Over at the Board Game Designers Forum, there is a monthly game design competition. A theme and a few parameters are given for a game—say “time†and “has dice, but no more than threeâ€â€”and from that, you have roughly two weeks to turn around a 500 or 800 word description of a game. Not the complete game, but the idea behind the game and some expression of how the game would play. The winner of the competition gets nothing at all; all that participate get the experience of starting a game design in public and gathering criticism from other designers ((I have entered two or three times, never won, but still benefited from the experience)). From these proto-games, real, finished games may emerge.
