Game Design
Art and Concepts

PSA: Want to learn Game Design but don't know where to start? There are tons of free online courses out there

I was a heavy online courses user back on its day when Coursera, EdX and Udacity launched. Recently I revisited those sites to see if there was any new courses I could be interested in.

One of the things that surprised me was the number of courses, or even whole specialties about game development and game design that are there. Some examples are

https://www.edx.org/xseries/video-game-design

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/game-design

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/game-development

They are completely free and very easy to consume. If you are an aficionado and looking to get into game design, but don't know where to begin, these could be a nice starting point.

As a caveat, I can't vow for the quality of all of these courses. I checked out a couple of them and the quality differs quite a lot. Still, probably worth checking out.

CalArts on coursera has a brilliant Professional Certificate Game Design course and I couldn't recommend it more.
It has a bit of an edge in video games design, but about 90% of what you'll learn is transferrable to tabletop as it's just general good game design practice. You'll learn a ton about game purpose, balance, player experience, player engagement, worlds creation, characters and story writing, art, and so on. Specifically, your first 4 assignments will be to create and balance/improve a board game. I took it a year ago and it's absolutely the most useful well of information. Aaaaand it's taught by a man and a muppet 😃

Here is the course https://www.coursera.org/specializations/game-design#courses