole herd of Radlands fans helping me as playtesters.

Radlands

The big, and central thing, of my game design career has been the highly successful publication of Radlands.

Radlands has sold more than 200,000 copies, though it tapers off each time I get my sales report. It's still doing well for a four-year-old game. Almost all of the thousands of games of that age are long-forgotten. It reached a peak of #175 on BoardGameGeek.

Radlands has made me substantial income, though nothing outrageous. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't make good money from board game design. You just need to get into the top 200 on BGG.

Publication also changes your relationship with others. With people in real life, I call myself a board game designer.

Radlands has fans. With such power comes an obligation to give these people something really high-quality, regardless of how long it takes, which is what I did with the Radlands expansion, and will be doing with all future games. It's not theoretical any more. Radlands has likely been played a million times. Every little good or bad choice I made has impacted so many people.

I've been a fan of things, as we all have, so it's been very interesting to have been on the other side of this equation for once.

What am I doing right now?

I'm still doing revisions faster than ever before, and getting things right. I aim to complete one revision per day when I'm not doing other things. This is far more achievable in late design, however, when I'm just polishing.

Game design is not about designing a game. It's about learning how to design a game. I could make games in ten revisions each, if I had made several games in the genre before, because I'd know exactly what to do.

Game design is really hard, but I'm starting to get good at it. Designing a game is like finding a path through the fog. Once I've found one, I can probably follow it easily again, and make a game in the same genre. If I find enough different paths, I'll have a general understanding of game design.

Most of the changes I make to my games are now correct. I'm not going around in circles, like I did with many of my earlier games, which never reached a publishable stage.

I'm being contacted by publishers occasionally, asking me to do work, or to see any prototypes I might have.

How I feel about game design now

I'm still enjoying game design. Maybe not as much as I used to, though, when I just lazily designed away, and did as I pleased. As I get better at it, I'm doing more things that are less fun, like endless polishing, and working on things I think will succeed.

During the previous game, I just played it every free day, for a few months. I only work on one thing at a time. That got pretty tiring, but I slogged through it.

I still like the craft of actually building the thing: doing the graphics, choosing art, and the like. However, I'm just much more efficient now. After a thousand revisions, I just want to do the minimal work to enable the next playtest. There are always small things that are imperfect, and unfixed. It's just a revision, after all.

Creativity

I'm far less creative than I used to be. My successful projects, like Radlands, have been in established genres. I put a big twist on the genre, and I execute it really well, but I don't do anything brand new. I've ventured out into creative-land many times, and not found a publishable game.

These days, I don't need to wow publishers with something novel, like most designers would probably have to. I only design for quality. I stick to safe ground that I (or other designers) have mapped out.

I don't follow the trends. I design things in spaces that were popular years ago, but are now out of fashion.

People just want good games. There's little reward for making something novel.

Novelty might help you get published, but that's a low bar you want to clear without having to compromise anything.

Better to just stick to safe territory, where there are known to be good games, and give yourself a ten times higher chance of creating something worthwhile. It's also much easier, as you can be informed by the games that already exist in that space.

Gavan, the boss of Roxley (who published Radlands) once asked me "why don't you just make more duelling card games?" That was a very good point. I do want to try new stuff, but I really know how to make that kind of game, and I could make an entire career out of designing duelling games.

Because of the amount of money my games are likely to make, my board game design is actually an important and serious part of my life. I need to make sensible financial decisions here. This all points in the same direction: create really good games, quickly. Do low-risk projects, that I know I can do.

Despite all this, I'm still breaking my own rules, and doing a few things that are passion projects.

Biggest mistakes

I put 124 revisions into Radlands, and 37 into its expansion. I've also been working on-and-off on another game for almost my whole design career. It's meandered around so much, and has taken 292 revisions. It's still not done, but it's really good, and is publishable, and I've learned a lot from it. I don't regret any of those things.

I've had amazing ideas, that I put work into, but abandoned within ten revisions (sometimes just one.) It's sad to see my pet ideas amount to nothing, but I don't regret those either. A couple of those experiments worked out (one was Radlands.)

Here's specifically what I regret: There are eight games, with 25-60 revisions each — 300 revisions between them. I made exactly the same mistake on all of them. The core wasn't quite right, but I kept trying to fix and build these games, with the intention that they would be great, once the core was fixed. I made beautiful graphics for these games, and built them out with carefully-designed cards and content. However, the core was never fixed, and these games consumed a huge amount of work, before I eventually abandoned them.

The lesson here is that things either work straight away, or they never do. Also, that games are their core.

I hope all this has given you some insight into what it might be like to be a successful board game designer.