Board Game Design: Dealing With Rejection
By MARK WILSON
Not to brag, but I’ve been rejected more than you.
I can say that with some confidence (more on why in a moment), and I think it’s given me a unique perspective on rejection. And a healthy perspective on it.
It’s also helped me in board game design, because a lot of it involves rejection. Even a brilliant design from a brilliant designer is likely to be rejected numerous times. There are a select handful of name-brand designers who have publishers begging to work with them, and the rest of us have to grind. Which means rejection.
So let’s get into what that looks like, and some strategies for dealing with rejection in healthy ways.
I also promise this will be fun. Rejection can be amusing. Let’s get into why.
But First, the 2000s Housing Recession
I graduated college in 2007. I know, I’m aging myself. But it’s useful to know, because the country was spiraling into a recession as I was just starting to look for a job.
This affected ALL industries to some extent. I was going to be a high school English teacher. But schools weren’t hiring; they were letting teachers retire, not filling the position, and retooling class sizes among the rest of the staff so that they didn’t need a new hire.
Multiply this by thousands of school systems and you had tens of thousands of workers looking for nonexistent jobs.
Over the next few years, my job application process went from sending applications to my top 2-3 picks, to my top 10, to my top 50. Then eventually it just became applying anywhere that had a listed opening. Other cities? Other states? Didn’t matter. I needed to escape my soul-crushing, minimum wage job.
Fast forward nearly three years and I’d received thousands – plural – of rejections or much more frequently non-responses to applications. Yes, literally, thousands. I got to some in-person interviews, yes, but these just became later-stage rejections, as they told me I was one of several hundred qualified candidates. What chance did a new graduate with no real experience have?
The only actual offer I got was from a prison in North Carolina, and I got the sense that they were just making offers to anyone who would agree to it. And I was at the point where I nearly accepted it.
I transitioned career paths in 2011 and never looked back, and am fortunate to have a measure of career and financial stability and freedom now. But thousands of unanswered applications takes a toll on you. It was a broken promise, one that was implicitly made to us by society as optimistic graduates.
Years of rejection changes you, and some of those changes don’t reverse. And it can make you jaded if you’re not careful. It did for me for a long time.
The Reality of Rejection
Does anyone read that section above and think I was at fault for not getting a teaching job? Hopefully not. There are different strategies I might have considered, and interview skills that undoubtedly weren’t as great as they could have been.
But I didn’t lack for expertise and effort. There were simply forces well beyond my control that made those initial career steps harder. Hundreds or sometimes even thousands of applicants were vying for individual positions, so the odds of landing any particular position was vanishingly small in even the best of circumstances.
Internalizing this truth was difficult, but I can’t look back and fault myself. In fact, I think it instilled some work habits in me that have served me well in subsequent years.
Hopefully you’re already making some connections to board game publishing, but I have another anecdote I want to share first that will move us toward some of the solutions to this issue.
Online Dating and Rejection
I have a friend who’s done online dating a few times before, and it’s always rough on him. He’ll go on dates, but he’s also dealing with rejection, ghosting, bad dates, increased food and drink costs relative to his normal spending, and the psychological toll those things take on you in the aggregate.
Anyone who’s done online dating for long enough knows that this isn’t necessarily his fault but can be the norm for such platforms. It can be exhausting, and it is for many people.
I had taken a deliberate break from dating for a number of years at one point, and decided to get back into it back in 2023. I signed up for a couple online dating services, but I didn’t do it before setting my mentality properly.
See, I knew there would be bots, and ghosting, and rejections, and awkward dates, and more…
…and I was excited about those things.
“Expecting failure” sounds defeatist. But that’s not what this was. It was more that I knew I’d have to trudge through a lot of “No” responses to get to that “Hell Yes” response that you want on a date. And I was determined to have fun with the rejections and the ghosting and the awkwardness.
It was only going to be mentally taxing if I let it be. Why not have fun with it instead?
Very few of us – approaching zero, in fact – find the love of our lives on the first attempt. So this is a universal human experience. Why does it have to be a bad thing?
I ended up meeting my current, long-term partner during that period (ironically not through a dating app, but concurrent with those efforts), and we’ve been together for over two years now. But you know what else? I did have fun on those other dates, even the ones that went nowhere. And I had fun feeling the mutual butterflies that led to a second date with some, or even more dates in some cases, even if they ultimately ended eventually. And I had fun chatting with women who I never ended up going on a date with. I even had fun reading messages from obvious spammers and bots.
Even if I hadn’t found someone long-term, it would have been an enjoyable experience. And I think there’s a lesson in that approach for anyone who’s about to start an endeavor where they can expect a lot of rejection.
The Man in the Arena
Teddy Roosevelt has a famous speech that’s worth reading in its entirety. It’s known as his “Man in the Arena” speech. I’m paraphrasing heavily for my purposes, but it goes something like this:
The critic or observer is never the one on display, inside the arena being scrutinized. It is the person who puts themselves – their beliefs, their creative work, a piece of themselves – out there to be evaluated who is subjected to the slings and barbs of the world in its greatest fury.
But the one in the arena is the more noteworthy and admirable in this scenario. They’re bloodied and beaten down at times, but are daring to put something worthwhile into the world.
Combine this nobility of vulnerability with my mentality toward online dating, and you can start to understand my thesis on dealing with rejection as a creator, be it of board games or anything else.
Board Game Pitching and Publishing
There are big-name designers who have their choice of publisher and designer collaborations. These are the minority, though; those who have worked in the industry for 20+ years, have several hit games, and are recognized by fans.
For the rest of us, even many designers who are published in some small form, board game design is a money-losing effort, not a money-making one. Talk to many designers and they’ll happily admit it’s a luxury hobby, so called because they have enough expendable income that they can pursue design.
Nevermind that this speaks to some imbalances in publisher/designer dynamics that I’d like to see changed. It mostly speaks to the fact that there are simply far more designs being pitched than publishers accepting them.
It’s hard to look at the board game industry, with its massive growth in the last 20+ years, and imagine this. But it’s true. The disparity has never been greater, actually, since the barrier to entry for designers has never been lower. The tools and resources exist for anyone to pick up design.
Which means rejection. Lots of it. For some, they’ll never get anything but rejected by publishers.
I know some smart, talented designers who are into triple-digit rejections, with no published games. Several of them, in fact.
This is true of many excellent games, by the way. Which gets us back to the idea of no-fault failure. Some of the best games I’ve played in the past few years are unpublished. Conversely, some bland, uninspired games (to my eye) are published. Commercial publishing, hell even commercial success, is not an assurance of quality. The fact that theme, artwork, and miniatures drive a lot of game sales means that in some cases the gameplay is actually an afterthought in the calculation of why a game was published and is successful.
For clarity, a lot of unpublished stuff is just garbage too, of course. I could cite examples, a couple from some of my own abandoned projects. But my overarching point is that not being published does not, in and of itself, point to a lack of design skill. Far from it, in fact, and some of the most talented designers I know are toiling in obscurity.
Couching Optimism With Harsh Honesty
The flip side of that is that some people really do need harsher critics of their work to become better. One of the onerous undercurrents I detect in playtesting is an unwillingness to simply tell a designer when a game isn’t working, or when their pitch materials are going to bounce right off any reasonably savvy publisher.
I don’t mean being a dick. I try to find positive elements of games I playtest, even if I have to deliver a lot of tough love on other elements. But if some designers are languishing because they’re unknown and making it in design is tough, others are languishing because they don’t have a game worth publishing yet.
So self-honesty becomes key here. It’s easy to blame circumstances, but harder to turn the mirror inward and see what you can be improving in yourself.
I think publishers and designers sometimes need thicker skins for bad reviews and harsh commentary on their games once it’s released commercially, for instance. This is a form of rejection too, and it can suck. But what’s the better mentality between these two:
- “I can’t stand random haters! Don’t they know how hard I worked on this! Maybe it’s not their style of game, but there’s no way it actually deserves a 1/10.” Or…
- “Obviously my game wasn’t going to be for everyone. Getting a bad review means it’s in enough homes and getting enough attention that I’m attracting some critics, which is awesome!”
I promise you that the second one is possible, and healthier, since it matches the reality of any creative work. To create is to be critiqued.
Neither of those quotes is hypothetical either. I’m paraphrasing, but in the former case I actually think I’m softening the whining considerably compared to some that I’ve heard on social media or in-person from designers.
So then, if you can look around and legitimately say to yourself that you have a good game, with enough honest feedback to know that this opinion extends well beyond yourself, and that there are no major flaws in your pitching process to publishers (it could always be improved, but I’m talking about opportunity-killing flaws), then it’s ok to hold your head high and keep plugging on. Or if it’s published, know that you’re going to get great, terrible, and in-between reactions.
Embrace it; this is what success is as a creator.
At that point, it’s a numbers game, trudging through those No’s to get to the Hell Yes, and/or weathering the 1/10 ratings to find an audience for whom it’s a 10/10.
It’s my dating analogy from earlier, but with a toy you made and are trying to sell rather than a romantic relationship you’re trying to spark.
Putting It All Together: Dealing With Rejection
I’ve created my whole life; writing, videos, graphic design, web design, RPG adventures and supplements, music, dancing, board games, and more.
In every one of them, I’ve been rejected in some way. But I’ve also succeeded at all of them in one or more ways. My career has been built on my writing and design skills, which I’ve needed to refine and hone through the years. Rejections were a part of that. I’m a confident professional in a variety of settings now as a result of this progress.
I’ve submitted thousands of job applications, but can say that it helped me claw to a place of wisdom in regard to professional opportunities and relative financial stability.
My RPG supplements have brought in some side money that is a nice boon. More importantly, it’s made me a better GM and player at my weekly Dungeons & Dragons meetups and other RPGs I’ve played in. My life is more fun and fulfilling because I’ve applied myself to these areas even through failure.
I’ve met people through these endeavors. Friends, or significant others, or eventually colleagues and professional contacts. I’ve worked freelance, helped friends, and taught beginners to help them on their own journeys.
I’ve also fallen short of the success I feel I can achieve in some of those areas. I’ve exceeded those expectations in a couple, but when for example I don’t have half a dozen publisher-signed board games despite pitching that many, there’s a little voice of doubt that nags at me, even after everything above that I’ve talked about. It tells me that I don’t have what it takes.
So we need to remind ourselves of this stuff. It’s important. That voice isn’t very loud for me anymore, but it took decades of practice to silence it. And it’s likely that it will never fully be gone.
We’re all likely rejected thousands of times in our lives. It’s not always obvious, but happens in little ways. Sometimes, it’s because our skills aren’t what they need to be. Those can be improved, though. Other times, it’s due to circumstances beyond our control. These situations need to be weathered with that perspective, which can be frustrating but takes away a lot of their emotional sting.
Stay in the arena, though, and good things will happen. Maybe not all the success you envision, nor the exact type of success. But success nonetheless. And get used to the body blows and uppercuts of being in the arena and you can eventually face them with amusement, enthusiasm, and excitement.
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