Vomit your work on to paper and get it to the table. Play it.

It will be terrible, and you’ll be embarrassed. And then you’ll either be inspired to make the next iteration better, or decide this is not for you and give up.

Both (and the entire spectrum between) are 100% valid.
— Eric Lang
Games are better if they hold up to competitive play, but they MUST hold up to non-competitive play. Don’t allow your game to drag on or fall apart if players don’t pursue victory as aggressively as you expected them to.
— Seth Jaffee
Don’t automatically conflate a game’s set-up variability with its replayability. After all, based on centuries of evidence, Go and Chess are the most replayable board games. Instead realize that a game’s replayability often results from the variability within its players.
— W. Eric Martin
Ideas are a dime a dozen & mean nothing if the work isn’t put in to actually make a game out of it.
— Jason Dinger