Our top tips for presenting your board game to publishers.

Okay, you’ve just put the finishing touches to your game and you’re really happy with it. It’s an absolute winner. But now what? How do you get your game in front of someone who can ultimately get it onto the shelf and into someone’s shopping basket? Well, here are our top tips for showing off your masterpiece.

RULES

Before you do anything, make sure your game plays really well (have you tested it enough?) and double-check it is original (look online to make sure that someone out there hasn’t already rudely invented a game just like yours). If your game passes both these tests, you’re ready to show it off.

Things not to worry about: the name of your game (that can be changed) and what it looks like (that can be crafted later). What gets publishers excited is a great game idea.

Okay, the first thing to do is to write out the rules. A Word doc is fine. Hand these to a stranger and see if they make any sense to them. If they do, they’re good to go.

Here’s an example of the simple rules for our game, What Came First.

SELL SHEET

Next, sum your game up in approx. 100 words on another sheet of A4. Include useful info like numbers of players, age, time and contents. If you want to sketch a box, playing pieces or use some images from the internet to jazz it up, that’s great, but it’s by no means essential. Just make sure it’s easy to read and have your contact information somewhere on the page too. A tiny tip is to make sure your sell sheet prints easily, ie no block or background colours, as some publishers will print out the sell sheets they are sent to go over at a later date.

VIDEO

Finally, it’s time to make a video explaining how your game works. The point of doing this is that most people can’t be bothered to read the lovely rules you lovingly typed out above and would rather watch pretty pictures instead. Don’t stress about this, you don’t need to be Steven Spielberg, just use your phone and keep it super simple. Simply talk through how the game works using the prototype you’ve been testing on your friends. Just enough for people to get the idea.

Step 1. Using a phone is fine.
Step 2. Get someone to film you demoing the game.
Step 3. Walk the viewers through the gameplay and how you win.
Step 4. Watch your video back to make sure it makes sense.

And that really is it. If you’ve got any brilliant board game ideas you want to pitch to us, just head here.