Wannabe Board Game Designer calendar tracks open contests and deadlines

Wannabe Board Game Designer’s contest calendar lets you filter for contests “currently open for submissions.” Its motto, “Design - Test - Fail - Learn - Repeat,” makes the target audience obvious: active makers with ideas in motion. The site’s philosophy is explicit: “You don’t need a published game to call yourself a designer. If you want to be one, just start designing and you already are one.”

A calendar built for working through the backlog

The calendar is not just a list of shiny opportunities. It is a planning surface for designers who are juggling several concepts at once, each sitting at a different stage of development. A deadline can tell you which idea deserves another round of playtesting, which prototype is ready for a submission packet, and which project can wait until the next contest window.

The page lists “a lot of different board game design contests and events just waiting for participants to create new games.” Contests give shared prompts, comparative feedback, and a reason to turn notes into something playable instead of letting a promising system stay trapped in a notebook.

What the listings reveal about scope

The visible listings show the calendar’s range. The Cozy Game Design Contest runs from March 27 at 09:00 to August 31 at 23:59, with Bad Comet’s development team hunting for the next great board game. Another entry, the 2026 In-Hand Game Design Contest, runs from October 1 at 23:59 to March 31 at 23:59 and is aimed at in-hand games, meaning games that do not require a surface, pockets, or anything but your hands to play.

The calendar is not locked to one style of design. It can surface cozy prompts, compact formats, and broader competition windows, which makes it useful whether your current prototype is a tiny dexterity toy or a more conventional tabletop pitch. The same page can help you compare a long runway contest with a tighter format-specific brief.

How to use it at different stages

If you are just starting, use contests that force a clear hook and a manageable scope. A themed challenge like Cozy Game Design Contest, or a format-specific brief like the in-hand category, gives you a concrete boundary that can speed up the first prototype and keep playtests focused. When the ask is narrow, it is easier to see whether the core loop actually works.

Once you have a few playable ideas, the calendar becomes a pacing tool. You can line up one contest for a rough concept, another for a more polished prototype, and a third for a version that is ready to pitch. That lets you reverse-engineer your year around submission windows, playtest nights, revision passes, art production, and the moments when a game is finally ready for a public deadline.

If you already design regularly, the value often shifts toward community pressure and quick iteration. BoardGameGeek’s Design Contests forum keeps active discussion in one place, and a June 24, 2025 video about a designer entering BoardGameGeek’s 24-hour design challenge shows how these events can become process tests as much as competitions. Fast-turnaround challenges sharpen your ability to make a clean hook, cut dead weight, and communicate a game in a small amount of time.

• If you are new, use smaller-scope or themed contests to get a first finished prototype across the line.
• If you are in the middle of your design journey, use deadlines to build a repeatable pipeline of testing and revision.
• If you are already comfortable submitting, lean on speed challenges and forum-based contests to pressure-test ideas under constraint.

A broader ecosystem of places to look

Cardboard Edison maintains its own contests page for game designers. In the Reddit post tied to the project, the creator wrote that the calendar was built by collecting contests, deadlines, and phases.

Design opportunities are scattered. A forum thread on BoardGameGeek, a challenge video, and a standalone contest page can all point in different directions, and a single calendar helps you see them as one workflow instead of a pile of tabs.