Board Game Maker: Design Your Whole Game Online

Yes, for your first game. The free plan runs in the browser with nothing to install, and covers one project with up to 120 cards and 10 layouts, plus unlimited playtest sessions on the online table. Exporting print files starts on the Hobby plan at $4 a month billed yearly, and ordering the box through The Game Crafter is on Indie.

Start on paper. A hand-drawn board and a deck of index cards will tell you in an evening whether the core loop is fun. Once it is, move it here: set the board up at the size you plan to print, keep the decks in a spreadsheet so a rules change is one column edit, add tokens and dice as their own collections, and playtest online until the numbers stop moving. Then export the files or order a printed copy.

That depends on the box. There are six rigid boards, from a 4 × 4in small square to a 10 × 10in large square, plus 4 × 10in and 5 × 10in strips, and two folding boards: a 9 × 18in bi-fold and an 18 × 18in quad-fold, a common size for a full main board. Each one maps to a product The Game Crafter makes, so the board you design is the board that gets printed.

It depends on what is in the box: a quad-fold board with two decks and a bag of tokens costs more than a card game in a tuck box. On Indie, Print & Ship prices your game from The Game Crafter's own catalogue, counted in whole printed sheets, and shows you the total before you order a copy. If you only want to play it, the PDF export prints on a home printer and costs you the cardstock.

Not one that draws a board from a sentence. The AI assistant writes cards, and boards are still laid out by hand. The quickest start is a blank board: a square grid, a loop track, a race path, a hex map or a spiral, free to download as a PDF, or Slatemoor's four blank boards opened as an editable set where you recolour the track, retype the spaces and add your own art. Free game board templates.

Yes. Plotwright is four blank boards in dark ink on white: a square grid, a hex grid, a loop track and a point-to-point route map, each with a title, a one-line goal and a key you retype. Add it to a project, set which board each row draws on, and playtest it on the online table before you print it. The Plotwright blank game board template.

Yes. Several of the games above are built for young players, with big spaces, a number die and cards that teach something, like Rumblenest's dinosaur facts or Witbloom's trivia. Print them at home, or put the board on the online table and play it with a class on one screen. There are no student accounts, so each player who joins from a link plays as a guest.

Yes. Put the board, the decks and the tokens on the online table and send the link. Only you need an account: up to five other players join as guests in their browser, with nothing to install.

Yes, and plenty of people do. The deck is the component that benefits most from data binding, so it is a reasonable place to stop. Nothing forces you to move the board or tokens in.

You can import existing artwork as images and place it in a layout, and export at the size and bleed your printer specifies. What you lose by keeping components outside is the shared palette and property set, so a late art-direction change means editing in two places.

Each component type carries its own size presets, mapped to real manufacturer products, and the table above lists what those are. You can work at a custom size instead, but a size with no matching product exports fine and cannot be ordered, so the picker tells you which is which before you start designing.

Through The Game Crafter, yes, with one exception. Cards, boards, mats, tokens, meeples, dice, score pads, screens, and the tuck box are all registered component types with matching manufacturer products, ordered from the same project. The rulebook is not: booklets print, but there is no rulebook editor yet, so that one is still a job for elsewhere.

Work back from what you need at the end. A print shop such as The Game Crafter makes a boxed copy from files you bring, and this tool sends to it from inside the project. A classroom board builder is quicker for a one-off quiz board played on a screen. When the game is still changing week to week, you want the board, the decks and the pieces kept in one place so a rules change reaches all of them. We compared the main options side by side, ShuffleKit included. The best board game makers, compared.

Honestly, it is a card tool that grew components. The deck workflow is the deepest part and the reason most people arrive. If your game is mostly a board with almost no cards, you will feel that emphasis.