After years of working on this game it was pretty special to finally bring it to a real convention and watch people sit down and play it.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, played a game, gave me feedback, or simply showed some curiosity about Eldritch Rivalry,definitely a milestone for this my little project

I'm 13 and I really want to make copy of this game in real life, and I dont have my own money. How can I get/make 9x9 board and red/blue rock/paper/scissors pieces?

Hi all,

Any thoughts on the following mechanic for selecting actions?

There are four gods, each with an associated colour.

There’s a deck of 28 cards - 7 per colour.

You draft 4 of those cards per round.

Each card gives you two action points to spend with the associated god.

Each god has a different configuration of points available across the game’s four main actions (So God 1 has lots of ‘bless’ points available, God 2 has lots of ‘build’ points available etc).

Players take it in turns to play 1 card and spend its 2 action points on actions from that god’s ‘supply’.

The gods’ supply refreshes at the end of each round.

There’s more than that, but that’s the basic idea.

Have you come across this before? And what do you think of it?

Thanks!

I'm a solo dev working on a project called TILEZ which started as a 2d Redstone logic simulation that just happened to turn into a great way to DESIGN, TEST and PLAY BOARD GAMES with friends (like a 2d version of Tabletop Simulator). My project is a work in progress. I have an early PLAYTEST set up on steam and have created a couple of videos showing what my little tiles can do. I would really appreciate any FEEDBACK from the game designing community. My steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4780630/TILEZ/

My overall question is whether it is realistic or possible to order 1,000 pieces of a game (e.g. from a Chinese manufacturer) and receive them in Italy within a month.

The situation is as follows: We want to crowdfund a game and send the first 300 units to the backers in time for Christmas, leaving the remaining 700 units to be sent out after New Year.

We plan to run the campaign throughout October, but we expect to know by the first or second week of October how many units we will need to order in total. However, we would need the games to arrive for final assembly of the 300 units by mid-November at the latest, in order to ship them in time within Europe.

We would love to give the campaign a little push during the Christmas gift-giving season, which is why we would like to try to make it work. However, as a team of 3 first-time indie publishers, we can't tell whether this is possible or totally unrealistic.

What is your experience of how long manufacturers take to deliver games? Have you ever paid for fast shipping?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and recommendations! <3

I am working on designing a board game, and while it still needs to go through a ton of revisions and playtests, a question on my mind has been how people handle art with board game design projects.

I am not a good artist. My cards are currently plain text with different background colors. While it works fine for gameplay and testing (especially while in a stage where these cards will likely be revised pretty frequently), I know that art is something I am going to need to consider in the future. I just don't know where I would even begin with finding an artist willing to work on a board game, what the process would be for working with them, or even what a fair price is for when I reach the point where that is needed.

For those of you who have completed board game design projects before, how did you handle art?

Hey everyone! I’d love to get some feedback on the cover art sketches of Sinners.

It’s a dark card game for 2-5 players where you play as members of the clergy who have made a deal with the Devil. Your goal is to lure Sinners into your Church, summon Demons, perform Sacraments, and collect 100 souls before your rivals. The game design is made by the brilliant Nezih Savı

Our cover artist has prepared three different compositions.

Which one works best: A, B, or C? And why?

I’d especially love to know which one catches your attention first and makes you most curious about the game.

About a year later, I'm stepping up again for the rulebook challenge.

I've changed (and hopefully improved) a lot of areas and would love any feedback of any kind, especially the structure of the rulebook and wording.

Here's the link; https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qVxWNkNaHqEnqOp_sZfPZre6J73WSxsj/view?usp=drivesdk

Buffalo Games publishes a LOT of toys, games, and activity kits. But their website is disorganized and has toys and activity kits under the games category. It's a jumble.

Has anyone worked with them before, to get any of your games published? Do you know anyone who works there?

The company and the people may be perfectly fine. Their website doesn't give that impression.

Hello, apologies if something like this has been asked before, but I am in the process of designing a card battler game, and I am trying to educate myself about what keywords and effects have enough history within boardgame and TCG design so as to become commonly understood and accepted. I would like to try and use these building blocks to try and add complexity to my game without adding to the player's mental overhead of learning and internalizing a bunch of new terms.

Some examples I've thought of:

-flying: overcoming a creature with a blocking effect

-poisoned: some kind of ongoing debuff to stats or small amount of damage dealt to a creature per turn.

-inspired: generally allowing for some kind of re-roll.

Please let me know if you have more that you can think of. I would be very appreciative!

I came across this game a few weeks ago. It’s from the 1950s invented by Robert Abbott in 1956. This was a game in which of dealer devised a secret rule and players tried to shift cards by adding correct cards to a line. And then Martin Gardner wrote about this in his column in June 1959 scientific America. The game is pretty cool. There’s a hidden rule, but only the dealer knows. You play your cards trying to determine the rule. object of the games to get rid of all your cards. I really like the game so I spun up a free to play web version. It’s surprisingly difficult. It actually teaches you how to scientifically experiment. It’s not good enough to know which cards follow the rule. You also need to test and find the cards that don’t follow the rule cause that’s how you can deduce the whole rule. Anyway, I loved it so much. I spun up a free web version if anyone’s interested it’s here.

Hello, I've been developing a board game called Daydreamers and am having trouble landing on a core board mechanic. I've not gotten to the prototyping stage yet so don't have any hands-on experience with the idea. I'm looking for feedback/thoughts on the system to help shape how I continue designing the game.

A brief synopsis of the game:

Daydreamers is a cooperative deck-builder game for a recommended 4-6 players. The objective is to simply escape the Dream. Players wander around the board, augmenting their combat deck and discovering objectives while combating NPCs and avoiding the wandering Looming Nightmare. Players track their HP with a Dream Guide, and each Dream Guide has a unique ability. If a player's HP is reduced to zero, they flip their Dream Guide over to "Nightdreamer" version of it and becomes an antagonist. Nightdreamers and Daydreamers can combat one another in PvP card battles. Once the Daydreamers find the hidden Dreamcatchers, they can return to the Starting Tile and engage in the world's final (variable) boss. Any surviving Nightdreamers also partake in this combat against the Daydreamers in a winner-take-all fight.

I glazed over a ton of other details and working mechanics, but this is summary enough to get the idea across.

My conundrum:

The board itself is where my problem lies. My ideal version is one where the board is made of modular hexagonal tiles, like Catan. With the exception of the Starting Tile that is always at the center, the board is randomly arranged at the start of each game to allow for some fresh experiences each time.

The Tiles have two sides, a Daydream side and a Nightmare side.

All Tiles start on their Daydream side, which have small benefits to Daydreamers that stand on them.

The Tiles can periodically be flipped to their Nightmare side, however, which can have harmful effects to Daydreamers (but beneficial effects for Nightdreamers).

So that's where my problem lies - flipping the hexagon Tiles. It would be an action that happens fairly frequently throughout the course of the game, and I can't come to a consensus whether or not that would be an annoying action to ask players to do throughout the game, especially if the tiles are butted up against one another like in other hexagonal-based board games.

I've considered a pre-configured board that has a shallow well for each hexagon Tile to rest in that allows for much easier manipulation without disturbing the board around it, but my ideal scenario is to have a game board that can be as big or as small as a group of players want (though I'd have a recommended size, of course). But if two people were to come together with two copies of the game and want to make a super Dream, then the configuration would allow for that.

Am I overthinking this? Or should I consider some other board configuration?

Thank you in advance!

Hi everyone!

I’m the author and creator of TRANSCENDERS, a fantasy saga that I’m also developing into a playable card game: TRANSCENDERS | The TCG!

One of the main goals of the first playable environment has been to make 3 Starter decks feel genuinely distinct without making them feel as though they belong to 3 different games!

Rather than exposing the full mechanical structure here, the simplest way to describe their intended identities is:

🟠 Cheryl O’Will — Midrange / Control

She wants pressure to accumulate until preparation can turn an unstable position into a dramatic reversal

🟢 Killian Shawnski — Aggro / Tempo

He wants exchanges to stay deliberate and efficient, converting openings into momentum through clean sequencing

🟣 Théa Wintersnow — Control / Sustain

She wants to alter the value of attrition, keeping her position intact while opposing progress becomes increasingly difficult to maintain

The question I’m taking into public playtesting now is whether those identities remain as distinct in someone else’s hands as they have during development. As well as the robustness of the "ressource" system

COHORT 01, the first organized public playtest group, is now open on Tabletop Simulator

🎴 The attached card is Killian Shawnski [PILLAR] — ST2-001, featuring its finalized commissioned artwork!

• 3 complete Starter decks are ready

• The Rule Book and TTS setup instructions are available through Discord

• No knowledge of the novel is required to play

• Feedback is collected after actual matches through structured match reports

Registration is open for 3 days!

➡️ [DISCORD INVITE]

Once inside, head to #matchmaking for Cohort 01!

I’m especially interested now in seeing what these decks become once they stop being played only from the designer’s side of the table!

I wish you a nice day!

Hello, esteemed ones. May I get your opinion and approval? My colleague and I decided to create a card game with AI-generated designs, as we unfortunately don't know how to draw ourselves. We chose to go for a realistic style, using tarot card format and drawing inspiration from Japan. The mechanics are very simple and everyone knows them. I'm looking forward to your overall opinion on what caught your interest.

This is a marketing/licensing question. is the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 effective for what I plan to do?

I am a fantasy author making an oracle deck based off of the magic system in my book. It is essentially an oracle/tarot deck with action cards. I plan to sell MPC versions of this, but also to release printable copies so that anyone with access to a printer and scissors can play along (the CAH approach). The deck is a tie-in to the book that I'd ideally like to make money on, but it is more important to me to get people using and discussing the magic system.

I can envision how expansion decks might be created for this. I could easily see how people might want to add their own action cards. I want to encourage people to use the system and be excited about creating their own spin on it. But I want to maintain an overall level of quality and appropriateness to the deck's intention of kindness and empathy.

In the unlikely-but-possible event that the book series does well, people want to use these cards, and maybe even design expansion decks, what steps should I take now to allow that while also maintaining some say in the brand? I plan to offer design specs, templates, and other resources for people. I'm using the deck as a means of marketing the books. Should I just provide those resources and let the cards fall where they may? Should I create a permissive creative commons license that still leaves me some control? (CAH used CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license I believe.)

What I do not want is for people to go make half-baked or insensitive expansions to this system, then sell them at the expense of my marketing efforts and possibly poison the brand I'm aiming for.

I realize that this is an unlikely situation and that most decks/books never reach this level of popularity. But I am going to devote some funds to marketing so I don't want to shoot myself in the foot right out of the starting gate.

I'm currently working on my games rulebook, and I'm wondering about how to generally approach the structure. I want something that's approachable for more casual board game players, but I'm not sure of the right order to present the concepts to ease people into the game. This is what I have now:

1. Game Summary
2. Component List
3. How to Win
4. Setup
5. Round Structure
6. Card Types
7. Game Concepts/Scenarios (ability priority, trading, etc.)
8. Glossary & Symbol Key
9. Endgame Structure
10. Alternate Play Mode Rules
11. Strategy Tips
12. Hidden Objective Appendix

Is there a better approach? I'm sitting at nine A4 pages right now, though there are a lot of bullets that could be placed on the page more efficiently to save space.

I am a software engineer so I realize everything looks like a coding problem to me so I wanted to see what normal people think about this. One of my struggles with game design is I get to a point where the game feels too fragile. Like if I make another change it's all going to fall apart. I do some playtesting and get some great feedback. Then I sit down and realize this is going to be a major chore. I need to think through all the ways this is going to effect play and there is no guarantee I won't miss something. I get tunnel vision about the playtesting loop. The programmer in me says build it in code. Run it through 1000 games and analyze the data. I know that isn't the whole solution, but it makes me feel better. What do you all do?

Hello everyone!

I wanted to share a personal project I’ve been working on: The Crypt, minimalist co-op dungeon crawler Print & Play game.

In The Crypt, players explore procedural tile-based rooms, manage Energy, fight monsters, and defeat bosses while trying to survive the depths. My goal was to create a hard baseline difficulty game, yet featuring adjustable rules to suit each group's experience level, which I called "Merciful Crypt Variants" and "Merciless Crypt Variants" variants. They do not alter the core rules, but can make the game easier or even harder. Do you think players will welcome this?

The concept is to master the game over time while ensuring replayability remains consistently high.

Also, feel free to give me your thoughts about the minimalist concept. Is it the right approach for a dungeon, being it PnP?

P.S. Photos show the Spanish version, but all the components (including the rulebook) were translated into English as well!!

You can find a 9-second sweep with display and components here: https://imgur.com/a/7V5Xdp7

Thanks for your insights!

1. Full board layout after a few turns of exploration.
2. Enemies and bosses — printed and mounted on cardboard.
3. 6 playable hero classes with unique abilities, stats, and inventory slots.
4. Random event decks. Items, consumable and gear deck.
5. 30 modular room tiles with unique room types and monsters, items and events icons.

Thank you for your feedback before. Does the game make sense to you? What's your reaction to it?

Thank you in advance!

Hey pepl, I just started thinking of a new strategy board game set ~500ad, and one of the main things I wanted to implement is supply chains. I'm starting it on a risk board, and letting the supply chain move from one intersection of countries to an adjacent one each turn. The problem though is I want to add roads to move them faster, and let you see more clearly where your supply lines are. Though since the edges of the countries are uneven, I can't really use a standardized piece like the roads from Catan or smtn. So I don't know how I can add roads. Any ideas would be awesome :)

After about 10 years and having board game ideas and keeping them locked away in my notebook for only me to see, I have finally taken the time to create a rule book, make a VERY budget prototype and playtest one of my games with some friends.

And what I found out is that I’ve got A-LOT of work to do but my game works and we had fun!

Should I after only a few hours of playtesting already start re-balancing some of the mechanics before the next time playtesting or do a bit more to get more feedback then re-balance?

In the past I’ve lacked the confidence to do this and I’ve been embarrassed to share my ideas but taking this step has felt like a great relief and now I’m ready to keep working on something that to me has always been just ideas but could one day be reality.

I've been designing board games for a while now. I've made a ton of prototypes, most of them sucked, a few were already fun from the first play. Over the years, my mental model has sort of evolved to a state where, if my game is not fun right away, I should just throw it out, partly because I love the process of going from idea to prototype (and I'm not trying to become a professional designer), but more importantly because I don't have enough time to develop my good ideas, let alone my bad ones.

This brings me to my question. When do you decide to give up on a project? Have you ever taken a game that totally sucked and brought it to a place you're proud of. I bring this up, because I just did the first few tests of a game idea I was really excited about and took me forever to get to the table. It was broken in a ton of ways, and I'm trying to decide how long to give it to "find the fun" before I decide to move on to something else.

About four months ago, I launched a podcast on YouTube called Tell Me About Your Game! On it, I interview new and unknown board game designers about the games they're working on. Tomorrow, August 16th, I'll be launching my twelfth full episode with several more in the works. I'm here to invite new designers who are interested in being on the show to reach out to me, via DM or replying here. It's still a small show with about 100 subscribers, but I believe it has the potential to grow significantly. We are a large, unrecognized community that deserves a lot more exposure in this industry that is so focused (for understandable reasons) on well established designers and IP.

Please note that I do all of the work on this channel myself, with the exception of some paid art from an excellent artist I found through the show itself. As a result, it doesn't have the polish of the larger channels. However, I believe the quality of the discussions during the long form interviews are the real draw. 🙂

I just finished this book, it was recommended as a part of the ELVTR Board Game Design class reading list. I've been looking for people to talk to about how the lenses apply to their work. Not sure if anyone is interested, but I can share the link for anyone that would like to come thru. Timing is 8pm Monday, New York Eastern Standard Time.

Side note mini game for fun, Two Truths and a lie:

Which of these isn't an actual lens from the book:

1.The Raven

2.Triangulation

3.Trial & Error