There are a lot of questions here. And there are great resources both online and in print to help you with some of them. But when we were starting out, it was tough to find info on how to make a board game prototype or how to make a card game prototype. So, we thought we’d capture some of the ways we’ve done it to make things easier for those starting out.

In this post, we’ll cover a quick intro to prototyping and testing since they go hand in hand. Later, we’ll look at this in more depth and we’ll look at how to mock up a card game and game board. Many board games include cards so it’s good to learn how to make both even if you mainly want to focus on board games…

It’s rare that you can make a game that won’t need changes from the first concept.

Knowing how to prototype or mock-up your own games is important. Why? Because it’s always best to iron out “bugs” in your game when it’s cheap and easy to make changes. It’s rare (read: near impossible) that you can make a game that won’t need changes from the first concept. Changes become more expensive—and take longer—the further along you are in the process. Once someone else is making expensive prototypes for you, it’s no longer cheap or easy to make changes. So DIY (do it yourself) pays off—a lot—in the beginning.

Back to the Beginning

Let’s assume that you’ve already got your initial board game/card game idea thought out and are ready to move on to mocking up an early prototype. Before you begin prototyping, it’s always helpful to have thought about your game at a high level and make sure you have at least your basic ideas captured. For that, use sticky notes, blank paper, graph paper, drawing materials, flowchart or “mindmapping” software, a spreadsheet…anything that’s good at letting you brain dump ideas and information and (this is key), letting you change both later. Most of these tools are cheap or free.

Also, remember that prototyping can also be a great tool for sparking new creative ideas, or improving them. So don’t always wait to start on mockups until you think your idea is 100% perfect, or you’ll never get started.

And Beyond

In our next post, we’ll talk about why to make a prototype. Hint: protos aren’t important for the reasons that many new game designers think.

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for a Flibbix intro/demo movie. We think you’re onto a great idea, so we took your advise and made one. Flibbix is an amazingly fun game, and we’d like to see more people experience the joy of making a game that’s perfect for them. It’s such a revolutionary new idea that it helps for people to visually see how it works to really “get” the concept. So we finally got that intro video posted. You can find a YouTube version here…

…or you can view it in higher quality QuickTime format. Click the images below for a medium-size movie (7.6MB) or a large (17MB) high-def movie that show you how to build a board game (or make a board game) with Flibbix—and what all the buzz is about.

This is the third in our series of how to make a board game. While you can use some of these concepts to make your own board game out of cardboard or paper, making a game with Flibbix is easier and gives you a lot more opportunity to change and “tweak” things later. This makes it easier to experiment and make a board game that works well and is really fun to play.

In our first post, we covered making or building a game board with Flibbix tiles. In our second post, we talked about making rules for your board game. Here, we look at using cards in your board game.

Flibbix comes with 40 cards that you can use with your board game. You can use all, or just some, of the cards to change how your game plays. There are different types of cards that are used for (you guessed it) different things:

Even more cool are Flibbix Custom Cards™. These can be anything you want. They could be an action like one of those above, or anything you can imagine. Just put your “action” for the card on your rule sheet before beginning your game:

Here are some that people came up with in games we played recently:

If you want to create cards for your own custom board game, you might want to try experimenting with Flibbix and Custom Cards first. It gives you a chance to try out your creations. We love being creative and making fun stuff. We think Flibbix is the easiest and best way for most people to make their own games, but you can also try making board game cards out of paper or blank business card templates from an office supply store, too.

The important thing is having fun, playing with others, and getting a chance to be creative.

In our next post, we’ll look at game play.