Board Game Designer Raederle

Question: How long have you been designing and creating board games? And what got you into it?

Answer: I suppose I invented a card game when I was eight, but it was just a sketch of an idea really. I made my first board game prototype when I was eighteen. I created another prototype for a different idea when I was nineteen, but I soon learned that having my epic board game idea printed by conventional means available at the time would cost $1,000 and I gave up. (At the time it was an inconceivable amount of money.)

I never could tolerate playing with index cards. Even with my first prototype I used my printer to print the cards, then cut them out, then used card sleeves to make it so that they could be shuffled and played with like ordinary cards. But even that didn't really satisfy me. Board games being beautiful is much of their appeal to me, so I wasn't thrilled with a hodgepodge method like that for game creation.

In 2013 I learned about The Game Crafter, a print-on-demand service. Less than a year later my first edition of Voice of Conscience was released. I recently renamed this game to simply Conscience, with the subtitle: The Game of Ethical Quandaries. I also immediately began work on another game, Heir to the Phoenix Crown, but it took twelve revisions before I was satisfied enough to release a first edition. For each of those first twelve prototypes I had all the cards professionally printed with full art and such. The artistry of a card is part of the prototyping for me. 

I'm like that with book writing too: the page layout is important to me. Not quite as important as the content, but nearly so. The punctuation, the font, the margins, the headers, the page numbers, the chapter headings, the spaces or indications between scenes – all of these elements are major contributors to what makes a book a joy to hold and behold. With board games the same elements are there, but many, many more visual elements come into play. 

In board games, it isn't just about what the visual elements of a card demonstrate in composition, color, shape, and mood, but what the cards communicate in terms of how to play the game. The symbols chosen communicate much to the game player, and much of the artistry of a game is about conveying as much as possible with as little text as possible. Too much text makes a game slower, prone to people having to pass cards around so that they can be read. Good symbols can be read across the table even in semi-poor lighting and semi-poor color perception. Part of those first twelve iterations of Heir to the Phoenix Crown was learning to make the symbols much larger and clearer.

You can see all my published board games here.

In summary, I dreamed about making games idly sometimes as a child. I made some halting attempts in my late teens; getting really into the design process but eventually petering out after a year of trying to make prototypes by hand and being disappointed. And then I really got started in my early twenties, about a decade ago, when I discovered a way to get my games professionally printed – even on their first prototype.