- Chris Backe talks board game design
- Posts
- [#023] Confidence, pitching, and more
Welcome to your weekly dose of board game design!
My Eurovision favorite (Finland) came 2nd place behind a dominant performance of Sweden, the ‘bookies favorite’ and a previous winner of the contest. Celebrate some weirdness below:
I could do without the hour-long artificially-induced drama or the need to pay to vote, but the music is usually tuning into.
Something I learned about game design this week
I’ve been putting a talk together for Boston FIG, which I’ll be giving on the 21st. You’ll have to (virtually) come out to see the talk, but if there’s a replay available I’ll share that here.
The thing I learned this week was confidence: I know a lot of stuff, and you do as well. You’re learning something every single day, both from designing games, talking about games, life in general, your work. You won’t realize it in the moment, though. It’s one of those things you realize in retrospect.
This week's tip
Pitching for a convention - I’ve already written about this a couple of times (the best practices to pitching and my ultimate guide to pitching at conventions are over here), but this is fresh on my mind having done a fair bit of it for UKGE.
Naturally, there are elements of my personal experience here, so take it with a grain of salt. Look to how you can apply this to your personal experience, like so many other things in life.
One quick truth: some cons are better than others for pitching. That’s because while the company may be there to sell their games at a booth, it doesn’t necessarily mean the person / people / team to pitch will be.
With smaller publishing companies, it’s worth remembering the one person (or two or three people) running things have a lot on their plates. They don’t have a lot of time to read through a novel’s worth of text about your game or disorganized text… and without an appointment, you’re unlikely to have their attention during the con.
What to do? Keep it short.
Keep it simple.
In a recent Facebook thread, Sen Foong-Lim (a designer I admire and respect) talked about the ‘logline’ of the game as the thing to pitch. The term comes from the world of screenwriting, and according to studiobinder.com:
A logline, or log line, is a brief (one to two sentence) summary of a movie, tv show, etc. that hooks the reader in and describes the central conflict of the story.
The formula that Studio Binder uses: When [INCITING INCIDENT] happens, [OUR PROTAGONIST] decides [TO DO ACTION] against [ANTAGONIST].
If you’ve ever read a Netflix description for a show / series / movie, it lines up pretty well.
This actually translates pretty well into board games, although board games don’t always necessarily have an inciting incident, protagonists, and/or antagonists.
This is where your descriptors come into play - the theme and mechanics your game have to offer, along with other elements more specific to board games.
The formula I’m trying to use more often: In [NAME OF GAME], you’re all [WHO YOU ARE] in the [WHEN] world of [WHERE]. It’s a [MAIN MECHANICS] game where you’re trying to [WHAT YOU DO].
You’ll see this in the intro section of rules (these are excerpts, naturally):
Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure. Players compete to connect different cities by laying claim to railway routes on a map of North America.
In this game, players must develop the area around Carcassonne. They will place their followers onto roads and into cities, monasteries, and fields.
Gloomhaven is a cooperative game of battling monsters and advancing a player’s own individual goals. The game is meant to be played as part of a campaign, where a group of players will use the accompanying Scenario Book to string together a series of adventures, unlocking new content for the game as they progress.
Plenty of other examples are around - just look near the start of the rulebook for any game you own.
I still like to include links to the rulebook / sell sheet, but the goal here is to intrigue the publishers enough to make some time for you.
What I’ve been working on last week
Had a good pitch with 2 publishers.
Wrote a speech / presentation for Boston FIG next week.
Playtested a co-designed game twice and Marshrutka twice (press-your-luck pick-up-and-deliver).
Lots of updates to Tabletop Publishers.
What's coming up this week
Send a prototype to a publisher in Germany
Continue gearing up for UKGE
Work on our next game for No Box Games (not yet announced)
Client work
ICYMI
Go check your Contrast between your text and background with an easy and free way to check: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker.
The Game Crafter’s new contest is all about table presence. Learn more here.
Random picture of the week
So I’d love to learn the story behind why a delivery company decided to commission a version of Trivial Pursuit for their employees… This might actually be fairly rare (I have no idea how to know for certain), but it’s still at the charity shop last I looked…
Thanks for reading!
Got a question about game design you'd like answered? Find an amazing new resource that would help fellow game designers? Reply to this email and share =)
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!