How does a game is made (well, by my way)?

There are like tonnes of game out there now, no matter is apps, online games or board games.
Here, we are looking at how does a table game is made! I specifically stated by my way, because there are many other way or you might start the game from a different point. You will see what I mean.

1. The base of the game

Theme based

This is usually where I start, from my view, a game has to be thematically strong rather then a paste up theme at a later stage. I will start by looking at newspaper, magazines, even ads on the street to get some ideas. For example, during the sale seasons, women are so into the discount and shopping. This can be a unique theme since shop to drop is not yet been done.
I love games that have themes that can happen in real life, even the chance is small but it is still realistic. 

Type of the game

This is a bigger category I think if you want to compare it with the theme based game. mechanisms, difficulties, age group, length...etc these are actually semi-related with each other.
The sheep roulette that I have tried to design is a game starts from the mechanism, where I am trying to make a roulette with less luck involved.

Office 21 sits somewhere between base and theme, I have designed a game called 21x21 before I go into the boardgame design, it is a game with 21 cards and you try to play blackjack aganist the other player.  The theme does actually comes from the situation where people graduated from university are really hard to get a job in Taiwan. This is where the theme brainstorming begins. 

The game of Office 21 does influence by a bit from the Love Letter from Seiji Kanai, where cards is condensed to be both points and special abilities. I have share this with him and glad he like this game when he is in Taiwan last year.  Black Jack without money is a boring game, so this is where the game does actually starts to grow.

Gold Rush is my second game, the game is actually a big mix of my previous prototypes, including roulette, slots and poker hand. and yes, they are all elements from casinos. 
This is one of my goal, if the casino is not for gambling, means no stakes or money is on the table, how can the casino game to be as fun as it should be. Gold Rush borrows the idea of poker where you draft 5 cards and try to be rich or poor at different situation.

I think this is a rather long one this week, I will catch up soon and continues on how does the prototypes are made and the next step.

Moreover, it seems there are quite a lot of people want to join the game design. I am not a professional, and only published my first game, but my one word advice is to read more, play more and enjoy more before you actually starts designing.