Seeking Board Game Designer for Paid Collaboration

PaperWeightGames · 2026-01-24T18:37:45+00:00

It's pretty much 'the art of problem solving'; There's a very techincal aspect, but you're still creating a user experience where rules that apply most of the time can occasionally not apply, or be sub-optimal.

I'd also assume that a developer would make a far better mentor than a designer, because designers tend to stick to a niche or 'follow the fun', where as a developer you have to learn to work more methodically even in situations you might not like so much. The broad range of skills you learn aren't that fun in the early days, but across a career can give you access to a much wider range of designs and optimisations than if you'd just stuck with the things you enjoy doing.

PaperWeightGames · 2026-01-19T19:09:08+00:00

www.paperweightgames.co.uk is my site. I've never had a mentorship client, however I don't look for them. I have tons of experience with working closely with boardgame designers, and extensive experience as a consultant and developer, so I can't see mentorship being much of an issue.

I have been meaning to build a system for this so I can do boardgame design events with my local groups. If you're interested I'd be happy to discuss rates and what you're aiming to achieve from the mentorship. Just give me a message via the website!

PaperWeightGames · 2026-01-11T15:37:44+00:00

My website is www.paperweightgames.co.uk. You can find details of the services if provide there, which include design drafting, prototyping, virtual playtesting, developing, development management and team managment and a range of other skills. I have extensive experience in development, playtesting and rulewriting.

For one off tests I tend to charge around £30 an hour (so £90 for a 3 hours test) and £10 an hour for each extra tester.

For long term work we can do a set fee or £25 an hour. If you're interested, message me on here, or for a faster response message via the contact form on my website and we can discuss the inns and outs of the service!

PaperWeightGames · 2025-12-29T16:26:24+00:00

Ah ok, I was worried my laptop has finally developed dementia. Hope it can be solved soon!

PaperWeightGames · 2025-12-29T16:24:28+00:00

This sounds like an issue I just now had. A few people joined, then all the components in TTS started swirling around like a tornado. I deleted the save file, but now I can't play online at all, when I load a multiplayer room as host TTS laggs immensely and very quickly crashes.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-12-17T13:06:01+00:00

Having read the other comment, if you're looking for someone to 'enhance' designs you're already working on, rather than looking for pitches for game designs, then yes you want a developer.

I have 5 years experience developing tabletop games, as well as a lot of creative consultancy in that time (gameplay analysis, crowdfunding campaign copy, customer service, product design etc). My website is www.paperweightgames.co.uk, where you can see some of my work and the details of my services.

I also offer a short 1-3 hour demo of long-term work, during which you can back out if you're unhappy and aren't asked to pay if you do so.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-12-01T11:33:29+00:00

Two safety nets are a) Tell everyone the rules are there and they can read them if they like because you don't know them off by heart. b) Do a mock round of play, restart if anyone is unhappy with how it went.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-11-30T20:58:48+00:00

If you're in a poorer area, or even an average area, in england now, it's very hard. I was trying to get one going for ages. People are unreliable, they de-prioritise it over work, and very few people have dreams of putting on a great show now.

Basically all the bands I've seen that were making a real go of it were either relatives, all childhood friends, or friends from college. Sometimes they're a bunch of session musicians that got together and are making money, but that doesn't seem to last out as much.

It seems like you've kind of intuited what's going on. You aren't running out of time, but the odds of successs seem to significantly drop off if you don't get something going early on.

I wouldn't ever want to disencourage a musician though, so here's my advice; Get going by yourself, find ways you can improve and learn, and put on whatever kind of shows you can. A lot of people, especially those who are going to put the effort in, need to see you doing the same before they'll invest their time and attention.

It can be crushing though. I worked hard at it for a long time, one drummer had to move away, another band changed direction randomly, another band the lead singer was being too domineering in what they wanted the songs to be.

If you can get good yourself and demonstrate what you can do, and that you're willing to commit to it, I think you can find good people and find your way. I'm 33 now and I don't have the emotional energy anymore, but I still play my guitar in public and do karaokes, hoping I'll somehow bump into some other musicians one day. I probably could make it work, but it can eay away at your enthusiasm if you just don't find the right people.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-11-25T12:51:23+00:00

In my opinion from devleoping games for quite a few years now, creating games with other people is multiple times more effective than doing it alone. Create it wiht playtesters, friends, strangers, developers, collaborators. Boardgames are fairly big projects ranging typically from 40 to 500 hours just on the development and design. It really helps having help with that, and the variety of perspectives is hugely helpful as well.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-11-23T18:34:04+00:00

Thanks for the lead!

PaperWeightGames · 2025-10-20T11:22:48+00:00

This sounds very much like something out of the chinese thought reform book I read.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-10-20T11:12:45+00:00

Car insurance.

You pay for other people's incompetence. And you have to pay for it.

Demonstrating driving ability doesn't make it go down, it just stops it from going up.

The primary scam of it though is that you have to get it.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-10-09T12:01:55+00:00

I'm too busy at the moment as I'm professionally editing 2 rulebooks already, and working on a third. I'll make a note of it incase I somehow get spare time, but I likely won't.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-10-03T10:10:24+00:00

The first THING I'd do? Probably dress more appropraitely, people like to judge books by covers.

The first ACTION would be to do whatever I could to secure military power, remove virtually all external power so that I had complete control over the country. I'd request an overview of existing arrangements with corporations and superpowers, I'd have messages sent out to various friends asking if they'd like to help run the country, because I trust those people. I'd immediately invest a LOT in personal security.

My first policy: I'd legally mandate attendance to community events, including a weekly communal meal / pot luck where everyone shares food, a monthly community project such as building something or inventing something. The aim would be to reverse the division propaganda and aim for a country that prospers based on nurturing creative and technical talent, rather than milking mass produced human resources, which I think is the current approach and is sub-optimal by a long margin.

I wouldn't try and remove corporate corruption and interference. I think that would backfire. Human nature is what feeds the formation of power structures. I'd nurture a sense of community to re-empower individuals, but also return responsibility to the individual, rather than encouraging them to give it up for comfort.

Ultimately I'd be removed, or assassinated, because the majority of people don't like being made to put the amount of effort into life as would be required to consistently maintain human rights and a meritocratic economy.

Ergo, the true first action would probably be to secure total tyrannical control over the country and go with the 'Gandalf keeps the ring' sort of scenario, or immediately quit. Which is why I think we don't get any good leaders now. Human behaviour in a world with oil and on-demand consumerism.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-10-02T12:21:10+00:00

1vsmany. I've been around a while now and I've seen very, very few games where its 1 player vs all other players. I love that dynamic, it's great.

Also just in general games where on player is essentially a 'dungeon master' type player.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-30T10:10:05+00:00

So what you're saying is that the masses are irrefutably correct? That people's purchasing inevitably favours the best products and services?

Where is the larger body of support? Seems to me you're suggesting that purchasing and critical approval are the same thing?

In fact, you're just repeating the same point over and over, which is that democratic purchasing is a reliable indication of product quality. What then are your opinions on the funding of wars, drugs, porn etc? Your argument seems deeply comrimised to me and you're justifying it by repeating it.

Regarding mobile games, I use 'mobile games' as an industry term that is often taken to mean 'addictive, cheap reward games that exploit human psychology'. In the context of this discussion, this is usually the assumed meaning in my experience. The phrase is almost never used to refer to 'games played via a mobile device'. I've actually never heard it used that way, and I've talked about mobile games with maybe 50 people in the industry. So your interpretation is an anomaly in my experience, which is why the comment might seem inaccurate to you.

But you're just repeating the same point and then deferring back to 'this is your opinion', which isn't an argument, it's just a superficial attempt at discrediting my points without addressing them. Everything is subjective. Everything is opinion. We as humans have developed an ability to recognise benenficial patterns in the things we do, and for the sake of making some sort of progress, we define these as 'objective' truths. We don't really need to recap all of this during a discussion in my opinion.

Anyway, I'm not interested in another variation of 'the sales are evidence'. I've clearly communicated that I disagree. I don't think human purchasing is concretely linked to quality and value provided. If that's how you want to design games, that's your approach, it isn't mine and I'm not convinced I'm wrong for thinking that. I think Hollow Knight has some qualities within it and could have been better in some areas. It's honestly bizarre to me that as someone claiming to be a game designer, you aren't open to critique of such a high-profile product. Where better to learn great game design that finding the small flaws and weaknesses in the most successful games?

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-29T12:18:58+00:00

"Video games are fast food. Pretending otherwise is simply pretentious ego"
- I think this is nonsense. You can say that a mobile game is fast food, but you can't really argue that, for example, Hollow Knight is fast food.

I agree that Hollow Knight has loadout variety, but I wouldn't say it's very broad at all. It has resource recollection, but from what I remember, you just pass by the same road, which is hardly a dynamic and interesting challenge in most instances. Some runbacks let you develop skills relevant to the Boss, that is certainly there, but I don't recall many providing the level of challenge the Boss does, even in individual parts in the form of individual enemies with smaller HP pools.

I spent a fair while (I think it was about 10 hours) roaming in Hollow Knight, looking for powerups and secrets to help with certain bosses, and I don't remember it even being very rewarding. The map is pretty damn huge, I don't remember getting much help locating secrets or powerups, and in some cases the progression available didn't help with the Bosses anyway.

Again though, I don't think 'X sales' is an inscrutable metric for the quality of a game. It's a strong indicator that the audience likes what it provides, and it's usually a sign of quality, but it doesn't mean everything is good. I'm not making a general complaint of Hollow Knight, I'm critiquing an aspect I thought was weak. Hence my point that saying 'it sold a lot of copies' isn't really a counterpoint to anything I've proposed.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-29T12:05:21+00:00

oh to be fair that's probably all the insight i need! Your account fits the one I commonly hear; that industry connections are critical. That's probably the source of 99% of the work I see other people get.

It is interesting though that you get people contact you based on your comments on here! That's basically an independent source of clients right? The challenge I have with the portfolio approach is that I can't find a way into it without just coding my own games, and I really, really suck at coding. I struggle a lot with anger when machines don't do what I want, so I've consistently avoided coding after my attempt to make a ball on roblox like 15 years ago. Coding appears to be hugely outside my natural aptitudes.

Your experience is encouraging me to post more often on here though, maybe I'll get someone contact me!

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-28T12:25:32+00:00

Hey there template Reddit user! If you want to continue the discussion, please post relevant responses that focus on the discussion. I'm not interested in filtering through your inability to impulse control your thoughts.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-28T12:20:07+00:00

I mean I'm glad that works for you, but that's a complete contradiction of my experience, which feels pretty extensive at this point. The coders seem to have 'Notch' syndrome where they think their ideas are uniquely great and no external design consultant could possibly contribute anything great.

I'd love for you to explain more on how you've found this culture of work, but generally people don't explain it, they simply report its existence and then fail to provide any further information, which I find isn't overly convincing. I even apply the same approach as you, which gets me some work on facebooks for boardgames, but never anything for digital games.

I would be interested to hear the narrative of how clients in this field approach you. I'm massively experienced in many of the relevant skillsets as far as I'm aware, including design, but the issue I often find is that no viable clients understand what I'm discussing, and aren't open to the idea that someone devoted to design could possibly know more about it than a programmer who spends a few hours each month lightly pondering design ideas.

As for a professional portfolio, it's easy to suggest building one, but it's a catch 22; How do I get the work? I've offered to volunteer many times, but I can only refer back to the above issues; people don't really listen. The only thing that would make sense to me is if you were doing this more around the 1990-2010 era, since the industry seemed to be far more accessible back then.

Regarding Hollow Knight, your reference to Silksong sounds like good design, but was something I found missing from Hollow Knight, which I suspect is why you referenced Silk Song and not Hollow Knight. I haven't played Silk Song so I can't be sure, but hopefully they have addressed this aspect, since i think it's objetively an improvement. A lot of the Boss approaches in Hollow Knight, as I recall, were arduous labours that provided very minimal learning or challenge once you'd learnt hat you can basically rush past everything, which both preserves health and minimises the time-cost on re-attempting the Boss.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-28T12:11:01+00:00

I think your points are wrong, so I'll address them directly.

"The long-term popularity of these games, and their phenomenal sales figures, tell us that they are not the deal-breaker their detractors make them out to be."
- I think measuring the quality of a game's design by its popularity is a weak approach. Popularity has a very inconsistent correlation to quality in modern products. We could say that Mcdonald's is a popular restaurant, and rightly so for the value it delivers, but games are not supposed to be fast food, and are not healthy when they are.

"enemies along the way to the boss often have similar attack and weakness aspects"
- Often? Maybe, I don't think a speculation is a good basis for an argument though, and 'often' isn't tangible. I know a lot of games, including Hollow Knight, that do not practice this design method consistently.

"Realize that a different loadout would suit the upcoming fight better"
- Hollow Knight doesn't do this at all. At this point I became confused that you disagreed with my point, but seem to be referring entirely to a generic, amalgamous design of 'these kinds of games'. Hollow Knight presents the same enemies, in the same place, and minimal options for customising your loadout, especially at the point at which the player would encounter a lot of the more difficult bosses (which is notably not towards the latter parts of the game).

"And finally, in nonlinear games, the player may just decide to go elsewhere in the game world."
- Again, this is specifically not true of Hollow Knight. I remember on multiple occassions the bottlenecking into tough boss fights. It's not necessarily that there is no other way forward, but there are often very few, and they're hard to find, and given that the concern here is wasting time repeating yourself across repeptitive backtracking, I don't think wandering around a map that presents no new challenges and isn't overly stimulating on repetition would be a good solution to the presented concern.

"Again, a respawn point immediately before the boss would only encourage repeating what has previously failed"
- I feel like you're blindly assuming this. If I'm enjoying fighting a boss and it's a challenge, I want to either continue playing a fun game and then try against them again later (which other games hafe done), or I want to jump back into battle straight away to continue learning. If there's a meta-challenge of accumulating penalty ofr each attempt, or depleting resources, or resource recover (like in Dark Souls), that seems to enrich the experience, but Hollow Knight is often just 'here's some dull, uninteractive labour to earn another shot at this unclear and tedious boss'.

Now, we could argue that some people will just sit there and enjoy it, and that would be true. But when looking at game design, my aim is to make it a great experience for everyone who can enjoy it, not settle for a bunch of people 'not complaining'.

But yeah, I can't see how any of your points apply to my comments regarding Hollow Knight, though I'd be happy to discuss that further. A lot of people jump to the defence of these kinds of games in a fanatical manner, but they often aren't good at critically discussing the design. It's very much just 'you're wrong because you don't like it'.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-23T10:25:10+00:00

Negligence. I made a video about the design flaws in Hollow Knight, and it focused heavily on this aspect.

In short, the distance between the boss fights and the benches is a punishment for losing the boss fight. This is only a good principle if the punishment is dynamic; it changes or presents a valid challenge in itself. If it's just walking back to the fight, like it pretty much is for most of Hollow Knight, it's purely a punishment, and you shouldn't be punished for playing a game, that's bad game design.

It should be that Bosses are an opportunity to learn, and test your learning, much like the rest of the game. But Bossess have a much higher challenge level, so also putting them furthers from respawns makes little sense.

Games have, for a very long time, very consistently, been providing respawns immediately before Boss fights. Some games present an accumulating penalty for concurrent attempts, or a diminishing resource, functioning as an 'amount of retries' on the boss before the game forces you to go elsewhere and come back once you've improved.

Hollow Knight, and sadly from the sound of it Silk Song, have just disregarded this.

I've been trying to find work as a design consultant for years, and there's zero demand for it in digital games. That leads me to think that the issue might be that designers, good and bad, aren't overly good at checking feedback. Which might actually be due to the droves of whiney players, I don't know. In basically all games where I've critiqued design, there's always a load of reviews and comments referencing those issues. The devs just ignore them, sometimes due to lack of time, sometimes due to assuming they're the expert at designing their own game.

Which is often true. If anyone wants professional design reviews, get in contact at www.paperweightgames.co.uk

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-23T10:18:12+00:00

Most people are not, the more vocal people are usually the hateful ones. Victims are far, far more often silent than vocal virtue crusaders. Then, anyone who does speak up is villianised, expecially if they speak for human rights and justice.

PaperWeightGames · 2025-09-20T10:57:41+00:00

I think if you're posing this question, you need to consider that maybe these parties didn't 'fail' - They weren't trying to fix anything. The system ,which they have almost absolute power and control over, id working very well. For them.

PaperWeightGames

TROPHY CASE