I've been playing a lot of board games in the last year, mostly with larger groups but some with smaller groups, and I've come up with a list of things that really bug me about board games from less experienced brands.

They're not always an indicator that the game is going to suck, but they do act as a marker that the company behind it thinks they know better than the rest of the industry.

Easy to learn, hard to master!

That's called a strategy. Mastering any game is going to be relatively hard. Learning any game should be easy.

If your game isn't a game of chance, this statement should be implicitly true, and not proudly plastered all over the front of the box as testimonial.

Any game I've tried with this on the front or sides of the box has been awful.

No explanation at all on the box

Just vague blurbs and testimonials. You need to actually state the basics of the game if you want people to be interested in it!

No list of game contents on the box.

This is especially important in the second-hand market and when your game has multiple revisions. Being able to quickly count if you have the right number of mcguffins is super important. Having it on the instruction sheet is a start, but having it on the back of the box (preferably bottom left...) makes it dummy-proof - you can't lose the box unless you really know what you're doing.

No photos of the game board on the box

If you're window shopping, the artwork on the front, description and photo on the back are the only way a game is really going to get noticed.

Does the artwork look good and professional? Does the photo on the back exist and show a common setup? If the answer to either of these are no, the publisher should be slapped for not suggesting it to the designers.

Ripoff artwork

If you just made a game that sounds like it plays like some other game and has artwork that intentionally looks like an Exploding Kittens production, I'm not even going to bother looking at it.

It's like [x] but with [y]

Don't sell your game based on the merits of another game. Really?

Extremely complicated instructions/Ambiguity

Boil it down. If you can't, redesign the game a bit so that you can. Do what most TCGs do and have the rules say that the cards have final say.

If I can't figure out what the intended result of a rule/action is, you should have made it more specific.

Deceptively simple

If your game is "deceptively simple", you did a poor job of presenting it.

Opinion based scoring

CAH/PYZ/many other games are like this. Generally it's very easy to make a game where the users decide who wins, but it's also very lazy and ends up in the trash after a few months unless you manage to succeed like CAH did.

What Do You Meme has been chasing this fad for years, releasing many games that all play pretty much the same just with slightly different premises. It's tiring.

In conclusion...

Making stuff is hard, but too many board game designers get stuck in their own head and miss the low hanging fruit.

• Pay somebody to make your box art, even if you are an artist yourself.
• Make an illustration or take a photo of a middle-of-the-game state and stick it on the back of the box.
• Write an accurate manifest of how many pieces the game includes.
• Condense your instructions down and, if necessary, have an index of more complex instructions that remove any ambiguity.
• Don't try to win over the reader based on the promises of a different board game.
• Don't try to win over the reader using art that intentionally looks like another board game.
• Don't try to sell your game as "something you can get better at!" because that's true of most games and should be implied by the fact that it has strategy.
• Try to make something unique for once.