Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

There's a lot of good stuff in this book if you are an aspiring board game designer. Parts 1 and 2, Concepting and Design, are especially good and applicable in all situations. Parts 3 and 4, Development and Presentation are important as well, but a lot of it is only applicable if you plan on licensing your design to a publisher.

For me personally, the Concepting and Design chapters were mainly just a reinforcement of what I already knew from listening to a lot of game design and review podcasts, and playing a lot of games. It was still helpful to read, and there were a few new concepts. A lot of it reminded me about something I once read about art: great artists can break the rules and get away with it, but only because they already know the rules, and know why they are breaking them. These two chapters collectively explain many of the rules of game design. A game can break some of them and still be good, but a designer should be aware of when they're breaking them and be able to justify why.

The second half of the book started to get into new territory for me. I knew a bit about development going into it, but it went into more detail and was overall quite useful. The one exception was the article on playtesting which felt like it belonged in a completely different book. While its interesting to know what a company like Hasbro does in playtesting, and there's value in knowing that there's no way you can afford to do that, discussions that begin with the line "you'll need to budget between $5000 to $50,000 to go this route" pretty much told me I wasn't going to be going that route without having to read anything more about it.

I don't want to rant about it too much. I do appreciate greatly the use of actual numbers in the article. Still, I felt it was out of place in a book that seems primarily aimed at aspiring board game designers. The article felt like it should have been in a book titled "So, You're A Hasbro Executive Now."

The first part of the final chapter was possibly colored by my impression of the article on playtesting. The article on what not to do with prototypes came off sounding like "how dare these people that have no experience in the industry fail to understand the things we do every day." Hopefully now they will if they read the article, but still.

Things got back on track with the next article which also discussed prototyping. The article after that discussed pitching your game, and was nearly all completely new to me. It alone is probably worth the price of the book if you are trying to sell your game to a publisher. Then again, its honest discussion of the odds may just crush your spirit, so you may want to put off reading it until your game is already done. It's also an article that might not be as useful to as many aspiring designers as it used to be given the existence of Kickstarter.

The final article is one of the best in the book and in many ways is a summary of everything else that comes before it. While it is focused on the traditional "this is what happens when you sell your game to a publisher" model, it was still a great read, and most of it will be useful to all aspiring designers.

The biggest lack in the book was any discussion of self-publishing. While it was written before Kickstarter was a major player, self-publishing existed before that, and some of the authors are in fact self publishers, so some discussion of that area would have been appreciated.

It's still a recommended read for anyone thinking about designing a board game.