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 everyone,
I'm reading Daniel Piechnicks great blog about gamedesign at the moment. I read this part today: https://daniel.games/reducing-complexity/
In it he says you should not have more than 2 systems in your game. Now I think I do kind of understand what a system is. But the more I thought about it in terms of my own game design the more I found it difficult to really differentiate betweet different systems and pinpoint when one system ends and another one starts. Is card drawing a system? Rolling dice? or does ist need to be more complex? if yes, how complex? How many rules do I need to call a system a system. Because no game mechanic in the game I design at the momet is truly seperate from another it got really hard for me to draw the line.
Hi everyone!
I’m the author and creator of TRANSCENDERS, a fantasy saga set around Oneira — a world governed and shaped by a fundamental force called Cenderessence!
Quote:
“The very essence of the Transcenders’ power, it is the exceptional substance through which Oneira is governed and reacts.”
— Mr Valeurobsolute
Over the past months, I’ve been developing TRANSCENDERS | The TCG as a playable extension of that universe!
I’m now opening COHORT 01: the first organized public playtest of its current Alpha environment on Tabletop Simulator.
Three complete Starter decks are currently playable:
🟣 ST1 — Cheryl O’Will
Midrange / Control
A pressure-building deck that wants to endure, prepare, and turn a fragile-looking position into a decisive reversal
🟢 ST2 — Killian Shawnski
Aggro / Tempo
A precision-focused deck built around clean sequencing, efficient exchanges, and punishing the openings your opponent gives you
🟠 ST3 — Théa Wintersnow
Control / Sustain
A resilient deck that protects its position, disrupts opposing momentum, and becomes increasingly difficult to break as the game goes long
The three decks share the same game, but deliberately approach it through very different rhythms and tactical identities!
🎴 The attached card is Killian Shawnski [PILLAR] — ST2-001, now featuring its finalized commissioned artwork!
🔎 A quick Alpha V1 readability note:
some card text may look small at first glance. Tabletop Simulator’s zoom makes it perfectly workable in play — and I say that as someone whose eyesight is certainly not winning any awards 😅😅😅
Readability and card layout are nevertheless already among the elements planned for further refinement as development progresses
⚔️ COHORT 01
Are sought for, people who would genuinely like to sit down and play!
• The 3 Starter decks are ready on Tabletop Simulator
• The Rule Book and setup instructions are available through the Discord
• No prior knowledge of the novel is required
• Essential server information is available in both English and French
• Feedback is collected after actual matches through a structured reporting system on the server
Registration for Cohort 01 is open for 3 days
➡️ SERVER LINK
Once inside, follow the arrival steps and head to #matchmaking for Cohort 01!
Thanks for reading — and perhaps some of you will be seen around a Table in Oneira!... ✨
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!
Recently I posted the preview link for Deep Deck's preview Kickstarter, and I received some high quality feedback from r/cardgames, so I tool some time to reach out to playtesters, film new content and tell the story better. Thank you all. Here is a link to the pre-launch kickstarter if you'd like to take a look or get notified. Pledging will open September 1st.
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.
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
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 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?
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 played your cards trying to induct the rule object of the games to get rid of all your cards. I really like the game so u spun up a free to play web version. It’s surprisingly difficult. It actually teaches you how to scientifically experiment. Is 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. .Eleusis
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.
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?
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
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!
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'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:
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.
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!
Maybe It's a long shot, but I'd like to help out at the stand of any small/mid-size, ideally indie publisher/game designer at Essen Spiel!
I'm working towards publishing my own farily large game - it won't be ready for Essen this year just yet, but I want to attend the event to learn first hand from the experience of other more experienced publishers/designers. I'd be happy to work with someone at their stand, I could help set up / wrap up, I can help teach games or run playthroughs, I can run errands and help out with whatever else you may need.
I'd like to have some hours here and there to myself so I can meet manufacturers and potential partners for my own project too - but otherwise - I'm all open! I simply want to be of assistance to someone else going through this design/publishing process - so that I can observe, learn from you hands-on, and so that i can have at least a clue of what I'm doing there next year when I bring my own game to Essen. :)
I have already directly written to a number of designers and publishers offering my assistance - but until I hear back, I'm casting a wide net and offering my help on here too.
Thanks!
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 :)