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[Amon26]

I wonder if there's a niche for people creating their own boardgames and putting the rules/tiles up online for printing?  I've been toying with the idea of making one myself, but I'd like to see what ground's been covered already, if any.

do people do this?

[The Ivy]

Yep, earlier this week in fact!

I made a game called Treehouse. It was a helpful prototyping exercise for me, since I'm not a programmer. It let me test out some game mechanics and change the rules quickly if the game seemed unbalanced. The game still isn't perfect, but if I spent some more time tweaking it I think it'd be decent.

I did consider making a bunch of little games like this, and maybe having the PDF's and rules downloadable on my website for around $1. Still a very new idea, so we'll see what happens.

[Alec S.]

Maybe it should also be extended for card games?

I made a game a while back that can be played with a standard deck of cards called Trades.  I created it when I was a kid and played it quite a bit.  Then I remembered it about a year back and tweaked it a bit.

[Melly]

The idea of creating one's own board game is quite interesting, actually.

[Amon26]

Yep, earlier this week in fact!

I made a game called Treehouse. It was a helpful prototyping exercise for me, since I'm not a programmer. It let me test out some game mechanics and change the rules quickly if the game seemed unbalanced. The game still isn't perfect, but if I spent some more time tweaking it I think it'd be decent.

I did consider making a bunch of little games like this, and maybe having the PDF's and rules downloadable on my website for around $1. Still a very new idea, so we'll see what happens.

Doctor President is my new hero

[Jason Rohrer]

I think it's a great idea.  However, I also believe that the "feel of the bits" in a board game are important, and looking at Erin's play-testing photos with curling squares of paper made me cringe a bit.

So, it would be great to figure out how to get beyond the "PDF and print it yourself" model.  Maybe with limited run prints on real cardboard or something?  I suppose that hardcore, crafty fans will glue the PDF bits to cardboard backing on their own... but most people will not.  And... ahem... the PDF of Treehouse does not include rules?  Where are the rules?


Time to put on my German Board Game Evangelist hat for a sec.  I'm assuming that anyone considering doing this has played tons of great German Board games already (from the look of Erin's game, it seems like she's in that camp).  If you haven't, it's time to get googling, lest you unleash another sub-Ameritrash racetrack game on the world!

Here's a good place to start:
http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/Top100/

Good to play these even if you don't plan on making a board game, because they can help you think about games in general in new ways.

[pgil]

TheIvy: I bet each game was preceded by a fight over who gets to be Doctor President.


I remember I used to make board games when I was a kid. I think I spent most of my time getting together stuff to use as tokens. Paper squares were not acceptable to little six-year-old me. I'm sure if I looked in my parents' attic I'd still be able to find big pieces of plywood with green felt glued to it and weird mazes and monsters scribbled all over.

[Paul Eres]

if you go to http://playthisthing.com, they often review indie board games alongside indie computer games -- there's actually a huge active community of indie board game developers out there, with a ton of variety

[Eric McQuiggan]

Myself and some classmates designed a board game in first year, it was pretty much a turn based board game version of Populous, which is funny, because none of us had played Populous at that point. Your dudes were represented by pips on dice and you tried to convert your enemies with shear numbers, there was a deck of cards representing godly spells. Its really fun, and we have an XNA version almost ready to put up on XBox indie games, if I get around to rallying the troops to finish it.

[Shade Jackrabbit]

I think it's a great idea.  However, I also believe that the "feel of the bits" in a board game are important, and looking at Erin's play-testing photos with curling squares of paper made me cringe a bit.

One could just use card-paper. It's a lot sturdier than normal paper, but it still works in printers.

Or at least, it works in my dad's printer.

Ink sometimes runs a little though.

[The Ivy]

Doctor President is my new hero

She's pretty awesome, ain't she?

I think it's a great idea.  However, I also believe that the "feel of the bits" in a board game are important, and looking at Erin's play-testing photos with curling squares of paper made me cringe a bit.

So, it would be great to figure out how to get beyond the "PDF and print it yourself" model.  Maybe with limited run prints on real cardboard or something?  I suppose that hardcore, crafty fans will glue the PDF bits to cardboard backing on their own... but most people will not.  And... ahem... the PDF of Treehouse does not include rules?  Where are the rules?


Time to put on my German Board Game Evangelist hat for a sec.  I'm assuming that anyone considering doing this has played tons of great German Board games already (from the look of Erin's game, it seems like she's in that camp).  If you haven't, it's time to get googling, lest you unleash another sub-Ameritrash racetrack game on the world!

Here's a good place to start:
http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/Top100/

Good to play these even if you don't plan on making a board game, because they can help you think about games in general in new ways.

I used printer paper for the sake of convenience, but you're right that it made the game a little precarious. Laughing on the game board was catastrophic and strictly prohibited. It certainly would have helped if the tiles had a bit more weight. If you look closely, you can see that I taped pennies to the bottom of the player pieces. Incidentally, I borrowed those pennies from Zaknafein's desk.

I'll have to check out those German games, they look pretty interesting. Thanks for passing along the link!

And by the way, due to popular demand, I've edited my blog post to include the game rules. They were sort of covered in the link in the first paragraph, but now they're all in one place.

TheIvy: I bet each game was preceded by a fight over who gets to be Doctor President.


I remember I used to make board games when I was a kid. I think I spent most of my time getting together stuff to use as tokens. Paper squares were not acceptable to little six-year-old me. I'm sure if I looked in my parents' attic I'd still be able to find big pieces of plywood with green felt glued to it and weird mazes and monsters scribbled all over.

I always try to play as Freckle, but maybe I'm biased.

I used to make board games when I was a kid, too. The most ambitious one was a Calvin and Hobbes-themed racetrack game. The most dangerous one, I built on a pane of window glass I found in my grandma's attic.

[Havok]

Over at BoardGameGeek there are tons of print n play games made my home designers. If you go on there and browse around you can get a feel for what others have done. Keep in mind there is only a severely slim chance you could make any money off of it (smaller than video games) but it certainly can be fun. Last month I created a custom dice game called Cubix and found the challenge very rewarding. The key is to play it a lot with others and modify things constantly.

[Radix]

I made a few in high school, first for a class exercise and then for every assignment after that whenever I could convince my teachers to accept it. Mostly colourful strategy games, plus one Waterloo war game for history class (took days to make all the tiny little horsies).

In uni we made and played a lot of 1000 Blank White Cards and Nomic-type stuff. My favourite deck was called Alien vs Predator vs Johnny 5, in which you have a team of three characters who can each use different item and ability cards to attack other players' characters provided they're still 'alive'. I've been meaning to scan it for years.
I designed a complex evolution-themed strategy board game there too, but never finished cutting out all the little bits. One day.

Recently I made a couple of games for teaching English to little kids.
One's a super cool dungeon crawling game where players explore a dungeon which is generated by drawing different corridors from a stack and laying them on the floor. Some rooms are special and may contain traps and/or some dungeon feature or a random amount of loot (letter cards or useful magic items) and might be guarded by a monster which must be defeated by spelling, scrabble-style using your letter cards, an English word at least as long as the monster's name. Basically I slapped Sorcerer's Cave and Dungeon Scroll together and took credit.
The other's a tense luck-pushing game about pearl diving (because all I had for counters were white go stones) with a fun competitive Scattergoriesish element that lets kids fuck with each other.
Unfortunately my bitch ex-housemate kept them both for her babysitting business when I moved. I'd go get them, but I figure at least with her some kids'll get to enjoy them.

Somewhere around here I've got a half-finished game about gods (players) screwing with a developing civilization for fun. Thanks for reminding me. It has a neat mechanic which might even be original.

[Jason Rohrer]

I'll have to check out those German games, they look pretty interesting. Thanks for passing along the link!

At the risk of sounding like a snobby boardgame elitist... you're kidding, right?

You've never played THE SETTLERS OF CATAN?  I mean, that shit's bigger than Halo 3 (at least in terms of copies sold).

Requisite WIRED article: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_settlers

Granted, it's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of really well-designed games... but yeah, it's sorta like never hearing Sgt. Pepper or something.  "It opens new doors, man."

[Amon26]

I should make an AOOFAD boardgame, where all the text is written in zalgo, the pieces are carved from deer bone, and the tokens are made out of resin mixed with human blood!

oh, and the board would be mounted upside down ofcourse.