Into the mouth of madness!

I do the same thing that Dralius does. Usually I come up with a theme, and a major mechanic. The two games that I'm working on right now are 'Ironclad', and 'Forgotten Gods.' I'll walk you through my though process when designing Ironclad, as it's the simpler of the two games. You can probably skim the rest of this post. If you want to see the game, there's a design journal on this site for it.

Ironclad has definitely been the easiest game for me, and is the most likely to be followed through all the way to completion, provided I can find the artwork required. I was sitting down watching a tv show about jousting, and I thought - "how cool would it be to have a game about jousting?" From there, I started thinking about how I wanted to fit a game into that theme. A miniatures game seemed a bit silly - at most, jousting is 2 knights riding towards each other and smashing lances into their opponent. Not detailed enough to really require any visualization of where each knight is located in the lists. So what about board-game? If I went that route, I could focus a lot more on the macro-scale of jousting, with knights roaming the country and entering tournaments, winning fans and prestige in different areas, and becoming the most famous knight in the realm. But that's boring - people who like jousting like it for the action, if I wanted a game where you just wander around playing in tournaments, I could just as easily theme it on football, or rugby. So I settled on cards.

'Forgotten Gods' is also card based, and each player has 1 character card and the players all work together against the deck. I didn't want that cooperative feel for jousting - I wanted it to be 1v1 player interaction. But Knights did get injured or die during jousts, so giving each player a single knight means that they might not last until the end of the game. So I need to give them access to multiple knights. Cool, done. How do they earn knights... there was a sticking point. Do they pick them from the very beginning? Do they have a deck like in Magic? Having a deck for each player means a lot of cards, which means a higher production cost to transfer to the consumer, which makes the game less accessible. Letting them all pick from a selection of cards before the game starts takes time away from the action, and makes the game take longer as they potentially argue over how fair it is for someone to get a particular knight. Can't do that either. So I added a mechanic where the players buy Knights from a communal pool as the game goes on, sort of like buying powerplants in PowerGrid. Then I thought that rather than bombard people with 50 knights, why not add in some form of customization? In the show, the horses were a big deal - a horse could make or break a contest. So I added in horses, and gave them rules that adjusted the Knight's effectiveness. And I added armor, which also affected the knight.

Great, we know that we have cards, the players are bidding on knights, horses, and armor as the game advances. What about the combat? Do I just want to make the players fight each other 1v1? That's fine, but then it's only a 2 player game, what if you have lots of friends over - I want you to be playing my game, not another one! So I made it multiplayer. I gave them Tournament cards, representing where their knights are dueling, and bottlenecking the players so that a few of them will joust each turn. This also gave me a win condition - each tournament awards prizes based on where you place, so the player whose knights have the most prizes at the end of the game wins. The tournaments also let me pace the game - there are 6 tournaments. Now I can start doing match to figure out how many of each type of card I'll need in order to have enough to get through a game.

For combat, I wanted a bit of randomization, to represent the fact that the players are only a coach to the knights - no coach has any control over when Beckham is going to play well or if he's going to be off spacing-out and playing horribly. So I added a dice. A D10 more exactly, because the even percentages make my math easier - I could rewatch the show and record how often knights actually made contact, how often lances broke, and how often knights were unhorsed or injured. Suddenly I had target numbers to use as an average - they hit around 50% of the time, so a 5+ was required on the roll. But my average modifier to the roll is +2, so I boosted the number to 7. An 'average' knight will hit 50% of the time. I didn't want the game to just be about who had the better knight, the best horse and armor, and could roll the best, so I added a card element representing a few jousting tactics used by knights of the time - players played these cards in secret to add deeper strategic value to the game. These cards also serve as currency when buying the knights, horses, and armor.

Suddenly I had a game, and only needed to iron out the details. Players have a team of knights, represented by cards, which they enter into a selection of tournaments over a 6-round "season," to joust against other players to determine how many prizes they win, and the player who has the most prizes after 6 rounds wins. Then it was just a matter of sharing the game, getting some feedback, working out some prototypes to playtest it repeatedly, iron out some bumps, and now it's on to artwork and publishing. Coming up with the game itself only took me about 2 hours. Playtesting etc I expect to take a few weeks, and artwork could take months if it happens at all. And I'll be publishing the game to a print-on-demand so publishing is quick and painless (although I won't make much money initially). If it does well, I'll have a leg to stand on when I take it to a real publisher.

No problem, glad to have helped. Don't be afraid to start small. Smaller games have fewer problems, because there are fewer mechanics. Take a game as simple as Blackjack, for example. You can explain Blackjack in just 3 sentences:
Aces are 1 or 11, Faces are 10-12 starting with Jacks, every other card is worth it's number. Each turn you ask for another card, or stop. The winner is whoever gets their total score closest to 21 without going over.

I used to be the kind of nerd who would ramble on about the minute details of a game long after someone had stopped caring or even listening. One of my girlfriends, bless her heart, finally asked me to teach her how to play M:tG so that she could at least understand what I was saying. I went out and spent $5 on two decks of 60 cards. I had one Red/White deck, and one Red/Black deck. All the lands were standard, none of the creatures had any effects like "Fly" or "Fear" or "Tap to ___." The only spells I put in were basic Red spells like Fireball that simply dealt damage when you played them. She learned the game in less than 20 minutes. M:tG is actually an astonishingly basic game once you strip away the years of accumulated card-effects.

Draw a card every turn, lay down 1 land every turn, and tap lands to play cards. Tap creatures to attack, and the other player can tap creatures to block. Every card comes into play tapped, and you untap at the beginning of your turn. Attack number is how much damage you do to the other card, defense number is your hitpoints - lose all your hitpoints in one turn and the card dies. If nobody blocks, the damage goes straight through to the opponent - knock their life down to '0', and you win the game.

5 sentences. That's all it takes to explain the core rules of MtG. Compare that to the 3 sentences it takes to describe Blackjack. The next game she wanted to learn was my personal favorite - Warhammer. I tried the same thing, set up two basic armies - each had a regiment of archers, and a regiment of swordsmen. An hour later and she was confused and frustrated. Warhammer is a very complex game; it has a 300 page rulebook for a reason.

Every mechanic within a game is just a smaller game in itself. Magic and Blackjack are so simple that they're practically a single-mechanic game. Checkers is a single-mechanic game. Risk is a multi-mechanic game, you have the movment and control across the regions, you have an economic aspect of raising troops, and a combat mechanic when two armies clash over territory. Getting each of those mechanics to blend seamlessly is hard. Try to effectively teach someone Risk in less than 10 sentences. It's a complex game.

Start small. If you have to, pick a unifying theme for each of your games and make them tiny and simple. Then, once you've got some experience making small games, start finding ways to link your games together. Eventually you'll have a large game with several different mechanics - going from checkers and craps, to Risk.