My style is purely 2D illustration technique in digital format. I also do some custom token designs on some of the card games I play.

Beautiful people of Reddit, I did it!:D

After almost five years of work, I brought my game to a state I am super proud of and decided it was time to set up its Gamefound preview page! I took a week off of work and went in pedal to the metal, as this page has been haunting me for basically months so I just wanted to be done with it.
Even if I change things down the road, Im still glad that I finally have something to show people when talking about the game.

I’m not a marketing expert and I know that a professional would have done much better, but I’m super happy with it (obviously biased)
Still, I would love to also know your thoughts!

And if you have any curiosities about anything, I’d be more than happy to chat! Hope you guys dig it!

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/kols-games/deadholt?ref=homepage_spotlight_crowdfunding-draft-published_8

I found that people were squinting at some of my previous cards and complaining some iconography weren't super obvious so I did an update!

Slight difference but I am a little reluctant making the upper left cost be so prominent! Does anyone have any suggestions on what colour to make the price tag?

I've been designing a 2-player lane-control card game called Faith War and it's at the point where friends-and-family testing has stopped telling me anything new. To make stranger playtests cheap, I built the prototype as a browser sim you can play against a bot. No install, no signup, 5-10 minutes a match.

The design in two sentences: 3 lanes (Sky / Earth / Underworld), 6 rounds, both players commit cards face-down simultaneously, win 2 of 3 lanes. The economy runs on sacrifice: Champions cost a follower body to play, Gods cost two and convert enemy followers (snowballing if you don't contest them). Clashes punish overcommitment, because when you're outnumbered in a lane your strongest unit dies first.

The two mechanics I most want stress-tested, because they're the ones that could be secretly degenerate:

- Sacrifice economy: does paying bodies for quality feel like a real decision, or is one end of the curve just correct?

- Strongest-dies-when-outnumbered: does it actually punish premium-piece dumping, or does it just make swarm the only deck?

There are three preset decks (wide swarm / tall champions / god toolbox) and two bot difficulties.

To set expectations: this is deliberately just the core loop. No deckbuilding, no card art, no extra card types yet. I want to know whether the core is actually fun before building anything on top of it.

The ask (about 10 minutes): play 2-3 matches an felt bad, confusing, or degenerate. The prototype records anonymous gameplay stats automatically, so your plays alone already answer half my questions. Your read on the feel is the other half.

Link: https://faithwar.playbench.workers.dev

Buenas de nuevo TRoOoPERS, adjunto la variante del playmat de Sanctuary, todo siempre respetando la identidad visual, en este caso aun falta cartas por desarrollar pero ya con estas dos facciones pretendo hacer los primeros tests del juego, "La luz es el único camino"

This is a write up of the art direction side of a small print and play card game I have been building since last autumn, specifically the part where twelve characters each need three states and all thirty six pictures have to look like they came out of the same box. It took three passes and a full redraw of two characters to get there, and almost everything that worked was a rule rather than a skill.

The game is a deduction game for four to six players set in a port town over one night. Each player holds a character, and every character exists in three states, called Rested, Shaken and Gone. The state is a separate card that gets flipped in as things happen, so a character is never one image. It is three, and the three have to read as the same individual at a glance from across a table under bad lighting.

Twelve characters times three states is thirty six illustrations. The first pass was a mess and it was a mess in a very specific way. Taken one at a time every picture was fine. Laid out together on the living room floor they looked like thirty six pictures from thirty six different games. Different light, different crop, different camera distance, two of them with scenery behind and the rest on nothing. The set had no grammar, and no amount of fussing with individual cards was going to give it one.

So I wrote the grammar down before making anything else, and this is the list that fixed it. Light always comes from the upper left at the same warmth. The crop is locked at chest up with the eyes on the same horizontal line on every card, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the eyes stay put when a state card is flipped in on top. Every character is turned three quarters to the same side. The background is flat, always one of three tones, and there is never any scenery. The palette is paper, a warm brown, a cold blue and one red, and the red is only permitted on a Gone card. One prop maximum per character, and only a prop that is named in their ability text. That last rule saved me more hours than anything else on the list because it killed the urge to keep adding things.

The states got their own rules so the change reads identically across all twelve. Between Rested and Shaken the light does not move and the shoulder line drops. Between Shaken and Gone the eyes leave the viewer. That is the entire vocabulary. My first attempt was more expressive, a different idea of trouble for each character, and it wrecked the set, because a card whose damage state is drawn on its own terms reads as a different game component rather than as the same person in a worse situation.

The character art is AI generated. I make it in a browser tool, generate the three states off the same character so the face carries between them, and the rules sheet says so on the back page under the font credits. I am saying it here for the same reason it is printed there, which is that it is going to come up and it should come from me.

Regenerating the same character is where the actual production friction lives. It does not come back identical. The collar sits differently, the hair parting flips sides, a coat lands half a shade cooler than it did the previous week. For one illustration on its own nobody would ever notice. For three cards a player is holding in one hand it is glaring. What I settled on is generating a batch of eight for each state and keeping the closest match rather than the best picture, and there are two characters where I kept a version I like less because it matched better. Stills at least hold still. I tried a short animated title card early on and the face drifted between frames badly enough that I dropped it and put a static logo there instead.

The silhouette test is the one thing I would keep if I could only keep one. I printed the twelve at twenty four millimetres wide, filled each one in solid black with a marker, and asked my partner to name them. She got seven. Not because she does not know the game, she has played it more than I have, but because five of them were the same shape.

That test predicted exactly what happened at the table. In playtest sessions three and four, players kept mixing up the debt collector and the customs clerk. Both were men of middle age in dark coats holding paper. Same shoulder width, same hat, same posture, and under pub lighting they were simply the same card. One player announced he was accusing the clerk and pointed at the collector. It happened four times in one evening. That is not a rules problem, that is me handing the table two identical objects and expecting them to sort it out.

Both got redrawn from scratch. The clerk came back shorter and rounder, with a visor and small round spectacles and a stack of papers held flat against his chest instead of held out. The collector came back taller and narrower, high tight shoulders, no headwear at all, hands empty. Six cards remade, roughly two evenings once the batch and pick process was working, and the misnaming stopped completely across the next three sessions.

The other failure worth writing down is a layout one. I had designed a crew reference card showing four characters together in a single frame, and a duel card with two of them facing each other. Neither ever worked, and I kept trying to rescue them for weeks before I understood why. The consistency rules that make the set work card by card are the exact rules that break a group image. Every character is cropped at the same distance, so a short character and a tall character came out the same height when placed side by side. Every background is flat, so four in a row read as a stripe. And when I broke the rules and drew a proper group scene with real staging, the characters stopped matching their own cards, which was a worse problem than the one I was trying to solve.

So the layout changed instead of the art. One character per card, always, no exceptions anywhere in the deck. The crew reference card became a text list with the twelve silhouettes printed small down one side, which turns out to be more useful at the table anyway, because silhouettes are what players use to find a card in a spread.

Nothing exotic in the pipeline. The layouts were built in Affinity Publisher, the character art in APOB AI, and the run itself went to a local printer.

The print run was sixty copies and came to about three hundred and forty dollars, a bit under six dollars a copy for thirty six character cards, eighteen event cards and a folded rules sheet in a poly bag. That price only exists because there is no box and no rounded corners. Both quotes that included a box came back at more than double. The printer cuts on a guillotine, so everything got three millimetres of bleed and nothing I cared about sits within five millimetres of the trim, and even so two cards in the whole run came back with a shoulder clipped along one edge, which I can live with at this scale.

The second run is a hundred copies and goes to the same printer in October. Two of the twelve are getting redrawn again, not for confusion this time, but because the bell ringer reads about fifteen years older than her character text says and it has bothered me since March. Twenty two copies from the first sixty are still in a box under my desk.

Life long bass fisherman here. Working on a prototype for my passion project, The Tournament Angler: A Bass Fishing Board Game. 2-4 players compete in a bass fishing tournament to declare who takes home the most weight by weigh-in.

All components are not shown and the art is 100% AI generated. If this game gets off the ground I plan to hire a professional artist.

At this point I have received very positive feedback from the fishing community. What I want to do now is branch out to general board game enthusiasts to see if this is something that looks intriguing.

Would you play this?

I understand that I have an incredibly niche product here and it will not appeal to everyone. That is not my goal.

Please let me know your feedback.

Buenas TRoOoPERS, adjunto el playmat de Empire, así quedaría la distribución del juego para cada jugador, todo bastante bien organizado y limpio para que se identifique bien la unidad con su arsenal y el estado, pero que ven mis ojos, parece que el médico ha sido eliminado!

Hey everyone! I’m a fairly new designer and headed to PAX Unplugged for the first time this year! I want to make sure I get the most out of my time there in terms of networking and meeting people, and I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on how to do a convention “correctly” as a designer who hopes to sign games at some point.

I went to GenCon once a few years back and that’s my only experience with conventions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I thought I would cross post this here.

My game is an Area Control game where a troop of mercenaries working for each of the biggest MegaCorporations (the players) retake a city from the grasp of a terrorist group to exfiltrate several "Metahumans". Each area is a building/zone of the city and in some cases it was difficult to convey it into an icon (despite the card having the name on it) so i left it as it is.

Now, in the nth review i decided to make a vetter version of the buildings that didn't looked like buildings.
The second image is the set of current icons, with which im happy, and i think the new ones fit well.
Any suggestion for the Crater will be wellcome.

I have always conceptually liked the idea of D100 systems for higher detail small scale skirmish games (3-5 models/team). However I don't see the system too much understandably as they are are notoriously clunky, and simulation heavy.

The inability to roll multiple D100 rolls at a time is a huge negative. If someone has a efficient way to do this that would be amazing, but most games use a "degrees of success/failure" system which is what I am working with atm.

• Shooting atm has you roll a D100 and check for degrees of successes.
• For each success, roll that many D6 'Location Dice' up to the weapons profile (1 legs, 2 abdomine, 3 chest, 4 arms, 5 head, 6 - penetrating/critical hit).
• Toss any location rolls that don't beat the location's/cover's AP, however lucky 'penetrating hits' 2x/3x the weapons AP to represent finding weak spots in armor/cover.

I think this works, but let me know if there is a preferable system out there.

THE ISSUE (LOCATION DAMAGE)

I want to model location damage, but with a minimum amount of simulation crunch.

After locations are rolled, the defender makes a single D100 toughness test adjusted by the weapons lethality. If the defender succeeds, each hit is resolved as a simple flesh wound (most characters have 6-8). Done.

If they fail, I want the character to receive a 'Serious Wound'.

This is where it gets rough. I would like serious wound to be location thematic, so I made a simple effect table (with critical rolls apply ing 1 additional effect based on the damage type for narrative flavor). That said, I personally found resolving multiple serious injuries was too crunchy, so I figured, maybe just 1 location can ever get a 'serious wound' per action?

But who determines what location die is chosen?

The attacker will always prefer the head. the defender will prefer a leg/arm. I like the idea that 'penetrating hits' and multiple hits in 1 location force priority, but that still leaves lots of tie breakers.

Main Questions

Do you think it's fine to have the defender simply choose the location of their own serious wound' (the attacker does has some input via allocating penetrating hits, and stacking location hits), or is there another way to randomize this without adding more dice rolls?

Alternatively, is there a totally different way to roll for multiple defense tests quickly for each hit?
Or better, is there a location damage system that already exists that handles multiple location hits?

OR should I just give up on location tables completely and find another narrative way to deal damage?

All feedback is appreciated 😄

hey y'all , a special update.

After a long, painful completely manual artistic journey, DIabolicards' transformation is almost complete. Just 16 cards left.

Today's one was special - its our take on Thor (with his proper norse pronunciation), the beloved mythological demigod who is going to be a part of the Diabolicards roster with a special ability true to his lore. Those have played the game know how fun this is.

Hi r/tabletopgamedesign,

I’m finalizing the design of my first published game and I’m stuck on the best way to handle score tracking for 2–6 players. The must-haves:

• Scores go from 1–20.
• At 10+ points, a new rule kicks in, so it’s important that everyone can instantly see:
  • Who’s in first place
  • Who’s in last place
  • Who has crossed the 10-point threshold
• The game is medium-sized, so table space matters and players need to read all scores at a glance.

We’ve playtested a few options and they’ve all felt pretty bad:

1. Personal round score dials (each player holds their own)
   • Bad visibility for the group.
   • People forget to update them.
   • Ends up with everyone asking at the end of each round: “How many points do you have?”
2. Shared score track with an extra pawn per player
   • Looks fine, but I personally hate the feel of it.
   • Also adds more big parts to manufacture.
3. New idea: colored d20s on stands
   • One d20 per player, in 6 colors for up to 6 players.
   • On small stands so they don’t tumble to the wrong number.
   • Slightly oversized dice for better readability.

What do you think works best? Are there better options I missed that handle 2–6 players, a 1–20 range, and a “something happens at 10” mechanic well?

Hi, everybody
My name is Roman (Nekr0ns), and I am looking for a job in these difficult times.
I draw characters, illustrations, maps, objects - basically everything that is in board games, haha. Except for the Ui and the labels - I'm not very good at them.
So if you are interested in my work, then I will be glad to work with you!
Have a nice day.

I'm a solo game designer and I've finally reached the part of this process that I don't think I was prepared for.

You spend all this time coming up with an idea, designing it, testing it, changing things that don't work, making the artwork, figuring out production, and eventually you have an actual finished game sitting in your hands.

And then comes the question:

How do you get it outside your own circle?

I've been working on social media and talking to local people, but I'd really like to hear from other indie/solo designers who have already crossed this bridge.

What actually worked for you?

Reviewers? Conventions? Local game stores? Reddit? Facebook groups? BoardGameGeek? Paid advertising? Sending copies to creators? Just slowly building a community?

And are there any good Reddit threads, communities, Discords, articles, or other resources specifically about the marketing/discovery side after the design and publishing work is done?

I'm not looking to advertise my game here or drop a sales link. I'm genuinely trying to learn this side of the business.

I put a hell of a lot into making something I'm proud of. Now I'm trying to figure out how a one-person designer makes sure his game doesn't live and die with himself, his friends, and the handful of people who happened to find it.

I'd love to hear what worked—and what absolutely didn't—from people who've been through it.

[DEVLOG] A RECAP OF MY 2ND DAY IN MY FRIEND'S CITY

My best friend invited me to his girlfriend's birthday, and he booked me a flight to his city. He also wanted me to playtest my game in his community.

Here are the things that happened:

• We had 3 matches in the evening
  • 2 matches won via Economic Victory
  • 1 match won via Elimination Victory
• Everyone easily learned the game very quickly
• At some point, I let them play the game and teach each other
• Surprisingly, 1 player tried to take a strategically aggressive approach in 1 of the matches
• We got good feedback from the owner; one thing to look at was the duration of the game
• - My best friend also mentioned the player who got eliminated early.

After the event. My best friend and I worked on the issues that the game was having, and we did the following updates:

1. WORLD CYCLE

• Cycle happens when a player lands on the starting tile
• Originally, World Cycle has 6 cycles, and each cycle has an effect on the game and gives an amount of gold depending on the cycle. For example: World Cycle 3 gives the player 3 gold and allows FREE MOVE, which means all players can choose 1-6 steps during this cycle
• Now, we still call it the World Cycle, but we moved the game effects to the Event Deck, and we limit the number of cycles the game can have. At the 20th cycle, "The Last Stand" event occurs.

1. THE LAST STAND

• During this event, all attached items and magic that are combat-related are considered.
• The first thing to check is the remaining players.
  • If 3 to 4 players are remaining, everyone does a combat check by rolling the combat dice. The top 2 players will proceed to the last stand
• During the face-off, both finalists will do combat rolls until a player runs out of Heart Tokens
• Additionally, The Last Stand will also occur if there are 2 remaining players left even though it doesn't reach the 20th World Cycle

1. GHOST PLAYER / DEFEATED STATUS

• We made sure players who are eliminated are still included in the game by changing their status to Defeated instead of Eliminated
• The Ghost Player resources and inventory cards are recycled or returned to their decks
• He/She is also not allowed to win nor to interact with players directly in order to avoid Kingmaking
• He/She has the task to bring Tragedy effects to all remaining players or draw Event Cards by rolling a Ghost Die during his or her turn

With the following changes, the game consistently ends around 60 minutes at full gameplay but can still end earlier, around 15 to 30 minutes.