what game themes are popular at the moment

In that sense, my suggestion is, just design a game that's fun to play with your friends and family! Having that, you can think about what to do to take it to the next level.

I have to partially disagree with Jeff. It is important to know what will sell when designing games, if you want to bring them to market.

First, let’s think about games into two different types of categories. There are mass-market games (typically manufactured by Hasbro, Parker Brothers, etc) and there are hobby games. I’ll loosely define a hobby game as any game that has less than 20,000 copies for the first printing.

Why do people buy mass-market games? If what appears on the shelf at Toys-R-Us and Wal-Mart is any indication, these games sell because of game-recognition or themes.

The consumer thinks, “The Spiderman movie was cool, let’s buy our child the Spiderman game.”

To quote Bette Lutz of Cactus Marketing referring to mass-market games, “The theme or subject of a game constitutes 60-70% of what sells that product to the manufacturer.”

So why do people buy hobby games? When I buy a game I evaluate it using three criteria - Designer, Mechanics and Theme, Art and Quality.

First, have I played a game by the designer before? Did I like his/her other games? I think of the designer as a kind of author.

Second, what are the mechanics of the game? I typically look for games that employ a variety of mechanics and not completely luck based. It is my belief that the game mechanic is how consumers of hobby games think about the games we buy. I don’t think I bought a game about San Juan, but rather I bought a German-style board game.

Finally, I look at the theme, art and production quality. Is it on a topic that I would enjoy playing? For example if the theme is about “relationships” and I typically play games with other guys, that theme does not pique my interest. But pirates, wars and history are generally safe themes for a group of guys. Also does the artwork look nice? Are the pieces easy to handle and of good quality? This is typically a good indication of adequate play testing – I have purchased games only to realize that the designer did a terrible job, so quality is important to me.

Where I agree with Jeff is this, if you attempt to design a game based on what is currently selling in the market, you have already missed the boat. If you look at the market and say, Pirates are popular this year, what will happen is one or two Pirate games will emerge as market leaders. In one or two years when you finally get your game to market there will be no way that a newcomer will be chosen above a well established game.

An example is Carcassone and Keythedral. I consider Carcassone to be a market leader because my non-gaming friends have played it. Keythedral, released using a similar city building mechanic of Carcassone, is a great game but will never have the same market penetration as the 5 or 10 different Carcassones.

So the question remains. How do you find out what will sell in the market. It is not an easy question to answer. The large manufacturers do consumer research, but this is typically too costly for hobby games. Since this data is important for their future products, you won’t find them sharing it with the world. Only after you are a well-established designer will they bother requesting you to design a game around a particular theme.

I think the best way for hobby game designers to figure out if a theme/mechanic in their games will sell is to do a lot of play testing. Find several groups that are your target audience. Get them to play test your prototype. Your prototype should include a solid theme, great artwork and great mechanics. Then ask them, how much would you be willing to pay for this game? If it the gross-margins are too low then ax the game.

Jonathan