Board Game Finding Tool

Designing Board Games Finding Tool

Creating a platform that connects players with board game cafés and collectors, making it easy to experience board games before buying them

My role

Sole product designer, leading the project from user research and interviews to identifying pain points, defining the product direction, and creating wireframes and prototypes

Team

1 Designer (myself)

Timeframe

Research process: 3 months
Design process: 1 week

Overview

As a newcomer to the board game community, I found myself overwhelmed by choices, unsure where to start, and hesitant to spend money on games I wasn’t confident I would enjoy. Watching YouTube reviews helped, but they often felt subjective and inconsistent. I realized the best way to understand a game was to experience it firsthand through playtesting. But even that had its challenges. Finding where a specific game was available, knowing whether it could be played, and understanding how board game cafés operated were all friction points. This personal frustration inspired a design challenge:

How might we make it easier for beginners to find and try board games before they buy them?

Discovery & Research

To validate assumptions, I conducted questionnaires with 86 respondents.

Key Questionnaire Results

56% regretted buying a board game without trying it first.
46.9% said it is important to test-play a game before buying.
Among those who don't test-play games, 46.4% said they don't know where they can try them.
Among those who do test-play, 78.3% said they do so because they want to know if the game fits they playstyle.
39.5% said they go to board game café to test play game.

We can infer that while board game cafés are a known venue for test-playing (39.5%), they remain underutilized, as 46.4% of non-test players don’t know where to try games. This gap between availability and awareness suggests a need to increase visibility and access.

To better understand the reasons behind this gap, I conducted interviews with five board gamers.

Affinity Mapping

After affinity mapping the interview data, four recurring themes emerged:

Confidence Gap: players are interested in visiting board game cafés but often feel intimidated by unfamiliar environments.
Accessibility Barriers: some players find board game cafés inconvenient to reach or feel that the trip isn't worth the effort.
Time Sensitivity: many players decide to play on short notice and want real-time information about game availability.
Social Anxiety: some players avoid board game cafés because they're uncomfortable playing around or with strangers.

Reframing the Problem

These insights made me think beyond my initial assumption. Although many players want to test games before purchasing, is a board game café really the only solution? Perhaps the challenge isn't finding a place to play, but gaining access to the games themselves.

This led me to ask:

How might we rethink access to board games themselves?

Instead of focusing only on where people can play, what if board games were treated as a shared resource? Similar to other sharing platforms, board game cafés and individual collectors could rent out their games, giving players more opportunities to try them before deciding to buy.

Design Concept

I shifted my focus from helping people find board game cafés to helping them access board games more easily. I envisioned a platform where board game cafés and individual collectors could list their games for others to discover, borrow, or rent before making a purchase.

MVP

To validate the concept, I focused on the core experience:

→ Search for a board game
→ See nearby availability on a map
→ Compare cafés and individual options
→ View game details
→ Reserve a game

Wireframes

Hi-Fidelity Mockups

Reflection

This project taught me that personal pain points can be powerful drivers of empathetic design. As someone new to the board game community, I approached this project with genuine curiosity, and that perspective helped me stay open-minded throughout the research process.

I truly enjoyed learning about other players’ experiences, motivations, and frustrations. Initially, I thought others shared the same challenge I had — finding places where I could discover and try board games. However, through research, I realized the deeper challenge was not simply finding a place to play, but making board games more accessible.

This project gave me the opportunity to explore a solution that I would personally use and value as a user. I used AI-assisted tools to create wireframes and high-fidelity mockups, and explore different design directions.

Through this experience, I learned that much of the board game ecosystem is driven by passion and community rather than purely commercial goals. Being both the designer and a member of the board game community made this project especially meaningful.

Thanks for reading!

Designing Board Games Finding Tool

Creating a platform that connects players with board game cafés and collectors, making it easy to experience board games before buying them

Sole product designer, leading the project from user research and interviews to identifying pain points, defining the product direction, and creating wireframes and prototypes

1 Designer (myself)

Research process: 3 months Design process: 1 week

Overview

How might we make it easier for beginners to find and try board games before they buy them?

Discovery & Research

To validate assumptions, I conducted questionnaires with 86 respondents.

56% regretted buying a board game without trying it first.

​46.9% said it is important to test-play a game before buying.

Among those who don't test-play games, 46.4% said they don't know where they can try them.

Among those who do test-play, 78.3% said they do so because they want to know if the game fits they playstyle.

39.5% said they go to board game café to test play game.

After affinity mapping the interview data, four recurring themes emerged:

Confidence Gap: players are interested in visiting board game cafés but often feel intimidated by unfamiliar environments.

Accessibility Barriers: some players find board game cafés inconvenient to reach or feel that the trip isn't worth the effort.

Time Sensitivity: many players decide to play on short notice and want real-time information about game availability.

Social Anxiety: some players avoid board game cafés because they're uncomfortable playing around or with strangers.

These insights made me think beyond my initial assumption. Although many players want to test games before purchasing, is a board game café really the only solution? Perhaps the challenge isn't finding a place to play, but gaining access to the games themselves. This led me to ask:

How might we rethink access to board games themselves?

Instead of focusing only on where people can play, what if board games were treated as a shared resource? Similar to other sharing platforms, board game cafés and individual collectors could rent out their games, giving players more opportunities to try them before deciding to buy.

Design Concept

I shifted my focus from helping people find board game cafés to helping them access board games more easily. I envisioned a platform where board game cafés and individual collectors could list their games for others to discover, borrow, or rent before making a purchase.

To validate the concept, I focused on the core experience: → Search for a board game → See nearby availability on a map → Compare cafés and individual options → View game details → Reserve a game

Reflection

Research process: 3 months
Design process: 1 week

46.9% said it is important to test-play a game before buying.

These insights made me think beyond my initial assumption. Although many players want to test games before purchasing, is a board game café really the only solution? Perhaps the challenge isn't finding a place to play, but gaining access to the games themselves.

This led me to ask:

To validate the concept, I focused on the core experience:

→ Search for a board game
→ See nearby availability on a map
→ Compare cafés and individual options
→ View game details
→ Reserve a game