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. This might be a look into where you're going too.
The big, and central thing, of my game design career has been the highly successful publication of Radlands.
Radlands has sold more than 150,000 copies, though it tapers off each time I get my sales report. It's still doing well for a three-year-old game. Almost all 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 really 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 be on the other side of this equation for once.
Every iteration of every game I've made is kept, in digital form. That's 39 different games, and almost a thousand individual revisions.
My "Game Design Index" is a table that records all the games I've made: their names, year, number of revisions, a line of notes, and a "potential". This potential is a number from 0 to 6.
0 - Will not work on this again. Had no merit, or has been superseded, or other.
1 – Only the theme or an idea is worth reusing.
2 - Unlikely.
3 - Had potential. Could resume.
4 – Current work / will resume.
5 - With publisher
6 - Published
Almost everything in the file now has a 2 ("Unlikely") or less. Those numbers used to be higher, but I keep wanting to make new things, not return to old messes. So, I'm very judicious with my numbers.
All these ideas that will amount to nothing were all part of my education as a game designer.
I'm currently working on my biggest game yet. It's a medium to medium-heavy strategy game. I've tried to make a game on this subject several times, and this is the first time I've been successful. This game is in fact the first new game that's passed the abandonment stage, in many years. It's publishable right now, despite being only in revision #54 as I write this, in late 2024.
Despite the size of this game, I'm doing revisions faster than ever before, and getting things right. I try to complete one revision per day when I'm not doing other things. I have a whole herd of Radlands fans helping me as playtesters.
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. There will eventually come a time when I can just invent games, and they'll all be great. (Not like now, where I abandon almost all projects.)
I did my first games in Word or Photoshop, and printed them out. Art was hand-drawn by me, and I'm not an artist, even a self-taught one. The computer work was laborious, and printing and cutting cards and boards, repeatedly, was even more so. These days, I exclusively use Tabletop Simulator.
Playtesting was originally done just with the occasional friend. Later, I would pay people I knew $50 to come to my place, and do some playtesting for two hours. That could get me a playtest every week or two. A friend would also help out sometimes, when I hosted board games at my place. Later still, I got into the groups on Discord, got Tabletop Simulator, and joined some small groups. It was inefficient, and I wasted countless hours playing some terrible five-player games. However, it was the first time I could get relatively easy playtests. I worked with a few different amateur designers over the years: virtually anyone who wanted regular playtests, regardless of their skill or demeanour.
Since the publication of Radlands, I've been recruiting the fans of the game. They've been generous and eager playtesters, and they're not game designers, so I don't even need to playtest their games in exchange.
I'm still really 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.
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.
I don't waste time making notes or change logs for each revision any more. No one cares, and I've barely ever had cause to read through them, except for out of interest.
My current game is in revision #54, and doesn't even have a name. It's just "(genre) game". Since I abandon most games anyway, these descriptive names help me know what the game actually was.
This new game also doesn't have a style, a story, a setting/location, or anything more than a general theme. The theme can narrow down later, depending where I want to go with the resources and systems. The publisher would probably overwrite any name and specific theme I chose anyway.
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.
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 said to 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 them.
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 actually 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.
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.