Boardgame Design Hydra — Design skill for Claude Code

Boardgame-Design-Hydra

Boardgame Design Hydra A Claude Skill for designing tabletop games end to end: raw idea in, playable prototype pack out. It routes to genre-specific engines, runs balance and pacing checks, invents mechanics, writes rules, and plans playtests. It does not replace a designer. It exists so the boring, important questions get asked before.

Author-TABARC-Code

Boardgame Design Hydra

A Claude Skill for designing tabletop games end to end: raw idea in, playable prototype pack out. It routes to genre-specific engines, runs balance and pacing checks, invents mechanics, writes rules, and plans playtests. It does not replace a designer. It exists so the boring, important questions get asked before the fun ones do.

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Ok Note:

This is a great skill to do the manual boring crap of board game design, and pull the small issues and little things we often miss and clog an initial Playtest. Its a time save and helps those who are new to game design.

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What it does

The skill classifies whatever the user brings it (a vague idea, a genre question, a stuck prototype, a rules problem) and routes to the matching part of the system rather than trying to do everything from one prompt.

• Ideas Go pipeline. The main workflow. Takes a raw game idea through intake (max eight questions, with sensible defaults for anything skipped), a design brief, four hard gates that must pass before any detail work starts, a prototype pack, and a trade-off arbitration pass.
• Genre routing. Eighteen genre engines covering 18xx, 4X, puzzle, abstract, Ameritrash, party, deck-building, worker placement, area control, co-op, hidden role, legacy, roll-and-write, wargame, dexterity, trivia, racing, and general strategy, plus a dedicated eurogame theory file covering mechanics taxonomy, the German market and awards culture, and community dynamics.
• Utility engines. Balance, pacing, player psychology, randomness and variance, themat