I’ve been sorting through my various writings and came upon this unfinished list of the Top Ten things you should so to improve your game design.

1. Add a Compass Rose to the game board, even if your game is about stock car racing. A compass rose adds elegance to the visual design and suggests careful planning. Also, if a player happens to get lost in the real life Himalayas with a copy of your game “Himalayan Hijinx,” they can utilize the compass rose to navigate back to safety. Can you imagine a better blurb on the box than “This game saved my life!”? I certainly can’t.

2. Add one more. If the hot new game features 25 cities, make sure your game has 26. Their primitive board still has only four edges? Yours will have five and unfold like an origami trick. Most designers limit their games by using six-sided dice, a tired concept hundreds of years old. Blow everyone’s mind with your outside of the box thinking and hit them with a seven-sided die. Other designers are satisfied with leaving their players hanging at the end of 1812. Not you. Your game, 1813: One Year Later, is there to pick up the ball.

3. Add pirates, even if your game is about stock car racing. Who can resist a game where there is the possibility of someone shouting “ahoy thar, matey” or “shiver me timbers” or that beloved staple, “arrrrrrrrrrr,”? Pirates are the universal mascots for that elusive sweet spot where whimsical fun and ruthless backstabbing meet.

4. When it comes to theme, there is no such thing as exploring a narrow period of world history too deeply, nor is it safe to assume that no stones residing in some exotic locale have remained unturned. Sure, you may have stuffed hundreds of coffee bean sacks into the holds of Spanish ships, but have you for one moment considered the harrowing journey of the bean itself? A wealth of unmined thematic material lies before you in what other designers lazily pass off as game components! You may have built so many medieval cities that they all sort of blur together. But what if instead of building a city during the Renaissance, the players built it during a Renaissance *fair*? Now your careless anachronisms and mélange of Shakespeare, Tolkien and Machiavelli actually add value to the theme.

5. If your game is so simple that a child can understand it, something is terribly wrong. Children don’t have any money. Feed the text of your instruction manual into an online language translation site, preferably one that features Aramaic. Then have the site give it back to you in English. Your new manual is now ready to be taken seriously by serious adults with serious cash. Having said that, you must still designate the recommended age range for your game as “8 to adult.” That way, if an educated adult fails to grasp the “nuances” of your eloquent design, they will keep it to themselves rather than admit an 8 year old is smarter than they are.