Customer Reviews

The Game Inventor's Guidebook

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According to its subtitle, The Game Inventor's Guidebook covers: "How to Invent and Sell Board Games, Card Games, Role-player Games, and Everything in Between!" In other words, the book covers the modern, *non*-computer game industry.

The book opens with short descriptions of some of the success stories of the past couple decades:
* Trivial Pursuit
* Magic: the Gathering
* Dungeons & Dragons
* The Pokemon Trading Card Game

If you're not familiar with the stories behind these games, they make very interesting reading, especially for indies. With the exception of the Pokemon TCG, these are stories of dedicated individuals pursuing a dream and not giving up when things get tough.

After that, the book describes how the game publishing industry works, and provides summaries of the companies and games that a would-be "game inventor" should be aware of.

More useful than the birds-eye view of how the industry works are the frequent interviews with publishers and game designers. These are probably the best part of the book. Such modern "name" game designers like Reiner Knizia (Lord of the Rings, Tigris & Euphrates & many, many more), Brian Hersch (Outburst, Taboo), Mike Fitzgerald (Mystery Rummy, Wyvern), and more, discuss how they got started and how they approach game design. Equally informative were the interviews with publishers such as Mike Gray of Hasbro, Peggy Brown of Patch, Mike Osterhaus of Out of the Box, and others.

Because of the costs associated with games of this nature, the book several times cautions against self-publishing your game ideas, recommending that the would-be game inventor go through a publisher. Despite this advice, the book also points out that such major successes as Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, and even the perennial Monopoly were created and made successful by determined self-publishers before a major publishing company picked them up.

The book does provide 4 chapters discussing what's involved with self-publishing games. Like most of the book, though, the chapters are at a very high level, providing more of a broadbrush overview than details. Still, the chapters cover the topic quite well.

One point that the book stresses over and over is that all game design should begin by first deciding on your audience. If you don't care about the marketability of your game, then you can start where you wish and enjoy creating and playing your game. But if you want to appeal to a segment of the population bigger than "You and People Just Like You", you have to pick who you want to appeal to. Once you know who you're making the game for, you can adjust and refine to better appeal to those people.

All in all, The Game Inventor's Guidebook provides an entertaining and educational look at the non-computer game industry and its current markets. If you are serious about game design, and want to learn about all aspects of game design, and not just within the computer industry, this book provides a good place to start.

If anyone wants to understand how game companies make decisions on what they publish, who to contact in the industry with ideas, or wants a solid helping hand in getting their ideas together and heard, this is a book you need to have. It starts out slow (the first few chapters aren't as pertinent as the latter ones), but it's written concisely and is a quick and easy read, essential to books like this which are all about getting usable information to the end user. The inside stories on companies and publishers is entertaining and partinent, and the contacts list for publishers and agents is invaluable. In short, a very good book at doing what it set out to do.

"The Game Inventor's Guidebook" is a bit of a misleading title as there's very little here to guide an aspiring inventor in getting into the industry beyond the obvious advice to get a broker if you want a shot at penetrating the big companies; and don't sink your life savings into producing a game yourself thinking you're going to strike it rich. Tinsman has put together a respectable, if somewhat lightweight, overview of the industry with brief glimpses at the backstories of some of the more successful games and their inventors that's most appropriate for the gaming aficionado.

NOTE: If you're interested in video game design, look elsewhere.

As a professional toy inventor and manufacturer, I found this book to be right on target. It gives both current and prospective inventors critical the type of ammunition needed to succeed in this highly competitive, extremely speculative business. I wish that I'd read this book when I started out fourteen years ago. Even now I found it helpful to be reminded of some of the basic precepts and underlying structure of the biz.

Anyone who is trying to design a game or get one published should buy this book.
It covers success stories of popular games such as Magic and Trivial Pursuit and gives advice on all aspects of creating and selling your game.
This includes finding a publisher or publishing a game yourself and deatils on a variety of game companies.
It is well designed and easy to read.

This is a very informative book. It does not talk about how to design a great game, but it talks about the game industry in general and what to do once you have a game that you'd like to get published.

Brian Tinsman knows a lot about a variety of different segments in the board game market. His knowledge is quite impressive and he write in a manner that is easy to understand.

I found this book to be interesting, but not all that insightful. It is written for a beginner or someone who is completely new to the field of board game design. On the other hand, if that is you, you'll find this to be quite helpful.

If you are thinking of designing a game...read this book! Great stories about the history of many hobby game favorites. Insightful interviews with the major players in the industry (although I do wish the interviews were a bit longer). The book is at its best when explaining what NOT to do when designing or publishing your game.

For those of us who have a game idea that we'd like to have published, this book will save you months of trial-and-error learning about game publishing and the game market.

The book helped me realize that Hasbro isn't the only game publisher and Toys R Us isn't the only game retailer. I especially enjoyed the anecdotes from game designers and publishers.

In addition, the book provided me with the confidence and knowledge to approach publishers with my game design.

Brian Tinsman does an excellent job explaining the inner workings of a difficult industry. He provides real examples of how games have failed and succeeded, how to pitch a game to an agent or manufacturer, and briefly covers self-publishing.

If you are looking into the games industry as a possible business venture, buy this book. It is well worth your time and money.

NOTE: This book is NOT for video game design.