You don’t need a published game to call yourself a designer. If you want to be one, just start designing and you already are one.
WannabeBoardGameDesigner.com is a learning journal. An ongoing project to collect resources and share stories and information about the board game design for anyone interested in board games.
I share what I’m learning as I go, from first prototypes to playtests gone wrong, so you can skip a few mistakes and join the fun.
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How to create an editable score sheet in TTS?
In this diary entry (24 January 2026), I show how I turn a roll-and-write scoring sheet (my “thief sheet”) for my Master of Thievery game into something you can actually use inside Tabletop Simulator: editable text fields plus a big set of clickable checkboxes.
I walk through a practical workflow in TTS, including how to size and align fields, how to copy groups of fields so you don’t have to build everything one by one, and how to save the result as a reusable component. To do this, I use the Make Anything Editable mod from the TTS Workshop..
At the end, I also cover a workaround for situations where you’d like editable surfaces on both sides of a card.
If you’re interested in the designs created in the 2025 roll-and-write design contest, check them out here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3585125/the-2025-roll-and-write-game-design-contest.
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Creating a card game prototype in Tabletop Simulator
Diaries of a Wannabe Board Game Designer – Entry date 2026-01-04
In this entry of my “Diaries of a Wannabe Board Game Designer,” I’m going to show you how I implement my own board game designs into Tabletop Simulator (TTS) (https://store.steampowered.com/app/286160/Tabletop_Simulator/).
Tabletop Simulator is an useful tool for us designers. It allows me to find playtesters from all over the world, even when I don’t have enough people to test with locally. In this video, I’ll walk you through my entire process: from preparing card “grid sheets” and using the separate Deck Editor tool, to importing the components and setting up a playtesting session.
I hope this guide helps you get your game onto the digital table!