Comment Re:Game Designer (Score 1) 324
This is actually a really really good suggestion. Nearly every professional game designer I know is a board gamer. And board games are a GREAT place to learn a lot about design. You have a minimal barrier to entry (all you need are some notecards and pens, and a few patient friends) and fewer crutches to lean on. (In video games its easy to dress a crappy game up with sparkly particle effects and glitter to distract from the fact that it's a crappy game. It's a lot harder to disguise a crappy board game.)
Not to say that all board games map nicely onto video games, (the interactive and realtime nature of video games does give them a few extra possibilities) but if you can design board games that your friends will play willingly, without prompting, then you probably have learned a fair bit about game design in general, (player motivation, reward structure, etc) and will probably find a lot of those skills translate pretty well.
So yeah, if you want to learn about game design, or start getting into it, making board games, while perhaps not as sexy as making quake mods, is still not a terrible place to start.