Killing Games

The path to publication doesn't involve creating one game, and then working on it until it's "good". It involves making dozens of experiments, killing them, learning things, and eventually finding something great.

This is very much an article for those who are designing for success. If you're just designing for fun, you can ignore this.

Ideas are not valuable

I have ideas for games, that I'm very fond of. I have amazing ideas that I would love to put into practice. The unfortunate reality is that very few of these things will ever become games, let alone great games. And, when I stop making board games someday, these ideas will all perish. Because I have more of these precious ideas than I have time for, the reality is that they're not valuable. I'm comfortable with this now.

This is basically the same for everyone. Having a couple of published games doesn’t make this part any easier.

For an unsuccessful creator, 100% of their dreams, ideas, and work, will amount to nothing. For a successful creator, 98% will amount to nothing.

Do not be sentimental.

You have more ideas than you'll ever need. Stop treating them as valuable.

If a game isn't great, just throw it (and its idea) away quickly, and move on to the next idea.

You should be killing games

Early on, I made every game with the intention that it was going to be completed. It made me sad when I was forced to abandon them. These days, I view game designs as experiments, with the full expectation that they won't survive.

Killing your games should be viewed as part of your standard operating procedure, not as a tragedy.

If I'd never abandoned a game, I would never have gotten to my best ideas. Killing games makes time for you to try better ideas.

Is your game an excellent game that can compete with the top 100 on BoardGameGeek? If not, abandon it. You should be trying to create one hit game, not a slew of publishable games.

The most successful game designers have done hundreds of these little experiments.

Failed prototypes are also a valuable learning exercise.

Of course, this all applies to people who actually have the ability to finish things. Are you actually likely to complete your game? Do you finish your other projects? You need to acquire this ability, just design for fun, or give up.

Multiple games at once

Are you working on too many games? If you're working on more than two games at once, you should definitely kill the rest, and just work on the two that have the most potential, or value to you. That's what's going to happen in reality, anyway, so it's best to formalise it. These days, I only work on one game at a time. I'm very excited to finish off the current game, because I can start on my shiny new idea! If I do both at the same time, I'll want to work on the new game, and have no motivation to work on the old one.

Managing a hiatus

If a game gets bogged down, and I step away from it, it will never recover. It's hard to return to a half-done game design after a hiatus, because I don't understand what I was fixing (or what happened in the last playtests), and what issues there were.

Don't lie to yourself, and put a game "on hiatus". If it's worth working on, work on it now. If not, abandon it. 

One-day designs

As your board game design career progresses, you'll become more comfortable with abandoning your games. I've gone further than that.

As I get better, I spend more and more time polishing games. That's the real value. I have millions of ideas and pet projects, but it's the work, not the ideas, that's important. I need to be careful to put all this work into the right project. I've put months of work into games, only to abandon them. I've done this several times.

As such, I've recently begun doing what I call "one-day designs". Instead of starting a new project, I make several games, and continue with only one. I design and create each playable prototype in one day only. This is enough time to design ten or twenty cards (or other elements), and write the rules on a reminder card. I don't set up templates, or do anything efficient. I just copy cards, and change their background colour. I choose a font, and that's all the style the game will get.

Once these games are done, I just leave them there. As I write this, I've got three of them waiting for me.

When it comes time to begin my next game, I'll play these games with my playtesters, and decide which one to continue with.

The losers will be entombed (likely permanently). But, I won't feel sad. I'll have the successful one to work on.

The small amount of work I put into each game, and the delay before playing them, gives me zero emotional attachment to these projects. If I just have one game, I'm inclined to try to "make it work", which sometimes leads me into a quagmire.

This also helps me feel like all my great ideas have had a moment in the sun, as I have more of those than I could ever make into games. Even though most are abandoned, I never think "I wish I had the time to try this idea..."

If you're designing very light games, you should be doing very little other than this. You should be designing one game every free day, and playing them in huge batches.

The game graveyard

A "game graveyard" is not just a place of wastage. My game graveyard is a library of ideas and mechanics I'm increasingly drawing on. I cannibalise themes, mechanics, and ideas from these old games. Then, the new game is effectively a superior version of the old one, and the old one is just a source of spare parts. Such games will obviously never see the light of day, and they now make up the majority of my abandoned games. It would be nice to have every project see publication, but I still find it satisfying to have an abandoned project see fruition as a contributor to a successful, published game. The unique ideas that could've been amazing in their own right are harder to let go of.

Be realistic

If having a published game takes five years and twenty abandoned projects, are you still interested in having a published game?

If you're serious, you should be killing the vast majority of your games. Get to it.