From Paper Prototype to Shipping Container: What It Really Takes to Make a Board Game

One evening, Elaine Lithgow's partner was stuck. They had been building an independent digital Dungeon Running Card Game for some time, trying to pin down the core loop of the title, but without networking code there was no way to play the game against anything other than a rudimentary AI. Writing that code would take weeks. Meanwhile, the fun — or the lack of it — remained a mystery.

Lithgow knew the problem well. She had spent over a decade in the video games industry and understood the full weight of what even a simple digital interaction requires: art and effects for a card, a database of its effects, animations, networking to translate a move to an opponent. "Any digital game developer can tell you," she says, "that something as simple as taking a card from your hand and placing it on a table to trigger an effect is a complicated, multidisciplinary problem that takes a lot of time to solve in a digital game." So they tried something different. They grabbed some card sleeves, blank paper and a couple of marker pens. By the end of the evening, they were sitting across the table from each other playing a game they had conjured from thin air — and enjoying it.

That game became Doomsday Bots, the first title produced by DigiSprite, the Scottish game development studio Lithgow works with as a Game Producer. In this story, Lithgow — X-Team's Game Designer — walks through what the board game creation process actually looks like from concept to crowdfunding, why physical logistics turned out to be the hardest problem to solve and what she tells anyone who wants to make a game of their own.

A Magical Evening and What Came Next

The paper prototype of Doomsday Bots was, in Lithgow's words, a magical experience — proof that eliminating barriers between an idea and its execution can unlock something that months of digital development could not. With a physical game, you pick up the card, put it on the table and read the effect. It is immediate. You can feel instantly whether it is fun. That directness was the revelation.

Once the concept was working in front of them, the next step was to make it look good. That meant play. Lots of it. Lithgow and her partner played the game until they were sick of it, then brought in friends and family, then people from local game clubs, then complete strangers. Each round of testers served a purpose similar to the one testers serve in software development — finding bugs, surfacing friction, exposing assumptions the designers had stopped noticing.

"It's very easy to get tunnel vision when designing and iterating board games," Lithgow says. "Tiny problems that you can't stop focussing on can dominate your thought processes, while larger, glaring issues slip by unnoticed." She thinks of handing a new player a rulebook the way a developer thinks about asking someone to read and compile code: the player has to construct the entire game engine in their head from the instructions on the page, and whether they can do that correctly depends entirely on how clearly the rules are written and how well the components communicate the design.

While testing continued, Lithgow and her team assembled visual design documentation and searched for the right artist. Rather than letting one artist's range dictate the look of the game, they sought out artists whose style matched their vision for each specific title — a deliberate choice to keep the games visually diverse rather than locked to one aesthetic. Remote talent, she notes, made that possible: "Just as X-Team has shown us, there is a wealth of amazing talent across the globe, all accessible remotely."

From Crowdfunding to Shipping Container

As an indie studio, DigiSprite commissions enough art to produce a vertical slice of the game and then turns to crowdfunding. For Lithgow, that model is fundamental to how independent game development works. "Crowdfunding is the heart and soul of modern indie development," she says. "You take your concept and show it to the world, preferably before you have spent all your life's savings on it." The crowd tells you whether an audience exists. If it does, the funding follows. If it doesn't, the project can be refined or scrapped without ruin. If the campaign succeeds, the task becomes finishing the project, manufacturing it and delivering everything on time and within budget.

That last part turned out to be where Doomsday Bots delivered its hardest lessons. Coming from digital development, where a finished product can be uploaded to Steam or the App Store in a matter of steps, Lithgow had not anticipated the full complexity of physical distribution. "With physical board games, we suddenly found ourselves dealing with factories in countries on the other side of the world," she says. "Organising proofs, shipping containers, import tax, packing and sending to the hundreds of addresses for your customers… we did all that by hand on our first project and it was an eye opening lesson in the harsh realities of real world logistics." Fulfilling distribution meant that, at times, their home became part office, part warehouse.

It is a challenge that has no equivalent in digital, and it is, by her account, the single biggest gap between what first-time board game creators expect and what the process actually demands.

What Game Nights Teach You — and the Advice Worth Keeping

The work of making games did not stop at DigiSprite. At X-Team, Lithgow's role as Game Designer feeds a parallel discipline she calls "Scholarly Boardgaming." The team uses X-Team's Unleash+ budget to buy new and interesting board games, play them together and then take them apart. After a few rounds, everyone sits down for a meal and picks the game apart: what worked, what didn't, how the rules were presented, how the components were manufactured and who made them. It is a structured analysis that generates lessons, inspirations and competitive intelligence about what other board game companies are doing — while also being, as Lithgow is quick to point out, a good meal with good company.

Her favorite game produced by that process — the one she would name if pressed — is Escape the Dark Castle. "I love games that allow players to experience a memorable story," she says. "If the players can walk away from the table with smiles on their faces and a tale to tell, I count it as a success." Escape the Dark Castle is a dice-rolling game that takes players through a randomly generated storybook — a journey through a grim setting familiar to anyone who has played the Souls games — with a play time of 20 to 40 minutes. It lands on the table quickly, gets going quickly and wraps up cleanly. People leave smiling. For Lithgow, that is the benchmark.

For anyone who wants to try making a game of their own, her advice is straightforward: start now, with whatever is on hand. All you need is pen, paper and a couple of hours. "Don't be precious with your ideas either," she says. "Get them out there and see if they are fun. Many won't be at first, and that's fine." DigiSprite's home office is littered with discarded prototypes. That is not failure — that is the process.

She reaches for a metaphor that captures the full arc of it: "Your idea is a bar of raw steel. Ugly, blunt and misshapen. Only by exposing it to the furnace, hammering it into shape and polishing it to a mirror shine can you make a glimmering weapon to carry into battle at your next game night." DigiSprite's second title, Adventure Mart, was nearing completion at the time of this interview — another bar of steel, well on its way.

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