What's the easiest way to prototype a board game design?

Question

In an idle moment I had an idea for a simple war game simulation. (Really simple - honest!) I'd like to prototype it, just to see if the game mechanic I thought of has any merit. I don't want to spend hours, though.

What it would need is a map (think Ticket to Ride), stackable tiles (eg the tiles in Carcassonne) with half a dozen possible values, and some little figurine-y things.

The simplest way seems to be to draw the map out on a big sheet of paper, and maybe use Scrabble tiles (each letter representing something...) Wondering what other people do in this situation?

Answer 1

Your instinct is correct. In the first stage you're only interested in seeing if your mechanics are feasible so all you need are some abstract representations of your game components. A game may consist of roads, towns and cities but to test, all you really need are three different things.

You can either:

1. Repurpose components from other games
2. Have a collection of generic components in various shapes and colors (Maybe even something like Piecepack)
3. Do everything on slips of paper or cardboard

Anything beyond that would probably be overkill at this time. I've recently read an article about 3 German game designers (1 aspiring, 1 first-timer and 1 "pro"). Among other things the article described the pro's design room, which had a huge selection of meeples, dice, cubes, chits and other generic game pieces in various colors. Such a selection takes time and money to build but is probably the fastest way to test an idea.

Answer 2

If you have some programming knowledge, you might try to make a computer version of your game. The difficulty and time needed for this task depends heavily on the mechanics of your game; you might be able to program only part of it (in a reasonable time). The advantage of this approach is that once the core program is written, modification of the game mechanics can be implemented and tested quickly.

Testing is made easier and quicker this way. For instance, if your game involves cards, you can easily try dozens of drawing schemes, while shuffling a physical deck takes time.

Drawing maps on a computer also makes it easier to make modifications at a later stage.

There may be a program that can be of assistance in this task, but I do not know of any.