Take Your Time

As I scroll through social media every day, I often see fledgling board game designers (and prospective self-publishers) asking some version of the following question:

What's your biggest piece of advice for someone who is breaking into designing/publishing?

And, of course, being the internet, there is no shortage of answers to these questions. Most of the answers are helpful, many contradict one another ("for your first project, keep it small" vs. "for your first project, try to make a splash"), and quite a few venture into some variation of that bleak old joke: How do you make a million dollars in this hobby? Start with two million dollars.

The biggest piece of advice I have for designers and publishers stepping into the space is, on its surface, quite simple, though it has many branching implications. My advice is this:

Take. Your. Time.

What do I mean by that? I mean, in every single aspect of your creation journey, take your time. When it comes to that initial design phase, when you may be sitting in your office or your kitchen or wherever it is that you do your designing, do your best to work through every eventuality before you even start playtesting. You'll fail at this, of course, and some of your oversights will be made obvious the very first time another human plays the game, but the fact remains that a lot of love and care needs to go into that initial design.

When you playtest, your instinct may be to show the game to your close friends and family and have them play the game. By all means do that, but also remember that your family and friends have deep bias toward you and, by extension, your creation. As early as possible, you need to show that game to as many strangers as possible. There are multiple Facebook groups, Discord communities, etc. that facilitate playtest exchanges, and many places (at least in bigger cities) have in-person meetups of local designers. However you manage to do it, playtest often, and then take time at the end of playtests to gather feedback. Ask probing questions, not just the surface level ones. Do not expect playtesters to fix your game (that's your job, not theirs) but keep an open mind and an open ear to what your players have to say.

Between playtests, synthesize the feedback with your own observations, and iterate. Iterate, iterate, iterate! Make broad, sweeping changes if you must. If a dozen people have said that the worker placement mechanism in your game feels stale and samey, take the necessary time to figure out why. Could it be that you need to introduce some kind of bumping and boosting mechanism into the worker placement? Maybe you need to rework your action spots to accommodate multiple workers, but then incentivize the arrival orders in a really intriguing way. Maybe, and this can sometimes be a real kicker, you don't need worker placement in your game at all....

It is for reasons like this latter one that I suggest that designers create an online version of their game and utilize Tabletop Simulator (TTS) or a similar platform to do online testing. While there is no doubt a huge benefit to doing in person testing of games (you can see the players in real time, notice fiddly component issues, etc.), there are some really amazing benefits to online testing.

For one, when you elect to test online, you open yourself up to a whole world of playtesters. You are no longer dependent upon a small handful of local folks, the operating hours of your FLGS (or wherever you do your in-person testing), or other external factors. Instead, you have, essentially, the whole world at your fingertips. It was due to extensive online playtesting that we were able to get our playtester list well into the hundreds of people for Galactic Cruise.

Perhaps the even stronger argument for online playtesting is how quickly you can make changes (sometimes huge changes) to your game in a fraction of the time. Your game becomes a little less precious when it exists online like that. If you designed a deck-building game, but then decide that shifting to a bag-building system makes more sense, it is much easier to make that shift online--not only because it's literally just a matter of uploading new files in new formats, but only because, mentally, you haven't spent all day slicing cards by hand only to have to throw them all away before handmaking a few hundred chits, all to test out an idea that might not even work.

There is some kind of psychological phenomenon that happens here. When we make something real and tangible, it becomes much, much harder to alter (or altogether kill) that thing. That game that really doesn't need to be a deck-builder is more apt to remain a deck-builder for far too long if the designer only ever does physical playtests because the time investment was far too great.

Now, let me pause here and say that, of course, OF COURSE, there is a time and place for physical versions of your games, and I am in no way saying that you wait until the very end to make one. Just don't trust that the one that you create for Convention A will be the same one that you take to Convention B.

Once your game is nearing the finish line, design-wise, and it becomes readier for publication, you need to take your time here, too. (Gosh, am I sounding like a broken record yet?) If you have no desire to self-publish, you need to take your time researching publishers to whom you want to pitch your game. It is very obvious, on the publisher end, when a designer hasn't done this. For instance, we once got pitched a game that was, in essence, just Apples to Apples with a Lord of the Rings skin on it. Granted, I love LotR, and have since I was a child. I also quite enjoy Apples to Apples for what it is. But if Kinson Key Games' follow-up to Galactic Cruise was a game like that, I believe there would be a whole lot of confusion about our brand (and likely a lawsuit, as we do not have, and likely could never get, the IP rights for Tolkien's works). Take the time. Do the research.

If, instead, you are pursuing self-publishing, you'll need to take your time researching...well...everything. Look into artists and graphic designers, and realize that they, too, have schedules and timetables that existed before your project. A true story about Galactic Cruise is that we had all intentions of launching that game sometime late 2022. We had several interested artists who could meet that deadline, and the game was (more or less) mechanically finished--or so we thought. After meeting with our dream artist, Ian O'Toole, we knew we couldn't pass up the opportunity to work with him. However, that decision majorly affected our timeline, as he could not even begin working on art for the game until spring of 2023. By the time we finally launched Galactic Cruise on Kickstarter in March of 2024, we were about a year and a half delayed from when we thought the game would take off--but, guess what? That time was well-spent, and it made all the difference.

While Ian crafted what I think is some of his very best board game artwork, we continued playtesting, fine-tuning all the little minutiae of the game. It became the game it is mechanically because it took longer than we'd originally budgeted to make it great visually.

Frankly, so much of what led to our success comes down to take your time. There are plenty of other examples: take your time to look into content creators, into manufacturers and their quotes, into other games that will soon become your peers. There are also other big pieces of advice that I'd give new industry professionals beyond just "take your time." But start there, and when the other things rear their heads, seek out those who have been there before. We certainly did that, shamelessly. We drew upon the wisdom of designers and publishers who came before us, and we took in all the advice we could get.

If you are stepping into this wild and wonderful world, I encourage you to do the same.