A post on Gamasutra caught my eye:

To be able to establish a mascot character and product, like Mario, Sonic or Tomb Raiders for a game is the Holy Grail of game design and should never be taken lightly by any designer, if so tasked.
-William Anderson

While the post is aimed at electronic game developers there’s wisdom in it for board game designers as well: does your design lend itself to creating an ongoing franchise? If not, can you tweak it in such a way that it does?

Take a look at what AEG does with its shared world. These types of considerations are making their way into board games, too.

Read William Anderson’s post over at Gamasutra.

Of course you can sell a game. But can you sell game rules? Can you sell rules and still make a buck?

No. Rule’s can’t be copyrighted and aren’t worth patenting (and a rules patent would probably be overturned in court if it came to that). Rules, in and of themselves, have no monetary value.

You could collect a large amount of rules and sell them as a book. If the rules referred to games you could play using standard components. If there were enough of them. If they were of games similar to what people were already playing, or aimed at a specialist audience. And you probably wouldn’t make much with it. So no, even if you could sell rules you wouldn’t make much money selling them.
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