Book Club: The Game Inventor's Guidebook

Part of my plan for creating games is to learn new stuff.  I figure that there is a lot to be learnt by doing, but an increasing amount is being written on game design, so I am reading books on the subject too.  So, first up I give you...

"The Game Inventor's Guidebook: How to Invent and Sell Board Games, Card Games, Role-Playing Games, & Everything in Between!" by Brian Tinsman.

I picked up this book in Kindle format, largely as a bit of light holiday reading (the last few years I seem to have mostly stopped reading fiction).  Tinsman has a fairly long and definitely successful career as a game designer, mostly related to Magic: The Gathering, but also including assorted other tabletop and digital games, and at the time of the book's publication, was in charge of acquisition of new game designs at Wizards of the Coast, so he certainly should know his stuff.

The book flows fairly well, being largely built around anecdotes about various figures within the industry, which grounds the book's advice in a collection of case studies.  There isn't really very much about working at the rock face and crafting games, but that is because the book is essentially an overview of how various parts of the tabletop games industry operate, and is intended  to help a wannabe game designer progress all the way to getting a game onto shelves in actual shops, and this aim is supported by extensive appendices, including samples of the sort of contracts a designer might expect to see coming from a publisher.

Given that my focus for the foreseeable future is on learning to make better games rather than trying to get published, The Game Inventor's Guidebook is really more entertainment for me (yeah, I know, I have a weird idea of entertainment), but the descriptions of the workings of the games industry (and particularly the larger parts of it like Hasbro and Mattel) were fascinating.

Probably the biggest take-away for a would-be game inventor tallies with discussions I have read elsewhere on blogs and in forums: do your research and know the market.  A big chunk of this book is taken up with profiles of companies and games that any game designer should know about (yeah, Monopoly, but also Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, Taboo, Warhammer, Axis & Allies, a bunch of Euro games, etc.).  The book is a few years old, so there are a load that would be added if it was written today, but it's a good section.  And to drive the point home, there is a chilling story of a guy who was trying to pitch a clone of Pokemon to Wizards of the Coast and who didn't seem to know that this is what he was doing.

Anyway, I am reading/have read a few other books on the general subject of game design, so I may well add further posts like this one as time goes by.