| Inventing a board game sounds like fun. Images spring to mind of carefree afternoons test-driving your brilliant creation on admiring friends and family, with carefree evenings ahead celebrating inevitable success. Strangely (or perhaps not to those with experience of startups and product development) it’s definitely not like that. However excellent the ultimate outcome is or might be for this new board game of ours (whilst we love 3ology, the jury is out on whether that’s a view shared by the world) there’s been an inevitable element of grind just getting to this pre-launch phase. It’s all new to me and therefore quite a learning curve plus, it’s a challenge I didn’t expect to face but for the record, one I’m thoroughly enjoying. Though in the spirit of our Topical Top 3 series of articles, though I’d articulate my Top 3 challenges so far as a new board game designer … 1. The Idea Everything turns on this. If the idea is right, you’ve got a chance. Thankfully for us, the idea for 3ology was many years in the making. So at least when we began the project, we were pretty confident the concept worked. 2. The Detail Ah yes, the devil is in the detail and all that. Should the box be blue or red? Which player goes first? Do we have the 30-second timer or the 60-second timer? How does the scoring work? These and a thousand other questions have to be thought through, challenged, reversed, answered … if the concept is going to come to life. Painstaking doesn’t cover it. (The box is blue, by the way.) Even then, we know that all battle plans go to pieces when faced by the enemy so we’re sure a thousands Qs and queries and changes lay ahead of us as the game goes public. 3. The Delay Word of advice to aspiring inventors — the sound you hear when you agree on clear deadlines for each stage of the process? That’s the game gods laughing. It is an immutable law of the games design universe that delays will happen and deadlines will slip. It is also a law that most of the delays will be your fault, either because you have vastly underestimated the time needed to complete a task, or having completed it, you realise you have overlooked some crucial element that requires you to start again. I/we/you have to learn to deal with the frustration. Oh, I should point out that, despite these and all the other challenges — or maybe because of them — it has been a lot of fun so far and the next phase promises to be more of the same. We’ll keep you posted and if I repeat this Top 3 during 2025, it will almost certainly contain a different set of answers. |