Homebrew Game Design

S O, YOU’D LIKE TO INVENT YOUR OWN want to play a game about pirates?” is more com-board game? Great idea! Here’s how to do it pelling than “Do you want to play a game with a — or how I do it, anyway. unique movement point system?”

1. Determine Who Your Audience Is

Know your audience. If you’re making a game to play with your family and friends, that’s great! That’s the best way to start. But if you aim to sell to a game publisher, it’s never too early to think about how to position your game in the marketplace.

For example, when I started Cheapass Games in 1996, I knew I wanted to target “core hobby gamers” like my friends and me — college-age males who frequent game stores. Because gamers already have their own dice and game pieces, I knew we could have fun just with new sets of rules and cards or a board. This simplicity meant that games could be sold cheap, in plain envelopes, and displayed near the cash register of the game store to serve as impulse purchases. That’s how Cheapass was born.

2. Outline the Story

My games sell on story, so the first thing I do is try to come up with a good one: zombie fast-food workers fight over a single brain (Give Me the Brain) or infected mad cows graze fields to discover unexploded landmines (Unexploded Cow). A game’s theme is the first impression a new player will have of the game, so it’s important to nail it.

Once you choose the theme, think about what game mechanics will fit it — things like turns, dice rolls, and auctions. Some designers base their games around the mechanics, but for me, “Do you

3. Imagine the Ideal Experience

What is the playing experience? What are players “doing,” and how do they win? For example, in a space-mining game, do you want to spend more time flying spaceships or managing inventory?

How much luck, skill, or complexity do you want? “Skill factor” games have no luck at all, just pure intellectual competition, as with chess. At the opposite end, other games let players passively follow where the cards or dice take them, don’t make you work too hard, and with a little luck, let anyone win.

4. Decide on the Format

The next choice is the overall format of the game. Do you want to design a card game? A board game? Something else? Here is a quick rundown of the most common formats. There are other formats, too, and you can always invent your own.

Board games: Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, or chess, that use a central board for static, common information, such as a map, or for tracking game progress, such as score, army size, and so on.

Card games: Cards handle randomizable, quantized, or secret information. Randomizable means that the cards can be shuffled; quantized means that the game content is broken down into pieces rather than being presented all at once; and secret means that players can hold information that isn’t known by everyone. Card games tend to be simpler

Illustration by Melinda Beck; Flipbook illustrations by Brian Biggs

50 Make: Volume 08