How to Design a Role-Playing Board Game

Create templates in a word-processing program for your terrain or draw them onto cardboard or poster board. Different types of terrain include grass, hills, paved floors and floors with walls. This terrain forms the environment that your characters interact within. These templates should be at least 6 or 8 inches square to accommodate the miniatures you are using.

Print your terrain pieces and glue them to cardboard for stability.

Find volunteer players who are willing to test your game.

Give each player a miniature that represents the character he or she is playing. You can either allow players to create their own characters or you can use pre-made characters and explain how each is played.

Lay the terrain pieces out according to the scenario you designed. You can lay out the entire dungeon and keep the contents of each room a secret, or you can reveal one room at a time.

Reveal the contents of each room as players enter. Place miniatures to represents monsters on the board and anything that players can see in the room. Use cutouts for items like treasure chests, pillars, torches or anything else in view.

Play out the encounter using the combat system that you designed for the game. You can use the rules from the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons for combat or you can create your own combat system.

Take player feedback about difficulty, the length of the game and any changes to combat and character balance.

Make necessary changes and continue testing the game.

Repeat steps 3 through 9 until the game plays the way you want it to.