Brandon the Game Dev

Play-testing is the most important part of board game design. It’s how you turn rough, raw ideas into polished, ready-to-play games. It’s also brutally difficult. Play-testing is a labor of love, and sometimes it’s hard to even find play-testers in the first place!

This is a follow-up on last week’s post, How to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality. In that post, I talk about how to get started with intimidating creative projects. In this post, I’ll set my sights on a very specific question: “how do you find play-testers?”

Things to Remember Before You Find Play-Testers

Before you ask people to play-test your game, bear in mind the following advice.

First, play-testing is labor. Play-testing is hard work because it requires you to take a complex, intricate system and critique it. Many go a step further by suggesting fixes to problems found in play-testing as well. This kind of thinking is similar to management consulting or systems analysis, both of which are jobs that can command high salaries because of how difficult they are.

Because play-testing is hard, respect your play-testers time and opinions. Write down everything they say and keep a good attitude even if you disagree. Don’t argue, just listen. Remember: they’re doing you a huge favor!

Finally, go in prepared. I’ve written about play-testing before and you may find some of these guides helpful:

• 8 Signs Your Game is Ready for Blind Play-Testing
• Playtesting and Record Keeping
• 4 Things to Expect on the First Play-Test of a New Board Game
• How to Play-Test the Core Engine of Your Board Game
• How to Play-Test the Mechanics of Your Board Game
• How To Play-Test the Rules of Your Board Game
• How to Turn Negative Play-Test Feedback into a Brilliant Game
• How to Tell When Play-Testing Feedback is Useful or Not

1. Ask friends and family

The first people you are likely to ask for help play-testing will be your friends and family. After all, they’re the easiest people to reach out to!

You might scoff at this idea, saying that family and friends are not objective enough to provide good feedback, but don’t be so quick to dismiss it. As I’ve said in an old post, play-testing with family or friends – particularly non-gamers – has benefits:

1. You play your game with non-gamers.
2. You play your game with people who understand what you’re trying to say.

This is to say, family and friends may not be able to tell you whether your game is fun, but they can tell you whether your game is confusing. That’s a huge step in the right direction.

2. Find dedicated play-testing groups online

One of the best places to find play-testers is online, particularly Facebook groups. There are large groups of people who absolutely love play-testing, even though it is often hard work. Reaching out to these enthusiasts is often the best way to find play-testers.

Two groups that come to mind are the Tabletop Game Playtesters Guild and Card & Board Game Designers Guild. You may also be able to find a game design or play-testing group local to where you live as well.

3. Visit your local game store

Speaking of local play-testing, once game stores reopen after the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may very well find that your local game stores are a great place to play-test board games. I recommend calling in advance to see if this is something that people would be interested in doing there as a courtesy to the store owners.

This is a great option if you want to observe gamers playing your game in-person or in real time.

4. Create a feedback form and online demo, then advertise and offer prizes

Of course, in-person play-testing isn’t always viable. Maybe you work strange hours. Perhaps you live in a really remote area. Or maybe the world is being forced to shelter in place because of a pandemic.

If circumstances require you to, or if you prefer to, you can always play-test board games online. You can make your game testable online by either creating a print-and-play game or a Tabletop Simulator demo.

From there, you can create a feedback form for people to submit their feedback. You can then advertise your print-and-play or Tabletop Simulator demo, offering prizes to people who submit their feedback. It’s expensive, but it’s an effective way to get feedback online.

5. Run online demos or live-stream your game

Perhaps you prefer a more hands-on approach to digital board game play-testing. If that sounds like you, you can live-stream your game. For best results, I recommend creating a Tabletop Simulator demo and working with people who already stream board games. That way you can play-test with gamers and draw a crowd (who sometimes provide good feedback as well).

6. Go to play-testing conventions

While none of us will be going to board game conventions anytime soon, they will return at some point. When they do, keep an eye out for Protospiel conventions. Protospiel conventions allow board game designers to gather in one place and play-test each others’ board games. I went to one in Atlanta and it was a good experience!

Final Thoughts

Play-testing may be tough, but finding play-testers doesn’t have to be. You can run with any of the suggestions above. Give people a good reason to play-test your game and you may be surprised at just how helpful their feedback is!

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “what confuses you most about board game development?” And, wow, did you all deliver! Now I have a three-month backlog of questions to get through!

The first topic I want to write about comes from a guy identified only as Matt in the comments. In it, he says that his biggest struggle right now is having the confidence to run with his ideas.

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This topic is close to my heart, so in this post, I’m going to talk about how to find the confidence to turn your ideas into reality!

Just to give you some additional context before you read, here’s my origin story, my biggest failure, and how things wound up going two years after that. I encourage you to read these three articles that so you know where I started too!

Turning Your Ideas into Reality (By Starting Badly)

Creating something new is scary. That’s true whether you’re making a board game or book, recording a video or podcast, starting a new job, entering into a new relationship, buying a new home…

You get the idea. Any change to the status quo is frightening. But for some reason, starting creative work is notoriously hard. Procrastination is a huge problem for authors, musicians, and game developers alike.

So why is this mental hurdle so formidable? From whence does this procrastination arise? To me, it’s a simple answer: fear. People procrastinate because they’re afraid. We’ll get into why people are afraid to create in a moment.

If you’re afraid to create, treat it like a cold swimming pool. Just jump in. Create something badly.

Hold yourself to no standards and just start writing or drawing. Picasso’s first painting was probably crap, too, so you have nothing to fear by screwing up. Not trying is infinitely worse.

Why Turning Your Ideas Into Reality Looks Scary (But Isn’t)

Creating something new is a little rebellious at its core. In a way, you’re saying that nothing that exists currently is what you want, and you must make something on your own.

Believe it or not, though, the creative impulse, rooted as it is in rebellion, is one of the noblest instincts in human nature. It’s how we created automobiles and the Great Wave off Kanagawa. It’s how we eradicated polio and how we’re going to do the same to COVID-19 on some sunny day in the future.

Our society glorifies creators. It makes them out to be deities when in reality, they are flawed men and women who follow their noble impulses and take advantage of the resources provided to them. To imagine yourself among them, even in some small way – such as creating a board game, novel, or film – well, it feels bold. Like you don’t belong.

That’s impostor syndrome. It’s basically a psychological pattern where you doubt your accomplishments. Left unchecked, impostor syndrome will leave you in perpetual fear of judgment, an obsession with your perceived inadequacy, and the specter of the possibility of being exposed as a hack.

Tom Hanks has it. Michelle Obama has it. Lord knows I’ve had it. It comes with creativity and boldness.

The only thing you can do is recognize your fears for what they are, and keep creating. If that means setting quotas for yourself to meet every week, do that. If it means you set an alarm for 6 am and make your board game until you have to go to work, then you do that.

To turn your ideas into reality is to run a marathon, not a sprint. It will take time, and persistence is key.

Inspiring Others to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality

Getting started is the hard part. It gets easier with time. However, it will take a long time to inspire others to help you turn your ideas into reality. I’m not going to sugarcoat it or pretend that this isn’t the case.

Before you ask others for help, see how far you can get without help. It’s not a good idea to try to turn a board game into a complete consumer product alone. It is, on the other hand, a good idea to learn as much as you can before you reach out to others.

The thing to remember when networking or asking for favors is that you ultimately want to be valuable in the relationship. That’s why it’s so important to keep creating on your own time, learn new skills, and experiment on your own. This gives you a chance to build up useful skills that you can use to serve others.

Once you do this, then you can think about inspiring others to turn your ideas into reality. But remember: it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Dale Carnegie spelled it out nice and easy for us in his super-famous 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Here are a few golden bits of advice to remember straight from the book:

1. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
2. Become genuinely interested in other people.
3. Be a good listener.
4. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.
5. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

Applying this Advice to Play-Testing

Now circling back to what Matt had asked about finding playtesters, here’s how you might apply these principles. You can find people who absolutely love play-testing games by searching online. That is, give people a chance to critique the game because they enjoy doing so. (There are a lot of people like this.)

Alternatively, you run a giveaway for a board game bundle. People who play-test your game get a chance to win. That way, you may get a more general audience.

Lastly, you may choose to find a group of people who mutually agree to play-test each others board games, such as a Protospiel.

In all of these scenarios, people have a good reason to help you turn your ideas into reality!

Final Thoughts

I know it’s scary to create your first game. Believe me, I’ve been there. Start now, start badly, and keep going. You’ll get better with time and persistence, believe me!

Over time, you would develop a skillset that will be helpful to others. When it’s time to reach out to inspire others to help you turn your ideas into reality, you’ll be in a much better position to do so. After all, you’ll be able to give them compelling reasons to support you (by supporting them)!

Good luck, Matt, and good luck to anyone else who is reading this post. I believe in you!

Board games have been wildly successful over the last decade. In a world with abundant entertainment options, including video games, it might seem strange that a throwback hobby has done so well. Much of this success comes from the physical presence provided by board game components.

There is a lot of debate online about which components are the best. As with all questions of opinion, there is no objective answer. However, for a publisher or designer seeking to make their own games, there are trends that can be followed!

How I Gathered Data on Favorite Board Game Components

The best way to find out what board game components are the most popular is simple: ask a bunch of board gamers! Pangea Games did this through five giveaways. In these five giveaways, one of the entry conditions was to answer the question “what is your favorite board game component?”

The five games given away were:

• Terraforming Mars
• Dune
• Our own game, Tasty Humans
• Everdell
• Viticulture

Over 800 people answered our question over these five giveaways, giving us a great sample size. However, we want to make one caveat very clear. Every game we gave away, except for our own, was a mid-weight, mid-price game. If we gave away lighter games or big, expensive games like Twilight Imperium or Gloomhaven, we would likely see different results.

Nevertheless, I still think this data is useful and actionable whether you’re making a $10 game or a $200 game. You can use at least one of the recommended board game components below at any price point or game weight, if not multiple.

How I Cleaned Up the Data

If you’ve ever worked with a large data set, you know that you can’t just pop it into Excel and make a pivot table. You have to clean up the data. If you’re smart about it, you can do this without accidentally taking away useful insights from the final analysis.

First things first, we removed duplicate answers by email. That is to say, even if one person entered all five giveaways, we only accept their first answer.

Second, we eliminated all answers that didn’t actually have anything to do with board game components. It’s a free text field, so we had to go line by line to remove garbage answers.

Third, we had to classify and sanitize data in order to use it. “Card”, “cards”, “playing cards”, “cards with great art”, and so on are all basically saying the same thing: cards. But each line had to be reviewed, again, one by one, in order to prepare data for final analysis.

Last, once all data was classified, we created a pivot table in Excel and did a simple count of all favorite components. Because we went through the whole data set and sanitized the data, different ways of saying the same thing didn’t screw up our final results.

Honorable Mentions

Before getting into the top six components, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge components that exceeded my expectations. These are not necessarily #7-10 on the list, but rather just surprising insights.

Poker chips, both the kind used for poker or the kind you’d find in Splendor, did exceptionally well relative to more commonly found components. That is likely because of their pleasant weightiness.

Inserts and trays to help board game pieces stay organized were surprisingly popular. This is perhaps because they look neat and reduce setup time.

Rule books, very surprisingly, have dedicated fans! There are people who read them for fun and who can really appreciate when they’re done well.

Maps were mentioned more than I expected. This may indicate that people like games with their own geography more than we realize. I wouldn’t read into this too much, though, since “maps” came up as answer a bit less than 1% of the time.

6. Metal Coins

With their satisfying weight, interesting textures, and satisfying clanging, metal coins came in at 7% in our data. If they were cheaper to create and ship, it is very likely that this would rank much higher on the list because they would be more common.

My takeaway is this: if you are creating a board game and you want the experience to feel really luxury or premium, then metal coins are a great way of accomplishing that through components.

5. Boards

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most popular board game components is…the boards themselves! Coming in at 10% in our data, those who gave longer answers explicitly stated the following:

• Dual-layered player boards
• Thematic boards
• Beautiful board
• Board/Map
• Recessed player boards
• A good looking board
• Modular Boards

We noticed some common themes when going through this data. People are really attracted to board art, the physical feel of boards, and creative ways to use them. That means people aren’t so much attracted to regular, plain quad-fold boards. They want gorgeous boards that are used in unique ways and that have pleasant textures.

4. Cards

Cards came up in our data 13% of the time, which is higher than boards! There’s little reason to wonder why, too. Cards can introduce both randomness and strategy into a game, so people automatically have positive assumptions about their role in a game.

Beyond that, cards have many opportunities to display gorgeous art. In fact, that’s what our data suggests people like most about cards – phenomenal art.

3. Dice

At 14%, dice are more popular than boards or cards. However, there is a caveat. We’re not just talking about regular six-sided white dice with black dots. No, people are attracted to custom dice.

We suspect this is because dice-based games put so much importance on these tiny components. You next moves hinge upon what the dice tell you, forcing you to look at them. When dice are customized in a thematic way, that is really memorable.

2. Minis

At 15%, miniatures, or simply minis, are incredibly popular. You find them often in your most expensive, physically and mentally heavy games. Miniatures look great on their own, but many hobbyists take time painting them.

Minis allow for raw creativity for both the game creator and the gamer themselves (through painting). Games with unique minis stand out head and shoulders over games that do not have that. It’s not hard to understand why, either. Just look at the picture above – that’s way better than a piece of cardboard wedged into a plastic stand!

1. Meeples

With a whopping 25% of the vote, meeples stand out head and shoulders over any other component. Particularly, custom, wooden meeples is unique shapes. Animal meeples, people meeples, abstract meeples…gamers love meeples!

While it may seem surprising that meeples beat minis, consider the following. Only a small fraction of games can afford to feature minis. Nearly any game can have meeples. The cost of custom meeples is pretty low, and they add a lot of character to otherwise very abstract games.

But perhaps more importantly than that, there is nothing more symbolic of board gaming than meeples. When you say “board game”, a lot of people will think of “meeples.”

Final Thoughts

Some board game components are exceptionally popular. Metal coins, boards, cards, custom dice, minis, and meeples all have their fans.

If you want to give your new game design a little pizzaz, consider adding any combination of the board game components listed above. You’ll be glad you did!

What’s your favorite board game component?