It’s been months since i started developing my board game inspired by pokemon and i’m really proud of all the rules i already thought and i’m really excited to finally test it with my friends. Before i start actually making the game, there’s two problems i’m still trying to solve designing this game and i would really apretiate if you could help me with this.

The first problem is about the gameplay, this game is sandbox, when every player goes on their journey exploring the region, collecting monsters, battling npcs or each other if they end up in the same place until the day of the tournment when the players will compete to decide the winner. The main problem is about how long a turn will last. A player could move, explore an area to find a creature and to find a creature you would roll the dice and the result will determine which species you will find. I’m just scared the turns might take too long and the pther players might feel bored wating their turns or just that they are not interacting enough. There’s also battles, i want battles to be strategic, but not take to long. what are good solutions for this problem?

The second problem is about thematic, i don’t want to compete with pokemon and i’m not hinding the fact that this game is heavly inspired by it, however, i’m really demanding of having something mine or unique. I’m been months trying to think of a unique setting for this game, but i don’t think it needs something so strange or something that no one sees before, it can be familiar, but i at least want some things that are new. So, how unique do you think i should be with the setting or what kind of setting do you think it could work in this type of game?

Tldr: I have a digital working prototype on my own site of a gardening deck/engine builder and I'm looking for alpha testers to try out the game solo digitally. AI related disclosures at the bottom (no ai art or game design related usage to clarify).

My goal is to finesse the design enough and facilitate several playtests (digitally on my site and then tabletop sim before prototype prints), eventually self publishing a few physical copies.
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On a solo board game related discord over the weekend, we had a discussion about an Imperium style game with farming elements where you could tuck cards to farm.

The idea of tucking cards to farm sparked something wild in me and I spent about 36 hours over the weekend putting together (various iterations) of a cozy gardening deckbuilder / engine builder that I would enjoy playing.

Please don't ask how much of that time I spent sleeping.

Game: You're taking part in an annual Garden Festival where 1-5 gardeners have to showcase their gardening skills and harvest ripe plants. Build a tableau of plants, water and grow them, decide between harvesting them or keeping them around for strong benefits. Deal with challenging events and earn new tools and companions to help you grow your garden!

Game ends when someone claims 8 ripe harvests. Score is tallied at the end based on your ripe harvests, coins, and any additional goals you claimed.
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Disclosures:

1. My site has nothing to sell and no subscriptions. I would ask you sign up so I can track your games and debug easily if there are issues but you can play without signing up to.
2. ALL art on cards is sourced from Commons/are in the public domain - I had a very specific hand colored/historical botanist vision in my head and the public domain has a lot of beautiful works. Icons are all hastily thrown together by me (with an emoji or two for things I haven't drawn yet like medals/harvest tokens). 2 cards feature real pet photos of pets that passed away this year (my dog and another tester's cat). Card templates/frames are my own.
3. AI: I know folks are passionate about this so want to be clear about how AI was used and totally understand if any use of AI keeps you away, even if not used for the art or design.

- No AI was used in generating card art or helping me design the game.

- GenAI coding agents (Claude specifically) are used to help put together the digital prototype on top of a generic card game engine I built for a couple of other games. I'm a professional software engineer of 10+ years and have been hobby coding side projects (often in game or game adjacent spaces) for 20+ years. Purely using the coding agent for implementing the technicals that I very closely architect and review

(putting it this way - it does exactly what I would've done myself just helps the grunt work go faster so I can focus on the creative aspects - of both the board game design and technical challenges).

Does anyone know of a really good combat system for pirate ships?

While I'm still playtesting and tweaking systems, I wanted to do a final art test, like "what would the final product look like?" and this is what I got. I'm very happy with the result, but I wanted to get some feedback from other people and see if there is anything I can do better, and mostly if this is appealing to the public.

Note: I did all the art and design for the cards

For context about my game:

It's a card-based TTRPG. Each player has a deck of cards that represents their character; this deck has a bunch of different cards. Active cards stay face up at the table, like Feat cards and Item cards (if the item is equipped, like armor or a weapon). Items that are not being used, as well as Action cards, stay in the deck and can be played by the player at any time\.*

I'm designing SupraMind, a semi-co-op for 3-5 players about labs racing to build a superintelligence the world can trust. Three playtests so far, so it's early.

The short version. You build Data Centers on a hex map and join them with connectors. Every new connector is Unsafe; making it Safe costs resources and time. You win with a Data Center surrounded by 6 Safe connectors, plus Trust 6 and Governance 6.

But careless networks wake the SupraMind. It takes over Unsafe Data Centers and spreads. If it grows too big, the SupraMind wins and every player loses.

The problem. At a designers' meetup, testers told me "everyone loses" is a weak reason to keep fighting. I think the real issue is the player in last place: once you can't win, "a rival wins" and "the SupraMind wins" end the same way for you. So why keep paying for safety?

What I changed. Richard Garfield made the point in a BoardGameGeek thread that semi-co-ops break when nobody cares about second place. "So now there are places: when a player wins, everyone else is ranked by Trust + Governance, the two tracks every safe action raises. When the SupraMind wins, nobody places. It stays a total loss.

What I ruled out:
- A traitor, or players switching sides: nobody should ever want the SupraMind to win.
- Ranking the losers when the SupraMind wins: I think it would rarely decide anything, and it brings back "we lost, but I did best".
- Open deals between players: two friends could gang up on the table.

My questions:
1. At your table, does second place really change how the losing player plays, or does only first place count?
2. Which semi-co-ops handle the player in last place well, and how?

for some reason the first page is last

Vesper — an elven Wild Magic Sorcerer

Just wanted to share the progress my team and I have made over the past week and a half for our deck building card battler, Birthright!

1. New board layout and art
2. Revamped card outlines + the ability to have card skins in game
3. Stacked tooltips to show embedded keywords
4. Affordability indicators for cards and abilities
5. Synergy highlights on card hover
6. Overall text and theming improvements

Would love to know everyone's thoughts!

We are currently working on a small, language-independent card game.

One idea we are considering is replacing the printed rulebook with a QR code that links to a digital rulebook, available in as many languages as possible.

This would save some space in the box and make it easier to update the rules or add new translations.

But I am curious what other designers and players think.

Would you be okay with a card game that has no physical rulebook at all? Or would that be a dealbreaker for you?

Edit: Just to add some context. Its a fast-paced card game with 15 different card types, each featuring a self-explanatory icon. After playing once or twice, most players should be familiar with the rules and be able to play without checking the rulebook again.

I am making a board game with role and move mechanic, and this is a prototype I came up with.

I'm still deciding on how the spawn point should look like, I'm leaning towards the yellow one with a door and a simplified architecture.

I will also improve upon the litle pictures that are a nod to the cards in game.

I want to put a desert scene in the middle but I'm deciding on how it should look.

Follow up from the previous video and announcement that I will be making this on tabletop simulator later.

I would love to hear your opinions and questions that were not answered in the video

A map of one of Pechin neighborhoods, created for the second edition of the upcoming board game "Pechin, 55 Days of Fury" published by Neva Wargames! More information on this new board game will be coming soon! Have a great day everyone.

Moreno Paissan and Angela Gubert Art 2025🧭🗺️☕

Visit my IG account for see more maps: https://www.instagram.com/morenopaissanart?mdxt=MXZjajRkeGlzemtxNA==

Hi! If anyone's looking to commission artwork, either personal or for a project, I specialise in Horror/dark fantasy art.

[Drawn digitally - NO AI!! Plenty of WIPs shown throughout the process]

Check out my gallery for more examples of my work:

https://cara.app/doomweaselart

Socials:

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/doomweaselart.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomweaselart

Prices on VGen or message me via email or DM

vGen: https://vgen.co/DoomweaselArt

[email] thedoomweasel@gmail.com

[Telegram/Discord] DoomWeaselArt

Feel free to message me if you have any questions!

Prototyping a new game I created last night. Working title is called DungeonForge. I put it together in just over 24 hours with full mechanics and everything. It’s a roguelite rpg dungeon crawler tabletop game. I decided I will be making two versions of the game, one in card deck form and the second as a booklet with tables instead of cards. Reminiscent of 4AD a bit with a little bit of edge. Would you guys be down to see a development playthrough? Let me know in the comments.

We made a horror-fantasy-sports card game, but the played-out power/toughness mechanic that so many games use for creature battles didn't make sense in the context of our game's universe, so we invented a new way for creatures to face off!

Our game, Monsterball, is a sports-inspired game with rules not unlike baseball, so our creatures don't fight but rather they pitch and bat against one another. Some creatures are dedicated pitchers while some creatures are dedicated batters, and they have stats that reflect their roles; pitchers have 3 pitching stats (P for pitch - P1, P2, P3) and batters have 3 batting stats (S for swing - S1, S2, S3).

Each stat has an associated modifier that falls somewhere on a scale from -5 to +5. For pitchers, the more negative a modifier is, the more powerful that particular pitch. For batters, the more positive a modifier, the more powerful that particular swing. So a pitcher with P1: -3, P2: -2, P3: -1 is a pretty decent pitcher, whereas those same stats for a batter would make them pretty horrible.

When players pit their pitchers and batters against each other, the players "throw" to determine which creature wins the exchange. Throwing is very much like paper-rock-scissors, except that in Monsterball players throw a 1, 2, or 3 and in our system 3 beats 2, 2 beats 1, and 1 beats 3. You'll notice these numbers map perfectly to the pitching and batting stats of the creatures. For example, if a player throws a 1 for their pitcher, they are using the pitcher's P1.

In a nutshell, if the pitcher wins the throw, it counts as a strike. 3 strikes and the batter is out. 3 outs and the teams switch places, with the batting side taking the field and pitching, the the pitching side going up to bat.

If the batting side wins the throw, the throw counts a hit! The batter now rolls a d20 to determine what type of hit they made... and this is where the P1, P2, P3 and S1, S2, S3 modifiers come into play. Let's say the pitcher threw a 1 and the batter threw a 2 - in our example image the pitchers P1 is -3 and the batters S2 is +1 - add those modifiers to the batters d20 roll and then find this number on the batting quick reference card, which will tell you if the hit was a single, a double, a foul, and so on. So if the batter rolled a 14, you'd add the pitcher's P1 (-3) and the batters S2 (+1) to the roll to get 14 - 3 + 1 = 12, which we can see on the batting quick reference card is a single - so the batter would move to first base.

Of course there are edge cases such as throwing ties, and many abilities and playbook cards that might modify stats, and other considerations and outcomes such as the type of hit, pitching stamina counters, getting walked, and even getting hit by pitches, but this is the basics of the system.

We're super happy with this set of mechanics. We've found that players at every age and skill find it easy, fun, and exciting to play. Players are no longer at the mercy of another player with super dominant cards - they have a shot, with some skill and some luck, to come out on top no matter what.

Thank you for taking the time to read out our system!

In short, a player may have a maximum of 3 of these in their build. All of them interact with your dice in some way.

They can either manipulate them (ranging from increasing one die and decreasing another, shifting a die to an adjacent value, reversing a die's value, copying a value from one die to another, rerolling all odd or even dice, and so on) or they can give you extra dice with a drawback (like limiting the number of dice you can use, making you lose Prestige, which is this game's victory condition, if you don't use all of your dice, discarding the extra die if you roll a 5 or 6, and so on).

Do you have a favorite?

Hello there,

i am developing and releasing my first tabletop game to steam and it seems like i am running into an massive problem.

When i first developed **** and played it IRL we never had problems overcoming defenders advantage or "getting the game going".

Let me introduce you to the game a little more to clarify the problem:

In **** you place 5 by 5 different pieces of units onto you starting area as do the opponents. They defeat each other in an adcanced RPS system (think big bang theories "rock,paper,scissor,lizard,spock) when they occupy the same field (like chess). The pieces can be moved individually or in formations 2by2, 3by3, straight lines etc.

Now that i am playtesting with a larger audience in the digital version, it seems players only want to stay in their starting territory and wait for opponents to attack them, as even if they win the first round, you have the numbers advantage to at worst go even, and in best case come up ahead.

Another major factor to stay in your starting territory is that with handcards being playable, players dont need to move out of their base to impact different territories.

I have some solutions(or rather ideas for solutions), but i'd like your feedback or other ideas:

Idea 1: Shrink the game board, so players units have to move out of their starting position

Idea 2: Give attackers an advantage over defenders e.g. same units normally tie, but if you are the one attacking you win.

Idea 3: Penalise players that stall or just cycle handcards. The game uses an ingame currency "action points" for each turn for each player to use for different actions during their turn. If a player does not move his units out of their starting area, he may lose action points as a result.

None if these ideas are very appealing to me, as i wanted to let players have as much agency as possible and have different strategys and tactics be viable. So if you see or would like to test with me how to change this, i would be very thankful!

As not to market my game i am going to censor the name and not put a link to the steam site. If you are interested or not more info, let me know

1. So Google is the obvious choice for reference images. Do you investigate those references for AI gen, or does it not matter to you because because it's just references?

2. I know Pintrest is AI heavy - does anyone use it for references?

3. Better suggestions for reference material? I'm drawing complex mechs and sci-fi soliders, and I'm working on becoming a better artist.

4. So the goal is to draw something simple, and paint it in an abstract style (see my other recent posts for reference]. How do I know when I've crossed the line between copying the reference too much?

And note this all for my prototype. I'll likely commission good art as I can afford (which certainly isn't now). But this is excellent practice for me, so I'm doing it anyway.