It started as a world building thing and ended up complete enough to actually play. It’s a bit like chess but with tiles placed to make the field and a pog like betting system. Everyone I’ve shown it to tells me I need to publish it, but I have no idea how. Any one here have suggestions?
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Build it in tabletop simulator, and use that to get more people playing it / solicit feedback.
A few recent games have started out that way, I think Nemesis was one of them
Test it, test it, test it.
Test to the point of failure, iterate on the systems and test again. 90% of game design is testing.
Also test with many different groups. What one group finds easy and clear, another might find hard and confusing.
Oh I’ve got that part down, we’ve been playing this for a few years now.
Test it at a game dev convention like unpub or protospiel. Other game developers will have better insight on how well it works. There are also often publishers there or at least people with experience pitching to publishers that you can learn from.
The easiest thing would be to put a bunch of PDFs with the rules, and some printable material (board, pieces, rules, cards… whatever) on itch.io. you can pick a price, set them as pay-what-you-want or just give them away for free.
You could also give away the rules for free and sell the printables if you have made nice designs.
Whatever you do, please update your post with the link ;)
I’ve got some friends that made a board game. They self funded making a small run and they sell them at gaming conventions. It’s going well but probably won’t take off into big business. Lots of luck involved in being “discovered”. Maybe send a copy to some game review youtube channels?
Check out the community at Trovve.co
Also +1 for putting together a digital prototype and testing further such as via Break My Game
Can get a lot of advice on self publishing at those as well as via Cardboard Edison - this one also has a cheap subscription for access to publisher info to filter who is taking submissions etc so you could pitch the game if not interested in self publishing
I had a coworker who designed a boardgame and that was his gateway into 3d printing. His game was kindof dungeon-crawler-y and he printed a lot of dungeon tiles made for D&D/Pathfinder/etc sort of TTRPGs. Last I talked to him, he was planning to publish the PDF for free under permissive licensing terms to allow derivative works.
One thing to note: copyright provides no protections for game mechanics. Art, lore, wording of the rulebook, etc are all copyrightable, but the mechanics themselves are not. So it’s perfectly legal for anyone to create a “clone” of an existing game using exactly the same rules as the original without getting permission from the creator of the game so long as they don’t commit any copyright infringement on any of the actually copyrightable elements associated with the game. (Sometimes game mechanics can be patented, but I get the feeling that’s not terribly common to run into in the wild. IANAL.)
I’m not all that worried about that. If the game gets big enough to get bootleggers then I don’t have to make the parts myself.
First off, congratulations! Making a game is a huge effort of weaving ideas.
I’d recommend playtesting a large amount, and tuning/refining your rules and mechanisms etc, until you are satisfied.
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You may glean a bunch of information from this documentary.
Options described, range from self-publishing to walking the floor at Essen talking direct to publishers.
Shows playtesting and feedback sessions.
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If you want to just get your game out and available to the most amount of people, you could release the game rules and pieces as a print-and-play .PDF file, and place it under a Creative Commons license.
Some examples here: Creative Commons/Open Source Games
Never tested myself: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/
