But never, ever, ever submit a product to more than one company at a time. Be patient and give a company 4-6 weeks to look a product, then move on to someone else. Anyway, those rejections I received meant that if someone contacted me with a new idea or product, I was going to take a look at the idea, long and hard. Each boardgame Jolly Roger has produced to this point has been a first for that designer. This brings about the topic of inspiration.
Practical inspiration sounds like a contradiction of terms.
The designer is therefore able to work within an existing framework, and this is always easier to do. For Orcs at the Gates, I was asked by Jolly Blackburn to create a game for Knights of the Dinner Table that was just like Maul of America. Easy, to the point. The other type is the brainstorm. It came about as an attempt to merge Formula De with the old arcade game called SpyHunter.