I think that maybe board game do not exist at all until they have rules.
In much the same way that you don’t know your thoughts until they’re written out on paper. This is a core belief I’ve taken from How to Take Smart Notes.
You can trick yourself into thinking you’ve made a board game if you only every play it by teaching it to people in person. Try to write it down and you’ll realize how wildly complex it is or how you’ve been using social shortcuts to convey rules that are impossible to write down.
You can create a fun board game like experience that you moderate with friends! That doesn’t need an explicit set of rules and components. You can facilitate that. But it is not a board game you can share beyond that context.
In the same sense that a blog post or a video game must stand entirely on its own after you publish it, a board game must too. The game is exclusively the artifacts you produce with zero interference from yourself.
Trying to “make a board game” without actually making these artifacts is like thinking about a blog post or a video game in your head and not actually writing it down.
Therefore, I should start with the rules and physicality of a board game idea.
If I always have rules, this means a board game would always actually be publishable since it always exists, much like a video game. What I have to publish might suck, but it will always be real.