Computer games have an extra level of complexity. Suppose you have an idea for a wargame, like the Campaign Series of computer games from Talonsoft, or their Battleground Civil War games. You have to do the research, come up with scenarios, develop rules, all that stuff that makes a wargame. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and make cardboard counters and some form of hex map and you've got a paper- based wargame prototype. Before you have a prototype of a computer game, you have to do a Jot- of coding.

There's extra stuff you have to do to make a marketable board game. If you're not very artistic, you'll have to hire someone to do the box art, the board art, and the components for a board game. Likewise, you'll have to hire someone to do the battleground art for the computer game, and the art and animation for the components. Then there's the whole question of music and sound effects, all of which add to the computer game but are completely absent from the board game.

Even if you design a great game, you can kill a computer game just by designing a poor user interface. While it's easy to pick up a die and roll it, then move a piece, how you do this in a computer game can be tricky. Even something as simple as having to click on one thing in one comer of a screen and then double click on something in another comer of the screen can make a computer game hard to use. This level of complexity, the humanmachine interface part, is largely absent from board games.

Even if you can program, board games are easier to design than computer games. The tricky part in both of them is the same, however: you need to have a good base game design for either to succeed.