Our Family Passion Project: Create a Board Game!

My family and I are big on board games.  We have quite a collection of games that we like to play together.  We play some of the traditional board games like Monopoly, Clue, and Battleship.  We play family games like Apples to Apples and Trivial Pursuit.  But our absolute favorites are some of the lesser-known strategy games.

Some of our favorites are:

  

Settlers of Catan
Carcassonne
Caverna
Ticket to Ride
Hero Realms
Splendor
Settlers of Catan (family style, dice game, 2 person card game)
Machi Koro
Lewis and Clark

Juliana is sad that I am beating her at Hero Realms.  I am the no-mercy-mommy!

Ethan's wheels are turning while playing Mastermind.

Levi beating me at Patchwork.

We love the website Board Game Geek for reviews, to discover new games, to watch how-to videos, and to clarify rules of game play.

So when faced with the challenge to come up with a 20% time Passion Project, I thought it would be fun to create my own board game. 

Where to start?  

Step 1:  Play a whole bunch of board games with my kids.  As a family, begin to log some of the characteristics of the game.  What do we like and dislike about this game?  What makes us want to play this game again?

Step 2:  Research what it takes to create a board game.  How much of a game should be skill and strategy?  How much should be chance?  How many is the "just right" number of players?  How much time should it take to explain the game to new players?

Step 3:  Brainstorm.  Write down all of my ideas and the ideas of my kids.  Do we want it to be a quest-type game?  A deck-building card game?  A resource strategy game?

Step 4:  To be continued... We'll have to do steps 1-3 and see what opens up from there!