Wei_Chang_CSG

A wannabe board game designer

[上杉真人｜ボードゲームデザイナー @dbs_curry]

名古屋のボードゲームデザイナー数名で、共同でオフィス兼テストプレイラボを作ることにしました。まだ何もないですが、ここからやっていきます。

[Nick Bentley 🎲 @Nick__Bentley]

Notes on Launching an Entertainment Product, 65 days out:

The thing nobody tells you about how to launch an entertainment product.

When you sell a problem-solving product, the main thing to communicate or demonstrate is how the product solves the problem. Obviously.

When you sell an entertainment product, you’re selling an experience, not so much a solution.

How to communicate the experience?

It's an easier or harder question to answer depending on the kind of entertainment.

👍 Movies have it pretty easy. You can communicate what a movie is like with a trailer, which is like a tiny version of the movie itself.

👎 Books have it harder. The experience of reading a book is mostly in the mind. In principle, you could make a trailer showing text snippets from a book, but text is cognitively demanding, not very visceral, and snippets would be too small and context-less to communicate well. Nor can you watch someone reading a book and understand what the experience is like.

I suspect that’s why the book industry relies so heavily on testimonials. In the absence of a direct way to show you the experience, publishers use descriptions of others’ experiences, suggesting yours might be like that. But that's pretty indirect, and therefore unconvincing.

I make board games for a living, and - too bad for me - it's more like selling books than movies. I could make a trailer showing the game on the table and a person taking a turn, but for strategy games that doesn’t communicate the experience well.

So this is what I'm struggling with as I prepare for our next launch. Here are some options I’m considering:

1⃣ Testimonials. Like book publishers, board game publishers already rely on testimonials. I wonder if I can do a better job of using them. As far as I can tell, people judge testimonials along two dimensions:

1. how authentic they are
2. how effusive they are.

In an attempt to improve authenticity, I've taken to using unsolicited testimonials as much as I can. That is: testimony we didn't ask for, but rather found.

However, I've noticed prospective customers tend to assume no matter what testimonials a publisher uses, they’re unrepresentative or manipulated. I don't blame them, because there’s so much funny business in marketing. That greatly weakens the power of testimonials.

2⃣ Thinking about the above makes me think we could do a better job if we summarized the sentiments of all the comments we found about a game online, positive AND negative.

There was a reviewer on Board Game Geek who used to do this, and I found it very helpful. There's no reason we couldn't do that too. Here’s a collection of links to all the reviews he did this way:

https://t.co/dMyPtdNwCT

3⃣ Another way to build trust and authenticity is to communicate not only who a game is for, but who it’s not for. I believe doing so is good for both publisher and customer.

It's good for customers because it makes it less likely a customer will waste money on a game that isn't for them.

It's good for the publisher because self-criticism builds credibility and trust.

4⃣ Another option: make extensive content, both text and video, about what we're trying to accomplish with our game, and how. This could be supplemented by booking podcast interviews where we can talk about those things. The challenge would be making it compelling enough for anybody to want to experience it.

5⃣ Slightly more out there: you could have play testers play, but have them record what each turn felt like immediately after taking that turn. Maybe a set of aggregated “turn diaries” would lead to clues about how to more clearly communicate what the game is like.

6⃣ Finally, it might help to communicate by analogy: to say game A feels like game B mixed with game C, where games B and C are popular games most people know.

Those are my thoughts for now. I'm sure I'll have others because I will be thinking about this challenge a lot.

[Nick Bentley 🎲 @Nick__Bentley]

Notes on Launching an Entertainment Product, 73 days out:

I’ve read a ton about how to launch products lately. As someone who makes board games for a living, I see a glaring problem with this literature:

Nearly all of it applies better to problem-solving products than entertainment products.

For example, it’s common advice to provide digital educational materials that help customers solve the problems they're trying to solve, in the lead-up to a launch.

Though entertainment products can be construed as “solving” customer problems, it's hard to translate that into actual communication.

I feel this problem acutely because the qualities of board games are hard to communicate, even relative to other entertainment products. Trying to convey what feels distinctive about a strategy board game is like trying to describe a color to someone who hasn't seen it before.

Also customers have a ton of hesitancies that don't apply to other entertainment products, like:

“Will it be too hard to learn?”

“Will anyone play it with me?”

Anyway, because writing is learning, I’ll share notes about what I’m learning as we prep for our next launch.

At the end, I’ll summarize what I’ve learned so others don’t have to feel as lost as I do.

If you know of resources pertinent to this problem, I'd be grateful if you shared them in a comment (and please repost to raise the chance of that happening).

[Nick Bentley 🎲 @Nick__Bentley]

What's the "why" of a board game publisher?

The most obvious answer: to make and sell great games. But that's a surface answer.

It's said what a drill-maker really sells is holes.

Likewise, what a game-maker really sells is playfulness and connection.

For me, this begs the question: are we doing everything we can to help others live playfully and feel connected?

I don't know, but I do know making games is difficult and requires extreme focus, which puts us at risk of losing the forest in the trees.

I feel a strong myopia right now, because we're about to launch a game on Kickstarter, we're all nervous about its reception, and in times like this, the mission has a way of disappearing in the fog of essential short term goals like "Sell copies", which aren't about playfulness and connection.

The following question makes me wonder if we should think in a different way:

"What are the obstacles to playfulness and connection?"

Here's one thing that's not currently an obstacle: a shortage of games.

5000 new board games are published every year. The 5001st makes a marginal difference of about zero.

On the other hand, here's a big obstacle: Life is hard. Hardship makes us less playful and less connected.

That begs the next question: how could I help others maintain playfulness and connection, despite hardship?

This is a tough question. I've worked assiduously in my life to do this very thing, and made progress with effort, time, and determination.

For example, there's a mantra I repeat to myself multiple times/day:

I accept I'm dying

and all things change

but I won't wait for life to be easy to be happy

and I'll love everyone through every pain

That last line is vital. By repeating this to myself every day, I've gotten to a place where, when I experience hardship, I also experience the thought "don't let this diminish your love", and then I practice focusing on the love I feel. The things we focus on grow. This has made life better.

So I'm more playful and connected because of these things. But can I help others with this stuff? I don't know. I know it's worked for me, but it also took a lot of work and was counterintuitive.

It feels so different than making board games, but it really is all about the same thing for me: making life better. How do I help others with that most effectively? How do I make a living doing that?

[Ryan T. Brown 🎮🩷 @Toadsanime]

There may never have been a day as big as today for indie games.

On the back of mass layoffs of major AAA studios, today more high-profile and under-the-radar gems are releasing on May 9th than any other day in recent memory. They need your support.

Here's a thread of 'em! 🧵

[Geoff Engelstein @gengelstein]

Geoff’s Law: Your game is more complicated than you think, even when you take into account Geoff’s Law.

[Patrick Leder @PatrickLeder]

Kyle decorating our booth. Booth 2846. #paxu

[Wei_Chang_CSG @CsgWei]

@GameMarket_ 皆さんのサポートに感謝している。限定10個に達しました。あと5個は会場に持ち込んで販売する予定です。

[Wei_Chang_CSG @CsgWei]

@GameMarket_ ゲムマ初参加・初作品です！

日曜日の[チャック横丁27]で『ピンポンを吹いて』

30秒でルールを説明し、笑い声が絶えない、緊張感もある。2-6人対応でプレイ時間5-10分。

予約は10個まで、よろしくお願いします。

https://t.co/jX74HJHXui

[EmperorS4 Games -#ゲームマーケット2026春 【P-54】 @boardgame_love]

ESSEN Preorders are rolling in! Join the excitement and reserve your copy of our game today ！

https://t.co/zEkWcAO00u
#SPIEL23
#EmperorS4

[EmperorS4 Games -#ゲームマーケット2026春 【P-54】 @boardgame_love]

#EmperorS4 will soon reach the wonderful Essen #SPIEL23 booth 5L-101
🤫Surprises in our ESSEN preorder! https://t.co/zEkWcAO00u

[Leder Games @LederGames]

It's a WHALE of an expansion! Coming to @BackerKit this fall. Sign up to be notified: https://t.co/vptT7NWBSY

[Smoox✈️TGM26🌸W07 @smooxchen]

搶頭香 Lucky First Incense

兒童版的規則簡單歡樂，很適合不想太動腦糾結的時候來一場٩(˃̶͈̀௰˂̶͈́)و

#playtest #prototype #SPIEL23 #essenspiel

[Wei_Chang_CSG @CsgWei]

@PatrickLeder At what stage of the game should the indie publisher start to approach distributors? I was today years old to learn that some do this before the game is printed.

[Patrick Leder @PatrickLeder]

At the end of the day, I just want to make beautiful things. I do not think one has to be in pain to create art. Sometimes though you do have to take your pain and use it to expose the truth. Then you can forge that truth into beauty. Truth is the highest form of beauty.

[Smoox✈️TGM26🌸W07 @smooxchen]

Wait, what!?
PATHOGEN🦠Collector’s Edition!?
@KolorDeep

[Patrick Leder @PatrickLeder]

My next Kickstarter will be for a game called the Ship of Theseus. It will ship with 2 copies of the game.

[Cole Wehrle @colewehrle]

If you happen to be at #GDC2023, you can come see me talk about the necessary challenges of historical game design at 9:30am Monday and then at 5:30pm I'll be on a panel about the state and future of tabletop games. Find both at the Tabletop Summit in Room 3016, West Hall.

[Wei_Chang_CSG @CsgWei]

Using both physical components and tts testing my soulitaire little card game #Farewell.

[Wei_Chang_CSG @CsgWei]

Prototyping a Chinese Poem Writing game.
Really surprised at the space that 5 random characters could offer.