Where ideas come from
This is the question a game designer hears most often. And it is a question that is hard to answer honestly without the answer sounding falsely modest.
The truth is that ideas are not the hard part. Coming up with one is free and fast. We have a list with dozens of games on it that will never be made. The hard part is recognising the one idea that will survive two years of work, and letting go of the rest.
But where do they come from? A few recurring sources.
From a mechanic
Sometimes the starting point is purely technical. You play a game with an interesting idea badly executed, and start thinking about how it could be done better. Or you come up with a rule that sounds like fun: what if players could not see their own cards? What if the game were played in two halves, with the choices from the first half inverted in the second?
An idea like that gives you no way of knowing yet whether it is a game. The only way to find out is to try it. Most mechanical ideas die in the first test, because they are interesting as thoughts and dull to play.
From a theme
The other direction is the opposite: first there is a world, then the rules.
For us this is the more common starting point, because the whole idea of the company begins with a place. Northern Finland is full of subjects nobody has turned into a board game: the yearly cycle of reindeer herding, the polar night and the return of the light, the villages along the rivers, the old trade routes, weather that decides what you do today. None of this is exotic to us, and that is exactly why it is genuine.
The trap with a theme-led game is that the theme stays on the surface. If you could repaint the game with a space theme and nothing else would change, the theme is doing no work. In a good thematic game the rules say something about the subject: if a game is about a northern winter, the weather has to actually wreck your plans, not just be a picture on the box lid.
From a constraint
A surprising number of good ideas come out of necessity.
"This has to fit through a letterbox." "This can have 54 cards at most." "This has to be learnable in five minutes." A constraint cuts down the options and forces you to solve the problem inventively. Unlimited possibilities usually produce bland design.
In our own work the production limits, such as box size, component count and cost, are not the enemy of game design. They are its frame.
From irritation
The most honest source is dissatisfaction.
A game night where one player was knocked out after ten minutes and sat waiting for an hour. A game whose rules were five pages too long. A game that was fun with three players and broken with five. A game every Finn knows but nobody genuinely enjoys any more.
Moments like these produce the question "why has nobody fixed this", and that is a better starting point than any flash of brilliance.
How to handle ideas
Three practices that have worked for us:
Write everything down. An idea that is not written down is gone within a day. We keep a shared list where everything goes, without judgement. Nothing has to be done with the list; its only job is to exist.
Let them sit. An idea that feels excellent on a Friday evening is usually mediocre by Monday. That is good news: time is a free and reliable filter. The few ideas that are still interesting a month later have earned a prototype.
Test early. An idea on the table always beats an idea in your head. The faster you get it into physical form, the faster you find out whether there was anything in it.
What an idea is not
One last thing worth saying out loud: an idea on its own is not a game, and it is not valuable.
People regularly bring us ideas accompanied by a request for a non-disclosure agreement. We understand the impulse, but in the board game business the idea itself is not what gets paid for. The value comes from the work done after the idea: hundreds of playtests, the polishing of the rules text, a hundred small decisions.
That is good news for anyone thinking about making their own game. You do not need a brilliant idea. You need an ordinary idea and a great deal of patience.
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