Hero Time Academy
How to Make a Board Game
To make a board game, you design and playtest it, choose the pieces, write the rulebook, work out the costs, create the artwork, manufacture it, safety-test it, ship it, and then publish and market it. The Hero Time Academy covers each of these ten steps with a category of in-depth guides, written by the team that manufactures games for 300+ publishers and creators.
Follow the steps in order the first time. Some of them overlap: you start the rulebook while you playtest, and you should talk to your audience about the game from the very start.
Check Out Our Free Resource: Checklist for Making a Game
This comprehensive checklist guides board game designers from concept to production.
Step 1: Design Your Game
Start with the experience, not the components. Write down three emotions you want players to feel, such as excitement, humor or a sense of progress, and the moments in other games that made you feel them. Then decide what players do on their turn, what their short- and long-term goals are and what ends the game.
Know who you are designing for: a player persona sums up your typical player, and the types of board games show which mechanics and play lengths those players expect. Then board game development begins, as a loop of rough prototype, playtest, learn and change. A paper prototype or a Tabletop Simulator version is enough at first. Play at least five rounds with it, and test with people who don't know you, not only friends and family.
Step 2: Choose Your Board Game Pieces
The parts of a board game, its pieces or components, are the cards, boards, tokens, dice, miniatures, inserts and the box (see our board game pieces overview). Make a first list while you design and a final list once the game is stable, and check every piece with your manufacturer for size and feasibility before the artwork starts: the print templates your artist works on depend on those final sizes.
Standard sizes and materials keep the price down, especially on small print runs, and fewer, smarter pieces make the game faster to set up and cheaper to make.
Step 3: Write the Rulebook
Don't leave the rules to the end. Start a draft while you playtest and update it after every session; over half the designers in a Hero Time survey recommend exactly that. A clear board game rulebook opens with the objective, lists the components, walks through setup and a turn, and ends with scoring and examples: the parts of a rulebook template lists them in order, and good rulebook design makes it easy to learn from. Before you print it, have it proofread through rulebook editing, and give players reference cards (player aids) with the turn structure and the rules they forget most.
Step 4: Work Out the Costs
Price the game before the artwork is made, so you never pay for art on a game that is too expensive to manufacture. What it costs depends on the components, the materials and the print run, plus shipping and fulfillment once it is made; How Much Does It Cost to Make a Board Game? breaks it down. Send a manufacturer your component list, quantities and target market early, so you know whether the game works at the price you want to sell it for.
A long-standing guide is the x5 rule: your landed cost should be no more than 20% of the retail price. Our guide to board game pricing explains how to adapt it to today's sales channels.
Step 5: Create the Artwork
Bring in an artist once the gameplay, theme, pieces and budget are settled, not before. Make a vision board of art that fits your game, approach artists whose work you love, and send them a specific list of every illustration and component that needs art so they can quote. Then set the files up for print with the right templates, CMYK colour, bleed and 300 DPI: our guide to print ready artwork covers it, and so does our list of the most common mistakes in board game graphic design.
Step 6: Manufacture Your Game
Board game production starts once your files are final. A sample comes first, so you can check the materials and how all the components fit together; then the factory produces the full run while you get updates and videos from the production floor.
At Hero Time, mass production takes from 30 days for a simple card game to 90 days for a heavy miniature game with new molds, after the files are approved, and the minimum order is 1,000 sets. Our guides explain board game production step by step and how to choose a board game manufacturer.
Step 7: Safety-Test and Label It
Decide your players' age early, because it decides which safety tests your game needs in each market: a CPC certificate for the US, CE marking for the EU and CE or UKCA for the UK. Games for young children need extra care with small parts (see board game components for kids). Plan the tests before production and label the box with the right warnings and marks.
Step 8: Ship and Fulfil It
Plan where the games go before they are finished: a warehouse, a fulfillment center that suits your sales channel (Amazon FBA or another 3PL) and, if you crowdfund, every backer's address from your pledge manager.
Then choose how they travel: air freight is faster and ocean freight costs less per game, as our comparison of air freight vs sea freight shows. Hero Time ships worldwide, including duty and VAT.
Step 9: Publish Your Game
Decide how the game will reach players: sell it yourself, crowdfund it, sign with a publisher or work with distributors. Our guide on how to publish a board game compares the channels.
Crowdfunding is not free money. In Hero Time's experience, campaigns of up to $30,000 spend around $6,000 on advertising and the infrastructure around the project, and income isn't guaranteed even when they fund. If your game is affordable to make and you believe in it, you can simply make it and start selling.
Step 10: Market Your Game
Marketing starts on day one, not at launch: talk to your audience about the game from the early stages of development. Find your target audience and where they spend time, build a website and social pages, and reach reviewers and community leaders. Then advertise on at least two platforms, test your ads against each other and keep improving them. Acquiring an audience takes persistence; our board game marketing fundamentals show where to start.
Ready to Make Yours?
When your design is stable, our team checks your pieces for size and feasibility and quotes your game, with a reply within 48 hours. Get a quote.