Board games have long been a source of entertainment, familiarizing people with elements like cards, boards, rewards, risks, and avatars. This early exposure helps individuals easily understand game-based activities later in life. Beyond entertainment, board games serve educational purposes, engaging mature participants and conveying serious themes. They enhance strategic thinking and problem-solving by simulating real-world scenarios. Gamification applies game elements to everyday tasks, motivating behaviours and engaging participants. Recognizing the diverse potential of board games, this research introduces a novel approach to designing and utilizing board games as simulation testbeds in research. This research introduces a comprehensive framework for designing board games to collect research data from human participants. The framework includes an iterative approach to designing the board game based on feedback from experts and participants throughout the development process. The iterations are expected to foster effective game design, providing educators and researchers with a dynamic tool that gathers data for research purposes. This research is built on the premise that the design methodologies used for entertainment and serious games cannot be directly applied to board games designed as simulation testbeds. It emphasizes balancing game design objectives with education, training, or research goals. Accordingly, this study proposes a framework of design guidelines explicitly tailored for simulation testbed board games. The framework is applied to develop a real estate-based simulation testbed. The developed testbed is assessed with participant feedback, who expressed satisfaction with the game design.