​Foreword
Making a game for your friends and making your game for the world are two completely different tasks. However, this isn't THAT blog post. Instead, I want to talk briefly about ways to save time, money and energy (the big three) when making a game that you know you will send to print one day.
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Just as a bit of me and why I have some insight into this area of board game making, I have to date dealt with six different manufacturers, four Chinese, one American and one British, and I have produced four prototypes and two published products (soon to be three). I have made the mistakes, I have made the errors, the very costly errors at that, so hopefully, through this post, I can save you some time, money and energy, so you can better spend that on doing something we all love in this community, making games!

Just a quick note, I will be mentioning my upcoming game Langskip in this post a lot. This is only because it is a game I just recently sent off to manufacturing, so I have up to date information and images regarding such process. This is in no way a marketing post. 

Tip 1 - Use a template first (or make sure your artist is using a template first). At the beginning of my game development journey, I cannot tell you the number of times that I had to change every single card in a 

Foreword
Everyone has played a gateway game, and usually, it's a player's first venture into the hobby that they have this experience, whether it be at a friends house, a board game cafe or just a game that they picked up on Amazon. This is the underlying pin of what I want to write about in this post. ​

What is a Slow Burn?

I enjoy the slow burn of some board games, and what I mean by that is I love it when about two-thirds of the way into my first playthrough of a board game, the eureka moment hits me. I think this is why this game is fun; this is why my decisions are important and matter. And that statement at the end right there is the crux of what makes an enjoyable slow-burning gaming experience for me. 

Having meaningful decisions in a game can be tricky to design regardless. Having them from the get-go can create intense analysis paralysis for the newer player. That's why I think having these decisions be more meaningful towards the end of the game can allow people to canter into the experience without much drag and hesitation. This experience is essentially my entire design philosophy, so I appreciate it when identifying other games' strategies to making slow-burning "gateway" games.