Reflections on a Career

I've been doing this for more than ten years now. I'd like to give you an insight into where I've come from, and where I am now, as of 2026. This might be a look into where you're going too.

2025

2025 was 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.

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.

2026

Faster, better, less fun.

I completed a game that took 256 revisions this year. As I write this, I'm in revision 29 of another new and very promising game.

As I get faster, and the number of revisions per game grows, output of publishable games increases drastically.

It's just a job, now. Long gone are the days of working away on design for a passion project. I've also been doing this for ten years. It's not novel to make my own games any more.

These days, I get up, have breakfast, and message a few playtesters in North America, to see who's free. (It's their evening.) I'll then make changes, based on that playtest, and have the next revision ready for the late afternoon, when the Europeans get up. After that, I make changes again. That's two revisions a day. Often, I have something else to do, or I get slack, and do less than two revisions. Far less often, I do more than two revisions in a day. I've done four (with four playtesters, and changes between each).

I don't mind doing this job, and I'm also very good at it. 

I now have about 30 playtesters, half of whom were recruited from this site.

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 #161 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. It is a very uneven source of income, however.

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.

The path ahead

I feel like I'm starting to get an understanding of the fundamentals of game. I'm making numerous games which seem to have all the same questions in them. I feel like I'm slowly gaining a general understanding of how to make good games.

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.

Creativity and fun

I'm getting less creative. What I design is like a spiral, and it gets smaller constantly. I've made a few types of games now, and I expect I'll mostly just make more games that are similar to those games.

For several years, now, I've only worked on one game at a time. I work on it until it's 100% complete, and then I go on to the next project. Endless late polishing is so repetitive that if I made another game, I'd only want to work on the new, exciting game.

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.

Maybe all serious board game design is a bad idea, and almost all the benefit is the fun.

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.