Beginning

Here's a summary of my prototype: 1 18x27 poster board playing surface, 90 assorted cards, 10 player pawns, scores of cardboard chits, player sheets...it has a lot of bits.

The first thing I did was make a list of everything needed (imagine the box contents portion of the rule book). If I needed 16 chit representing a lumber resource, that's what went on the list.

The next step for me was the game board. Because my game is historical, I found a blank map of the region I needed and printed it, and I added the necessary details by hand.

With the game board roughed, I made chits. Dozens of chits. I hated that part the most. After chits came cards, which were just slips of paper taped onto normal playing cards (using card sleeves works well too).

Once I had all the bits made I ran a few solo play tests while the board was being made into its 18x27 size. This helped me figure out what was needed more or less and I was able to alter the game to what was needed.

So, the short version is this: if it is a card game, start with cards, any cards, though try to keep to a theme and work that theme to completion (eg- all action cards done, all resource cards done, all faction cards, whatever). If it's a board game, start with the board.

At this point it's now more important for you to take the plunge and get started than it is to obsess over the little niggly details. Those will come.

Depending on the game, most of the time I'll start by making copious notes on mechanics, theme, concepts and the interplay between them all. I'm typically a theme guy, so at times it can be as simple as a cool name or snaphot of a game, and the following notes help refine and condense the idea into something tangible.

I always want a pretty good idea of where I'm going, with as complete an image of the complete game as I can muster before prototyping. Each game is different, so how things progress from there is unique...but I would find staring a a deck of blank cards MUCH more daunting if I wasn't able to immediately begin assigning value or purpose to those cards.

Interestingly enough the game I decided to self-publish first, Scrambo, was such a simple idea that I went right into prototype. The whole process from concept to playable was a matter of hours, less than a day. It's had plenty of testing and refining since then, but my typical process of copious note-taking wasn't necessary since the concept of the game is so simple.

I posted a video where you can play a couple turns of Scrambo here on BGDF, just in case you wanted to check it out :)

I think my approach is very different from the other responders.

The only thing that I will always do is to start a new page in my gaming wiki, with the working title. I will quickly write down whatever it was that inspired me to start this new game, and some quick notes on the details. These notes are so brief that only I could possibly read them and make sense of them; they are just reminders of the bits I want to remember, and not fully formed ideas.

At that point, my goal is to do the minimum I can do to get to a working prototype. If the game will have cards (most of mine do), then I'll start a Google Docs spreadsheet with the interesting values for each of the cards, and start to fill in a few. All the while I keep telling myself to do the minimum for a quick prototype and not to flesh out every last card nor to try to balance anything. (In spite of telling myself this, I usually do spend too much time thinking about such issues.)

Next I will make a quick nanDECK program to print out the cards. Since I am usually just copying one I already have and hacking it up, this is pretty fast. I'll just print out the significant fields with very little attention to layout or formatting.

Once I have a something remotely playable -- never more than 20ish cards -- I'll print out the cards on card stock and cut them out. Then I'll scavenge from my stocks or from games I own to get dice, meeples, coins, whatever else I need to play the game. If it needs a board, I'll just scribble that on a sheet of paper, or, if that's too small, on my dry-erase hex board I use for D&D gaming.

I'm between 2 and 6 hours into this whole process, at this point, hardly ever more than that. Now I will play a couple of games solo, just to see if the mechanics works at all. As early as the first time through, I'll scribble on the cards, changing values, etc. and then start the game again.

A number of games die right here. The mechanic that I originally thought was clever just doesn't work, or it's already too complicated and simplification just reintroduces the problem I wanted to solve, or something else that has caused me to lose interest in the idea.

If I do still like the idea, now I will go back and do some of the things that the earlier responders mentioned. I'll write up the notes on theme and mechanics such that someone else might be able to look at them and understand what I'm saying. I'll copy the bits I scribbled on the cards into the spreadsheet, and possibly think a more about balance, adding and/or modifying cards. This represent indulging myself, because it is what I enjoy about game design.

Then I will make another cycle of solo playtesting and incorporating changes before I even consider showing it to anyone else. On my third version, I will typically drag my son in for a few tries. He is more of a board game nerd than I am, and always has good comments. We will freely scribble on the cards and change rules as we play. At that point, I consider that I'm well past the "beginning" phase that you asked about.