Do you have what it takes to invent the next 'Monopoly'?

Have you ever played a board game and thought, "I wonder who made this up"? Have you ever played a board game and thought, "I could make a game better than this"?

Where do all those new games that show up on the shelves each year actually come from?

Many come from the minds and imaginations of people who simply like to play games, says Greg Jones, a founder of the Board Game Designer's Guild of Utah, a group that encourages the creation of new board games.

Game design is not as easy as you might think, he says. Or, the design part might be easy, but actually getting a game published is the challenge. It's a very competitive business, he says.

Still, the Utah group has some success stories — several games that have been published and several that are pending.

It all started in January 2007. Jones knew a few people (he was one of them) who were interested in game design, and he thought it would be good to bring them all together.

"I assumed that groups like this existed everywhere," he says. "But a few days before we were going to meet for the first time, I thought I should see how it was all done. I searched and searched, and found that no one was doing game design on a local level. There's one big national meet but nothing else on a regular basis."

At the time, Jones worked for Game Night Games, a game store in Sugar House, which has been very supportive, he says, and has hosted most guild meetings. However, the December meeting will be at the Salt Lake City Library, 210 E. 400 South, on Tuesday, Dec. 8. The guild meets the second Tuesday of the month. For more information, visit its Web site at boardgamedesigners.com.

Through his work, Jones had met people in the game design and publishing business, and he also knew people who were interested in design. There are also several local designers who have previously had games published.

"So, we had a lot of ideas," Jones says. "But my philosophy is no one is going to pay you for an idea. They want the finished game."

Members of the guild make prototypes of their games and bring them to the meetings where other members play them and offer feedback. "At the meetings we talk about some aspect of design, but then we play and play." That's the only way to know if games are going to work, he says, by playing them.

At one national meeting Jones met a representative of Rio Grande Games, one of the major publishers of what are known in the trade as Euro games — those that involve strategy and have a high level of graphic design.

"I told him what we were doing, and he was very interested. He said Rio Grande would sponsor a contest and pick one game to publish. That lit a fire under us. Rio Grande wants to foster this kind of development in the U.S. In Europe the game culture is so strong," says Jones.

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