I work for North Star Games, where one of my jobs is to listen to pitches from game designers who want to license their games.

I see more than a hundred pitches a year and I’m astounded by how bad they are. 99% are bad. No exaggeration.

Here’s the problem:

More than 4000 board games are published annually. Thanks to all that competition, fantastic gameplay is just table stakes. A game also has to be a great product, which means it must satisfy some constraints in addition to fantastic gameplay. Most designers, especially hobby game designers, don’t address the product side in their pitches, or do it poorly.

I can boil the product side of a pitch down to two key questions:

Question #1: What is UNIQUELY awesome about this game?

I mean UNIQUE. I want to know what it has that no other game has. The answer could relate to theme, mechanism, feel, components, potential art, etc. When I ask designers this question, they usually answer in one of two ways:

They point to a not-unique feature, for example: “It’s a really social game and plays great with 7 players”, or “There’s a ton of tension in the bidding”. But those descriptions apply to other games and they don’t sell copies. They point to a unique but banal feature, usually some small twist on gameplay that isn’t enough of a head-turner. For example: “It’s a route-making game along the lines of Ticket to Ride but you have to buy easements to make your routes.” – the kind of thing you’d expect to find in expansion or variant of a preexisting game brand. It doesn’t matter if it’s awesome to you, the designer. All the matters is whether it’s awesome to the people who would buy the game.

With additional prodding it usually becomes clear the game has no feature which is both actually unique and actually awesome. We can’t bring a game like that into the current market and expect it to have any chance of being a hit. That means we can’t publish it, because this is a hit-driven industry: staying in business depends on hits. So it’s essential for us to see a potential path to hitsville for each game we publish. That brings us to the second question:

Question #2: How will this game become a hit?

For a game to be a hit, it not only has to be uniquely awesome, it has to find its audience. How will it do that?

If you can tell a story about how the publisher can reach the game’s audience, you have a huge leg up. Ideally, the game is perfectly tailored to the audience the publisher already has. For example, my company is best known among hobby gamers for our Evolution-themed games. As a result, many of our fans have a scientific worldview and love nature. If you have a uniquely awesome way to embody those values in a game, it’s easy for us to show it to people who care.

But there are other ways too. Maybe you’re friends with Beyonce and she’s agreed to share it on Instagram. Maybe you have convincing data that an unusually high number of people who play the game evangelize it to their friends. Maybe you already made an app of it and it has 10,000 active players. Maybe you’ve discovered an audience during your market research that other publishers don’t yet know exists, so there’s low competition. The only limit is your creativity.

Answer the above questions first

Until I’ve got good answers to the above questions, I don’t want to know details about your game. So address these product issues at the top of your pitch. Be succinct, specific, and concrete. No superlatives, and minimize adjectives. The template for your pitch is:

“This is a [what kind of game is it] game where you [what players do in the game]” “The uniquely awesome thing about it is [uniquely awesome thing]” “Here’s how the game will be a hit…”

If you knock these arguments out of the park, I can figure everything else out for myself via follow-up questions and playtesting (tip: don’t talk about how good the gameplay is. That’s what playtesting is for).

This isn’t rocket science. Why do so few game designers do this? Two reasons:

They don’t fully appreciate how severe the competition has become and what games must be to succeed now.

They design games for themselves, and then only think about how to turn them into products after they’re finished.

A deeper problem

The second point above is instructive because it means the problem runs deeper than pitching. The problem is the design process.

To make a publishable game, write down a game’s pitch BEFORE you start designing it. Try to come up with a concept that’s a significant departure from what already exists in some key way that will matter to people, and which isn’t too hard to communicate. A classic example is the idea of a legacy game: “A game where the rules change each time you play, depending on what happens in each game”. That’s the kind of thing you should be shooting for.

After you’ve come up with your concept:

Get feedback from gamer friends about whether they think it’s a cool idea. Protip: show them pitches for a few different concepts and ask them to pick their favorite. Giving them a basis for comparison makes it way easier to interpret their responses.

If you decide the pitch is good enough to make a publishable game of it, let it be your guide for the design. Ask yourself over and over: “How can I refine this game to better satisfy the promise of the pitch?’

Use the evolving game design to explore how to improve the pitch further, so the pitch and the design evolve together.

Finally, if you’re pitching your game in-person, practice your pitch until every word of every sentence is perfect, and it comes out right every time.

A proposition for game designers

I’ve got a mutually beneficial proposal for you game designers. I’ll be more successful if I can find designers who heed the advice above, and you’ll be more successful if you heed it. So I’ve provided a worksheet below, where you can write down and refine your pitches for games over time, as you work on them.

I’ve made it a google survey so I can see who’s using it and how. If I see you putting together a great pitch, I’ll get in touch with you. Maybe I can help.

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Question

If you think there are other questions or lenses through which designers should think about the construction of their pitches, I’d love if you mentioned them in the comments.

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