I've worked on both. There's a lot of overlap. In fact I've seen quite a few board game designers tap out of the industry recently due to various frustrations a

I've worked on both. There's a lot of overlap. In fact I've seen quite a few board game designers tap out of the industry recently due to various frustrations and burnout. I haven't really made a name for myself yet in board games, but I also tapped out (and started focusing on making video games again) because there are a lot of frustrations in board games: - Convincing a publisher to sign your game takes a lot of marketing skill that an engineer like myself isn't used to, it can be harder than finding an audience of players, since you have to set up a meeting for each one person you're trying to convince to give your game a chance - Or your can go Kickstarter, but then you're committing to basically being a publisher yourself, and not designing/developing games - Board game publishers are also having a rough time since there's been so many issues and sudden surprises with shipping because of the pandemic. That's calmed down a bit but it's still putting publishers in a precarious state, and they tend to have fairly thin margins to begin with. - Board game designers also tend not to get paid very well unless they land on an evergreen title, like Dominion, Ticket to Ride, etc, and/or have a constant pipeline of games (which takes making great relationships with publishers and convincing them to sign a bunch of games you churn out) and people in the industry in general tend to get paid less (can be 50% less) than the already underpaid people in the video game industry. I keep looking at salaries in job postings and going "No way I could take that much of a pay cut, as much as I'd probably enjoy the work more" I know one guy that worked on a game for two years, made a game that was successful by the publisher's standards (it was in Barnes and Noble) and only received $9,000 in royalties ($18k split in half with a designer). He quit and started a marketing company and is a lot happier now. A few others I know are taking long breaks because they're just burnt out from the constant grind. That being said I did have a burst of motivation a few months ago and designed a few small games and tried pitching them at a board game convention this past weekend. One meeting (with the largest publisher, even) went pretty well, the others didn't. If nothing else, I can always code a web version of the games and release them without needing a publisher, eventually, or at least make Tabletop Simulator versions of the games.