The Playable Story: My Backwards Journey to Designing Games 

I need to be honest with you: I might be doing this whole game design thing backwards.Most design wisdom starts with mechanics. You build the engine first - the dice rolls, the card drafting, the worker placement - and then you find a theme to wrap around it like decorative paper on a gift.

I start with art. It’s probably the wrong way to do it. But it’s the only way that works for me.

• The Seed: A Piece of Art I Love

My process begins with a spark. Sometimes it’s a piece of public domain art I stumble upon that I instantly fall in love with. I have a physical need to make *something* from it. Other times, it’s a story or a theme that gets its hooks into me, demanding to be a game. Or, honestly, sometimes I just want to draw, and I need to give my drawings a purpose, a reason to exist beyond the page.

This is where the mechanics come in, not as the driver, but as the servant. I look at the art, I feel the theme, and I ask: “What is the story here?” Then, I try to match mechanics to bring that story to life. I’m not just building a game; I’m building a playable story.

Often, this starts with a deck. I love designing a regular deck of cards or a tarot deck around a theme that fascinates me. Those 52 or 78 images become the entire world of my next game. They are the characters, the settings, the events. My job is just to figure out the rules for how they interact.

• Building a Sandbox, Not an Ocean

My brain loves to run. If I let it, a simple idea can spiral into a sprawling, complicated monster of a game that I know, deep down, I will never finish. So I’ve learned to build myself a sandbox.

I decide early on if I’m making a big game or a small one. If I want it to be small, I give myself hard limits. I will choose 9 cards. Maybe it will grow to 18, or even 27, but that’s the fence. I limit the number of tokens. I create a list of components before I’ve even figured out how to use them.

This isn’t a restriction; it’s a liberation. By lowering the number of choices I have to work with, I make designing possible. The boundaries force me to be creative within a confined space, rather than being lost in an endless ocean of possibility.

• The Not-So-Good, The Learning, and The Picasso Principle

Does this process sometimes lead to games that look great but don’t play so well? Absolutely. That’s probably true of a lot of my early drafts.

But I think about Picasso. He created something like 700 paintings. Only a handful are world-famous masterpieces. A lot of them aren't very good. But without all those average, experimental, or just plain "not-so-good" paintings, he never would have painted the great ones.

It’s the same for me. Without the designs that don't work, I won’t learn how to make one that does. I won’t learn a new way to use a card, a different way to score a point, or a clever twist on a tired mechanic. The "failures" are the tuition I pay for the lessons.

• The Secret Life of a Game (Before You See It)

I work best alone. In silence. Uninterrupted. I have the ability to hyper-focus, to fall into a creative rabbit hole where I forget to eat for a day and don’t notice the sun going down. That’s okay. Time is a resource I have, and I choose to spend it here.

Ideas come when I’m looking for them, and they also ambush me when I’m not. They bubble up when I’m drifting off to sleep. I’ve learned to keep a notebook by the bed. Sometimes, I forget to go to bed entirely and pull an all-nighter, tweaking a rule set or rebuilding a card’s text for the tenth time.

And I have to feel it. I can’t just design in the digital world. I don't see the mistakes on a screen. I only see them on paper, in my hands. So I print everything. Hundreds of cards for a simple game. I keep them in folders, these artifacts of the game’s evolution. I can see the small changes, the scribbled-out words, the repositioned icons. The game has a history, a secret life, long before anyone else lays eyes on it. There are dozens of playtests with just me, surrounded by scraps of paper, blank cards with pencil marks, and printouts of rules that have been rewritten a dozen times.

My designs don't just appear. They evolve, grow, and even shrink until the day I’m finally ready to invite someone else in.

• The Moment It Comes to Life

That’s the magic moment. When another human being sees it, when they’re drawn in by the theme or the art that started it all. That’s when the game really comes to life. It stops being a solo daydream and becomes a conversation. When it starts to include the ideas of others; a suggestion, a critique, a different interpretation, that’s when it starts to shine.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes the opinions aren’t favourable. Sometimes my vision isn’t hitting the mark. It’s hard to hear, but it’s okay. Because I learn.

Recently, with the encouragement of my play testers, I tackled something that had always intimidated me. I transformed text-heavy actions and scoring conditions into icons. I created my own little language. It’s small, it’s simple, but I made it from scratch, all by myself. And the most amazing part? Other people can understand it.

• My Way

So this is my process. This is my way.

I design for myself, because I love playing board games. I design for my family, in the quiet hope that they’ll want to play them with me. I design because I have a deep, fundamental need to make things with my mind and my hands.

I start with a picture I love, I give it a story, and then I build it a world to live in. It might be backwards, but for me, it’s the only way forward.