The Game Inventor's Guidebook: How to Invent and Sell Board Games, Card Games, Role-Playing Games, & Everything in Between!

I wasn’t looking for a book on this subject, but when it came up as a Kindle Daily Deal I snatched up the ebook. I’ve always enjoyed board games, both as a player and as a graphic designer. The Game Inventor’s Guidebook was published in 2008. As the subtitle indicates, it’s not just about board games but all manner of non-electronic tabletop games. Author Brian Tinsman is a successful game designer and developer himself. At the time of publication he was game design manager for Wizards of the Coast, the company that now owns Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.There have been several books published on board game design in recent years. Tinsman’s guide is less about designing games and more about selling them. He outlines different scenarios for accomplishing this, from working with big mass market game companies (think Hasbro/Parker Brothers), small specialty game companies, or self-publishing. He describes the various market niches and emphasizes the importance of finding the right one for your game idea. Since this is a business guide, Tinsman’s primary criteria for judging a good game is the amount of money it makes, so he has much to say about mass market games (the kind you find in Target, for example), but he also provides advice to those interested in more specialized hobby games and strategy games on how to pitch to the companies that publish in those markets. For the prospective game creator, Tinsman imparts much insider information on the do’s and don’t’s of approaching and courting games publishers. He does talk about what makes a good game, but he doesn’t delve too much into the mechanics of specific games. In fact, it seems he purposely avoids that topic because he thinks the best games come from completely new ideas as far removed as possible from previous and familiar games.If I had discovered a how-to book like this when I was in college, I might have taken a game design career more seriously. As a middle-aged reader and moderate board game enthusiast, however, I just enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at the industry. I work in book publishing, and the two industries are very similar. Much like authors, most game creators don’t make enough to give up their day jobs, but some do, and every once in a while someone strikes it rich with a runaway idea like Trivial Pursuit or Pokemon. It is really interesting to read the histories of how some of the best-known games were created—both the superstar success stories and the horror stories of company failures. There are also quite a few brief interviews with games creators like Reiner Knizia (Lost Cities, Lord of the Rings), Brian Hersch (Outburst, Taboo), and Alan Moon (Elfenland, Ticket to Ride). As a how-to guide, the book is quite comprehensive and practical, even including contact information for many games companies and sample contracts for game creators.This is a business advice guide, so it’s not always electrifying reading, but Tinsman manages to keep it lively by liberally interspersing anecdotes, interviews, and games industry lore amongst the how-to material. Overall, the Game Inventor’s Guidebook is a brisk and informative read. The ebook is inexpensive enough that it is definitely worth a look for tabletop gaming fans, who are likely to enjoy Tinsman’s insider look at the industry.

I read this book on the recommendation of game designer Lewis Pulsipher. Tinsman, game design manager for new business at Wizards of the Coast, describes the book's target audience as "really just for one person...the lucky person destined to create the next category-defining blockbuster game." In fact, though, his book addresses anyone who seeks to have a game published, one way or another, with valuable advice and insight toward making a game concept into a reality.Tinsman opens with a series of anecdotes about four of the wildly successful games of our time - Trivial Pursuit, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and Pokemon. These stories of blockbuster proportions are exciting to read, inspiring to imagine, and yet a little daunting to the hopeful designer. What are the odds of coming up with the next Monopoly? Is that too crazy to consider?Perhaps, but Tinsman offers much more than just a review of the peak games of the age. He follows with chapters on the nature of the industry, the considerations that publishers have when they consider a new design, and the motivations behind designing (or as he likes to say, "inventing") games. I found especially interesting his description of the inner workings of a game company and the internal considerations that weigh on whether a game is published.Tinsman spells out four "markets" for games, and here I could quibble with his taxonomy, but really, his classification works for the purposes of his book, which come down to the different ways to approach design, publication, and marketing. He categorizes games among the following markets:- Mass market (what you'd find in a big box retailer like Target or WalMart)- Hobby games (roleplaying, miniatures, and trading card games)- American specialty games (a "catch-all" category for small print-run games like strategy games and "how to host a mystery")- European market (German boardgames, largely)- Others (unique market type games, such as sports games that might sell in sports-related retail outlets, etc)Okay, that's really five, but he spends little meaningful text on the "Other" category except as an out for the types of games that he doesn't cover otherwise. Although the average gamer might not break down games into these categories, they work for purposes of addressing the different ways that a designer would approach a publisher with a prototype and the different ways that a game would be published and marketed.Tinsman provides considerable detail on specific games and companies that he feels the reader should become familiar with. Many are familiar to the regular gamer, but a few gems emerge that are worth investigation.Self-publishing had always struck me as a last great act of desperation, but that's not so much the case with the resources available to today's self-publisher. Tinsman spends some time discussing the special considerations that have to be taken into account to try to bring a game to market yourself. The upside potential and the downside risk are both staggering.A nice aspect of Tinsman's format is that he intersperses the book with interviews of key figures in the game industry and "Insider's Views" on publishers, information that he is in a unique position to provide as a longtime member of the industry himself. He provides remarkably insightful perspective on what designers and industry figures consider in bringing a game from concept to market. These vignettes make clear that there is more than one way to skin the boardgame cat, and different people have different priorities and visions on what they hope to bring to the gaming world.With all of this background, Tinsman walks the reader step-by-step through the process of conceiving and scoping a design, developing it, all the way through getting it on contract. This final walk-through brings all the elements of the book together into a soup-to-nuts accounting of all the steps that a designer will need to follow to make a game concept into something that people can buy, take home, and play.Appendices include considerable resources - contact information for game companies, brokers, conventions, as well as sample forms for letters and agreements that the designer will find handy in conducting business with potential publishers.Brian Tinsman's Guidebook came well recommended by Lewis Pulsipher, and I am not disappointed. I hope my readers find it as valuable for gaining insight into the workings of the gaming industry as I have.

This really isn't good enough it's a quick and inadequate walk through of gaming industry such as can be found in 20other places for free and a couple of interesting interviews none of which are exclusive to this book.If you want a book of depth on game design I recommend the Scaff Ellias Richard Garfield collaboration, this is largely full of out of date lists

Brian Tinsman is a successful boardgame designer - otherwise, he wouldn't be part of Wizards of the Coast's Magic team. However, Tinsman is as much about business as he is about game design and it shows: like every business meeting I've ever been to, this book isn't about what you think it's about. There is, basically, minimal information on game design, the bulk of the text being concerned with how you get your prototype in front of people who might want to publish it. In this regard, it is little more than an extended "Dos and Don'ts" list, with little practical information on how to go about creating a process for yourself, and avoiding the pitfalls which so many others have taken before you. Whilst the interviews with successful designers (Richard Garfield &c) are engaging, they do little to de-mystify their techniques other than to say: "I have a ton of ideas, man, then I throw most of them away, only developing the best". Whilst this is interesting, it's not exactly insight. My suspicion is that the blurb on the book actually does a terrible job and miss-sells it.If you want a great book on how to actually approach the design of your prototype, I recommend Game Design by Lewis Pulsipher. That is a book about process, set out in a clear and instructive way. It may be twice the price, but it's ten times the book that Tinsman's purports to be.

This is more of an industry manual for publishing games and operating within the industry. There is very little information about the actual design process.As long as you know what it is, there's nothing wrong with the book, but it should really be re-titled "how to publish and sell boardgames"

I bought this book with the intention of learning how to design boardgames - things like how to play with the variables, different layouts, types of game, and perhaps a little psychology behind what makes board games popular etc. This book had virtually nothing of the sort, and instead focuses all but a few pages on how to sell your board game. I felt deceived by the title.

very interesting and thorough. It tends to be USA based but it does cover the rest of the world quite well