My 5 Rules of Game Design

Players are enjoying a golden age of games on the tabletop. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Backerkit have democratized publishing, allowing indie designers to share their creative visions and reach players directly. The result is hundreds of new board games promising hours of fun each, published every year in every niche and genre you can imagine–and some you can’t.

Why do the rules of game design matter?

Even the most passionate players do not have time to play every title. Game nights are notoriously difficult to schedule, and teaching (let alone learning) a new game is a significant time commitment. In reality, most gamers settle into a couple of favorite board games and are cautious to spend precious time trying a new one. 

Board game designers, then, need to understand what factors cause players to take a game from the shelf to the table. I have been playing hobby games for my entire adult life and spent the last seven years publishing and designing my own. These two perspectives inform what I call my five rules for game design–the five factors I use to evaluate new games and publish my own.

1. Visual Interest

Everyone judges a book by its cover. The same is true for board games. 

That’s why the visual interest of a board game is the first and most enduring thing about it. A unique art style, vivid colors, consistent style, and attractive components create immersive visual interest. Visual interest is what makes a board game stand out and cause someone to pick it up and flip it over. Visual interest excites an uneducated player (you know, who didn’t spend hours watching playthroughs, see the launch demo at GenCon, and listen to the creator’s podcast). And visual interest is what keeps the player going halfway through the game.

Leder Games's Root masterfully combines artwork and graphic design to create visual interest.

This halfway point of a board game is the deadzone, and the deadzone is one of the reasons a pretty game is important. At this point in the game, players understand the mechanics well enough to play but are generally unsure if they are winning. Turns start to take longer, strategies develop, and players spend more time flipping through their cards, counting their chips, or ogling their miniatures. 

As turns slow and players interact with components more, it is the components’ responsibility to keep players engaged. A beautiful hand of cards or a display of well-designed miniatures keeps players immersed and enjoying the game even when they aren’t the active player–and sometimes that’s enough to make them want to come back. 

2. Theme

Visual interest is players’ gateway into a board game, but theme is the world they enter. A strong theme captures players’ imagination with an interesting premise, logical actions, and an appropriate ending to gameplay.

A common mistake when creating theme is to assume a thematic game has deep worldbuilding. Too many writers craft encyclopedic lore for their game and then attach anemic rules that cannot keep players interested. Or, conversely, writers craft worlds so elaborate that only convoluted rules systems can represent all the little nuances. 

A successful theme simply gives players a reason to care and a satisfying reason to act. For example, playing an action card in Twilight Imperium is not just playing a card at an opportune time–it is one of your spaceship captains pulling off an expertly timed maneuver. Spending a CP in Warhammer 40K is not just re-rolling a dice–it is one of your heroes using the last of their courage to perform a heroic act. 

Likewise, theme creates a satisfying win condition. To win any game is ultimately a trivial, arbitrary accomplishment that players have just decided to compete over. It is up to the theme to transform this arbitrary accomplishment into something fantastical and memorable.

In short, humans are storytellers by nature. A board game’s theme should tell a story that motivates people to play and helps them understand how. 

3. Accessibility

A board game’s accessibility is a measure of how easily someone can go from knowing nothing about the game to playing it competently. People are busy, particularly young adults and those with families or young children. An inaccessible game, despite any other good factors, will never be played because it is simply too bothersome to learn and to teach.

The term accessibility tends to be associated with disabilities, and board games certainly must be aware of players’ potential disabilities. Things like color contrasts, legibility, and component texture can influence a game’s accessibility. 

But as a designer, board game accessibility more often has to do with the number of components and how intuitive they are to use. A game with ten different types of chits, cards, and tiles that all serve different, interlocking purposes is a nightmare to learn and to play. Frustration arises when unclear interactions appear, game-changing moves are missed, or players are foiled by moves they never could have foreseen. This quagmire of complexity creates a sense of helplessness. Players never feel in control, so they never feel responsible for their own win or loss. 

Instead, a board game should have as few components as mechanically and thematically necessary, and these components should be used logically. Players generally are excited by a high dice result, so they should not be penalized for rolling well. Cards generally represent strategic possibilities, so players will assume drawing cards is good and discarding them is bad. Players assume currency is good, so don’t penalize them for earning it.

Rules that play into such assumptions make for easier, more intuitive games. Combined with limited components, new players can start seeing rules interactions quickly and playing confidently.

That said, a game with numerous components and complex interactions can still be extremely fun. But these design decisions must be justifiable and create a unique gameplay experience. Otherwise, difference for the sake of difference is just difficulty. 

4. Variability

Variability is my personal pet peeve in game design. Plenty of beautiful, thematic games are ruined for a very simple reason: there is only really one way to play. 

A game fails the variability test if an algorithm can be written explaining the objectively best way to go from setup to win condition. A hallmark failure of the variability test is Magic: The Gathering’s cEDH format. 

Magic: The Gathering has over 36,000 unique cards in circulation. Yet recent data shows the same four deck archetypes account for over 25% of competitive tournament entries. It isn’t hard to see why. These cards are simply better than alternatives. They are rarer and more powerful, so competitive players buy them and use tried-and-true interactions to simply win more easily than alternative builds.

Any game that can be boiled down to these kinds of algorithmic wins has an inherent flaw: Huge portions of the game are not being used. Not only that, but experienced players who know these algorithmic wins will inherently do better than newcomers, which makes onboarding players more difficult and wins less satisfying. 

Instead, a good game involves strategies that change and that require players new and old to discover new strategies each time it's played. To this end, no component can make another component obsolete. Each time players make a choice, the options should each have merit and create variable routes to victory.

5. Price

If a board game aces the first four criteria, a player will want to buy it. But price determines if a player can.

Price is not simply whether a game is cheap or expensive. Plenty of amazing games are justifiably expensive, and plenty of cheap games are still bad. But price is a measure of whether your money is well spent.

Manufacturing games is a cost-intensive process, and costs are drastically increased by unique components and hefty materials. For example, why did Fantasy Flight choose to use uniquely-shaped, five-sided cardboard wedges for Twilight Imperium’s actions instead of standard cards? Why does Nemesis use three different custom injection-molded token sets alongside five different sets of normal 2D cardboard tokens? 

In a $50 game, these upgrades are little luxuries. For a $160 game, they are cost-prohibitive. And nobody will play an amazing game if they can’t afford it. 

Concluding thoughts.

Board games are an amazing social experience, and there’s a lot to love. No game can be perfectly simplified into these five categories, and a game can be immensely enjoyable while meeting none of these criteria. 

But for gamers and designers alike, these give rules are a good place to start.

Curious how your favorite titles hold up? Follow along for reviews of titles like Dungeons & Dragons, Settlers of Catan, and other top games—and for honest assessments of Hoodwink's own games.