Morning: Board game finds at Columbus Farmers Market

My family went to the Columbus Farmers Market in South / Central NJ to look for some goodies. They’re looking for toys and trinkets and stuff, and I wasn’t really looking for anything specific, but I decided to see what kind of board game stuff I could find.

This was almost the first booth we walked up to, and I will never pass up an opportunity to buy more Keyforge decks. I paid $15 for about 15 decks. I’ll add them to my growing pile to hopefully try out one day.

My favorite way to play Keyforge is with both players just grabbing a new deck and trying to find the fun in it. Then play a second game once you understand a little about it.

This was my second purchase. A good handful of large Heroscape pieces for $5. There were a few more that aren’t shown here. But I’ll always grab cheap Heroscape. I remember the time when this stuff was really hard to get and way more expensive than this.

But the guy told me he didn’t know what it was and if I wanted some more, he tossed them in the trash can in the aisle.

So now I have my first official trash picked Heroscape pieces.

This wasn’t a board game book, but it had a cool board gamey cover. Not cool enough to buy it though!

There were a handful of Star Wars Attacktix, which I love and will normally buy all that I see. They were $2 each, which isn’t bad especially for a silver base trooper, but it was broken. I should have just grabbed the sealed Bossk because he’s great, but I kept moving.

I never bought the conversion kit, and never played X-Wing again after the whole conversion thing, so I passed on this as well. I wasn’t really playing at a high enough level to need to convert, but it made the entire product line confusing from that point on. I could always go back and play my version 1.0 collection, but it just hasn’t happened.

Lots of collectible games. Found some Heroclix which I haven’t played in forever. Didn’t buy them.

This is more along what I expected to see. Except for the Lorcana Gateway. I just recently opened up my set to pull out the board. For $5 it would have been worth it, as it’s a really nice board to play on top of, especially compared to those half paper mats in the starters. Of course you can play without either of them, but the board is very nice quality.

And closing with some TCGs in the newer area of the Farmers Market. I didn’t buy any because they are way overpriced, but I just bought some Neuroscape Genesis last week to see what it’s all about. So far it seems familiar, but somewhat interesting. I’ll have to see if I can actually play it sometime.

Hope you enjoyed seeing what’s out there. Back to normal tomorrow!

7:16 AM: First discord post

The new secret game is trucking along and I made a spreadsheet with more cards than you would ever need. I feel like these came together so well, by using some of the techniques we developed for games like Dungeon Pages. There we would combine two halves of card abilities to create new ones, focusing on the trigger in the first half and the effect in the second half. Every time we came up with a new trigger, we could pull every effect and have a ton of new potential abilities.

9:03 AM: Longswords and stubby little daggers

The sword / rune game art is wrapping up and it’s looking so good.

There are also stubby dagger versions of them - these aren’t ever played like this, but it’s each player’s starting cards, so you know everyone will be making these little guys.

9:55 AM: The blog is featured on the blog

I whined about the Board Game Geek blog formatting and how long it takes to convert the Substack post over to BGG. I swear any other service you could just copy and paste and it would pick up formatting and images, but BGG is so old school you need to edit the html.

Anyway Discord came to the rescue and Luke Sorenson suggested automating it.

And a few hours later he had a site for me to use. Super thoughtful, and super helpful. It works like magic.

3:15 PM: More DIE Ball rules, but this time it’s new team pages

We decided to give each team half of a page and show their special ability rules (and describe them in further detail if needed, but also give a little story and some strategy notes, and some stats. This touches on something I’ve always wanted to do, which is make a strategy guide for one of our games. Here you get half of half of a page.

5:55 PM: More DIE Ball teams in the works

I mentioned the art briefs on these yesterday, but they are coming in quickly and look amazing.

Here are the Skeletons and the Outlaws so far.

Love the gold chin, the dynamite in the hair. All of it.

Catch you again tomorrow!

8:32 AM: First discord post

Milan sent me some art sample from an artist that reached out to us. This would be for an unannounced game. We’ve worked with a lot of artists, but this has a neat different feel than any of them.

[NOTE: These are samples of their work, this is not one of our games. Sorry for any confusion!]

It’s always fun and almost mysterious when starting art on a new project as you don’t really know what you’ll get. You have ideas based on your direction and their styles, but sometimes you are completely blindsided by something very different (which can be good or bad). It’s always exciting though.

10:28 AM: New DIE Ball teams

Working on some of the next DIE Ball teams. We already have the first 8 designed, some developed, and some already printed and released. Now we’re working on the second 8.

4:55 PM: Wrapping up the DIE Ball rules

We’re really close to being done these, but taking our time to review it all over and over as a team. Rules are dreadful to me, and I would say this has felt slightly less dreadful? That’s a step in the right direction.

5:33 PM: Starting to figure out the database some more

Ian started to clear up some of the database entries. It’s funny because there were specific reasons for each entry, then they got a little blended, and then we sort of strayed from using them in specific instances.

Now we have a few more simple uses (back of the box, etc), and we need it to be clear again. I’d like to just add fields that define the uses so we don’t stray again.

See you tomorrow!

6:45 AM: First discord post

We’ve been working on a secret game. It’s a weird one, so we want to really have it all in a great place before sharing anything, so expect some vagueness about it. But the graphics team is just getting started based on my prototype cards. I’m really looking forward to seeing this come together, and eventually sharing it with everyone.

10:08 AM: Updating our database, but the database not the data

Dustin Dobson set us up with a really helpful database for each game and expansion, with fields for everything you can imagine. Some of the newer games are behind on updating it and I wanted to get them moving, but in getting them moving I wanted to revisit a few of the fields and see where we were actually using them.

Now that we have boxes a lot of these correspond to a specific location on the box. We’re also adding some more with our new envelopes needing text in places. Hopefully this little bit of cleanup can keep things moving better.

2:05 PM: Pulling games for Friday Sales

You may or may not know about our Friday Sales so I’ll explain. Every Friday we release like 8-10 wallet games on Etsy (like 10-15 copies of each), within a single listing called the Friday Sale. These are games that are harder to find and generally not available on our site.

Each week we’ll dig around for games to include and it can sometimes be a bit of a scramble to find something that hasn’t been on in recent weeks. So I had a thought on how to designate a game for Friday Sales.

If we have like 100 or fewer copies on hand, we can split them up to 6 months of Friday sales, appearing one week each month. We can also be super organized and have these games in a separate section of the office with its own inventory and all that fun stuff.

So I pulled a ton of games for the next few weeks. Follow along at https://www.etsy.com/shop/ButtonShyGames. They launch at noon ET on Fridays and some sell out really quickly.

I also don’t think I’ve shared this here, but we snuck out two new Cuckoo Shuffle wallets recently, and they are sort of Friday Sale exclusive, at least for the moment. We’re releasing 10 of each on every Friday sale for the next 6 months.

The first week sold out really quickly, but these are a weird one and will definitely slow down as the weeks go on. Just trying some different things with our weirder games.

3:53 PM: A new Kickstarter comment… but on the Sprawlopolis campaign

Seeing who this is, it’s not unexpected, but getting a notification that says there’s a comment on the Sprawlopolis campaign was very much unexpected.

Gotta love it.

4:29 PM: New DIE Ball character names

I found this list of new DIE Ball character names on the table at Button Shy and just laughed.

The Snughts are an expansion of backup players that come in after an injury. But the trick is that they are all quite slow, being made up of snails, slugs, and sloths.

Here’s Soggs, all dressed up and ready to play.

8:48 PM: Vague question about the vague game

I’ve been working on this secret game and I have an idea and wasn’t sure if it would go over well. In fact, I know it won’t but I wanted to put it out there for discussion.

Ok vague question of the day: If you were playing a game with characters, and instead of those characters all having a special ability, instead they had a suggested challenge... would that character feel satisfying to you?

I’m trying to think of a super global example that everyone might know.

Ok instead of those abilities, it said “doesn’t like the green virus - try a game where they don’t come in contact with the green virus”

It’s not a bonus, and it’s not a requirement. Basically a loose preference.

Does everyone hate that?

If so, it’s 100% going in this game

So of course, most hated it. But the discussion that followed was excellent. With some suggestions from Jay Yeates we were able to get the text on the card to feel less prominent and more flavorful, solving some of the bigger issues of the weirdness of it being optional and without really giving any reward. See the text on the image below.

This character doesn’t require 2+ drink cards, but they prefer it. It tells a little story, and gives an achievement like goal.

Then the discussion got wild. The character was named received flavor text and now has a fanbase. So I guess it’s all ok in the end?

Be back tomorrow with more fun.

7:26 AM: First discord post

George had a great suggestion and it’s to make the Act One through Act Three cards in Out Of Print have growing branch sizes as the story continues on.

So my first post was just about the sizes.

We landed here for the day, and it’s almost there. It just needs a little tweak in the size difference between 2 and 3.

8:57 AM: My final post at PNP Arcade

Today I drafted my final post for PNP Arcade as I am leaving the company after 8+ years. We discussed recently whether or not I should announce that I’m leaving the site. It’s all been kind of fuzzy because I don’t really want to leave, and didn’t know if I was fully stepping away or not, but I don’t think it’s fair or helpful for me to half commit to something. So I drafted a little note to go before by last article at the blog.

But yeah, it’s a bummer to have to step away. I really love working with Jason Greeno and I hope we find opportunities to keep it up. I’m just stretched so thin and so is Button Shy, so I need to be 100% available for everything here.

If you’re unfamiliar with PNP Arcade, we were a PNP webstore / publisher. I was co-designer on the Dungeon Pages series, which are some awesome puzzly roll and writes, with a ton of content. I’m really proud of that project and all of the work we did together. Working with Greeno was always as natural as it gets, and I think we compliment each other really well.

Make sure to check out the blog. It comes out every Friday with news, links, and info on everything PNP: https://pnparcade.substack.com/

1:30 PM: Out Of Print reference cards and terminology

We had a big meetup to nail all of the terminology in Out Of Print, where we tried to differentiate between Act and Action, which show up multiple times in a single sentence in the rules.

Play any card below any Act card and MUST activate the action and any action on the Act card in either order.

See what we mean? Rules are really the worst part of all of this.

We settled on changing action into ability, but action is now a different term, just used very lightly.

We also started to tackle the reference card. Before it was almost all of the rules in the game (as they are quite short). But now it’s heading towards a much shorter version.

3:27 PM: Testing the Cyclopes in DIE Ball

Net on our list was to test the Cyclopes as they are the next to go to print, and they played really well against the Goblins. They won, so we dropped two values by 1 each to see how the next game goes.

But the Cyclopes are super fun on both offense and defense. Their offensive special is that they re-roll 1s. Which turns a dud into some hope. I was pretty successful in converting almost every 1 into a 6 with the re-roll, and that carried some serious weight in this game.

On defense they are also great because when you are down to your last cube on the field, you gain 3 of the Strength ability. Each gives you +1 to a die, and you can stack them. So you can pull of a great last stand, and I was able to really take advantage of this twice when I was down.

7:14 PM: The boxes are here!

After a whole thing with DHL, I was able to finally pick up our boxed game samples. Not going to complain more about them because it’s behind me now. Just until the next time we need something from them.

But the boxes are here and they are amazing.

We will share lots more on these as we open up more of the games, but for now here are a few more angles.

You can easily fit one in your pocket.

Elle fit two in her pocket (and said “this really should be an advertisement for Walmart pants”. I should note, she loves her Walmart pants.)

These little boxed are as cute as we pictured they’d be. We just have some little bits to sort out with the envelopes and I think they’ll be ready for production. Going to dive in tomorrow morning.

1:46 AM: First discord post

Driving to and from DC is the worst. We were coming home late and the graphics team is in Europe so they start their days super early. I had to give them a heads up as I was still driving home as they were waking up.

I ended up getting like 4 hours of sleep.

Worked on a variety of things for the next few hours. But nothing to show for it.

10:42 AM: Something Sword

Been working on a new swordcrafting game here and the team is tightening up the art and layout. I made this card mock up quickly to get an idea of space below the hilt, and to see if we could squeeze in a title.

Filip has been working on the tops and bottoms of the swords and he made this funny image of them missing the middles. I kind of love these stumpy swords.

10:45 AM: Tomorrow is the big reveal

If you’ve been following along the DIE Ball season (via The Queen’s Courier), tomorrow is the big day for the Witch Queen’s Cup results. It’s the Goblins vs the Mummy Cats and we can’t wait to reveal the winner. Keep an eye on the DIE Ball Instagram or the Button Shy discord for tomorrow’s issue.

2:15 PM: Approving Character Illustrations

This is a game that we’ve hinted at but haven’t shared, or maybe we did. But we have some awesome new illustrations to approve. There are standard and injured versions of each character. These have turned out so good. Can’t wait to share more.

3:57 PM: Out Of Print Wave Two Ideas

We spent some time working through our ideas for Wave Two of Out Of Print. Wave One is the two modules in the campaign (Moby Dick and The Tell-Tale Heart) followed by A Christmas Carol and Wizard of Oz. We’re also looking for a fun way to sneak out Jabbarwocky. We started out with a little refresher today on the modules.

Then we started to look at all of the new suggestions for books, but also to look for ways to open up the design space for the next wave. One thought was to introduce a single extra die for the next 4 book modules.

Another idea was persistent rules on the character card, and the last idea was 3 cubes that are used in different ways.

These notes are all over the place, but the goal was to essentially blurt out whatever came to mind, and I think it was pretty successful.

5:41 PM: DHL Woes

We have so many issues with DHL. More than we do with Fed Ex and Fed Ex is the worst thing ever.

Today we are waiting for an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND TIMELY package from DHL. It’s the samples of our boxed games, so that we can review and approve ASAP so they can start printing.

I saw it was supposed to arrive today so I called DHL and said that last time they came after we closed for like 3 weeks before returning our package to the sender in China. It was a whole nightmare and I don’t want it to happen again so I reached out to them.

They said that business attempts are before 5pm and we’ll be ok.

Then at 5:41 I got this.

This was exactly what we expected so I rerouted it to a locker about 25 minutes away. They should deliver there tomorrow and then I can pick it up. What can and will go wrong now? The answer is everything because it’s DHL. Ugh.

6:15 PM: Phillies Game

Took a break to go to a $20 Phillies game with my son. It was super nice out and they won.

9:12 PM: Vicky D says hiii

We get so many silly emails. I might as well share them with you.

I’m all for a casual opening, but this may be my first “hi” with 3 i’s.

9:32 PM: Out Of Print is killing it

It’s day two of the campaign and we passed $20,000 and 1250 backers. Those numbers are wild for these little modular games. It’s doubled DIE Ball already (I had a note from someone that said “It seems board gamers like books more than sports” - and in our experience this is absolutely true. Sports games have always been a tough sell, but we’re ok with that and going to keep pushing with them).

We also posted our first update today and asked everyone which books they wanted to see. There have been so many suggestions and we’re listening to all of them. Some are already on our radar, others are all new to us. It’s really cool to see this kind of interest.

And below is the coolest comment ever.

I love it because I had nothing to do with this update. I stressed about writing it, but asked George and Andrew to handle while I was away. My only contribution was to proofread, and then I changed a word or two, and hit post. Now this isn’t something all new as Michelle and George have been doing updates for years with little involvement from me, but this was a cool update and it’s great to see the shout out.

And with that, I’m done for the day. Going to sleep way later than I should especially after not really sleeping last night. Back at it in a few hours.

6:09 AM: First discord post

This says it all.

I didn’t realize we still had so much work to do on the campaign page. But now 15 and a half hours later, I can say it’s looking pretty solid. And I’m beat. So I apologize for a shorter daily recap.

8:10 AM: The Kickstarter Main image

I often make the first main image myself and then we make a better one down the line. This one was pretty decent and it never bugged me enough to ask the team to rework it. Until today that is.

Filip got right on it and proved me wrong. Or right? I have no idea. He just made it way better.

That little bit of blue in the background really made the cards pop in a way that I was missing.

11:08 AM: Do we need a cover for the Base Set?

This was an interesting question that came in. Out Of Print is the first modular game with a Base Set. In the game you’ll use the Base Set (basically 9 cards that make the game work) and mix it with any one Book Module.

But it turns out we never made a cover image for the base set.

This was my quick suggestion and after some back and forth we had a cover.

A good chunk of the rest of the day: DIE Ball rules

These have been tough. I’ve been handling the graphic side of the rules, and the immediate team has been working on them together, but we don’t have a rules editor on the Modular Games. They are smaller, lower budget, and have shorter timelines, and to keep everything moving on them, we just have a smaller group. But rules are the worst IMO. There are a million ways to say the same thing, and most of them are wrong. Then there are a million ways to show the same thing, and most of them are wrong too.

After working a bunch, I felt like these rules are in a pretty good place so we kicked them out to backers asking for some feedback before considering them final.

And it didn’t take long to get some great feedback.

We’ll be digging into this over the next few days and finalize it all. Will be very happy to have the rules part behind us. If you’re interested in checking out the rules, they are here: https://buttonshygames.com/pages/die-ball

The other good chunk of the rest of the day: The Out Of Print Kickstarter video

I have such a weird relationship with Kickstarter videos. I feel like I’m decent at making a certain style of video, but I hate that we need to do it. I just want to make games and get them out there, and spending a large amount of time making a campaign video just feels like it’s pulling away from making games. And I have no idea if campaign videos really do anything. I just know you need to make one.

So I made one.

Andrew did all of the writing and voice work here last week and It’s EXCELLENT. Not only does it elevate the video to the net level, but it gave it the focus that is sometimes really hard to find.

So the video is done. The campaign page is almost done (feel free to check out the work in progresshere: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/239309591/out-of-print?ref=2fgaya&token=49c5daf2), and I need to wake up super early tomorrow and figure out the final missing pieces before we launch at 8:30AM EST. Excited to get the second modular moving already, and excited to meet with the team and share my latest idea that I worked up over the weekend. If you think the Modulars are weird, this one is way weirder.

8:29 AM: First discord post

I had an early morning meeting with Jason Greeno to do our last design work on Dungeon Pages: Underboss. I told the team to hold off for a moment while I wrapped that up.

But finishing Underboss felt great. We’ve never finished one of our yearlong adventure games this early in the year, and this one has been extremely smooth. I think we built it in a smart way allowing for repeating parts over and over in order to make something all new. Really proud of that game, but also really happy to be done.

11:01 AM: New artwork for an unannounced game

Not much to say here, but the artist is killing it. Can’t wait to share some actual details.

There are map cards, tourist cards, and one more very specific type of cards. Those aren’t ready yet but we hope to get them soon.

1:57 PM: Out There is now known as Alien Theory

We struggled to come up with a name to hit a whole mess of beats about the game, and we settled on Alien Theory. There is a hypotheses phase in the game, which we’ve been itching to rename. It’s now the theory phase. And Alien Theory gets right to the point of it. You’re searching for aliens and then making a theory based on them. Then you’ll score.

Happy to have the title down. Logo next week, I’m sure.

2:26 PM: Astronotl In-House Test

We got our hands on the latest version of Astronotl, and had a handful of notes for the team. Looking to try and cut down rules (aren’t we always?) and considering some bigger cuts. One game was a loss and it was definitely George’s fault.

2:38 PM: DIE Ball stamp test

The stamps worked! They actually look really cool. Which team will you get? Maybe both.

4:31 PM: Out Of Print is getting some Peruse Bookmark promos

Filip asked if there were promo cards for Out Of Print and my answer was “it’s not that kind of game”. Whatever that means. But when I passed the question over to the team, Andrew suggested “it’s not that kind of game” as well, so I think we have our answer.

It’s not that kind of game.

BUT… there’s never been a better game for our Peruse Bookmarks.

They are bookmarks on one side and silly "find-the-words-in-a-book” game on the other. So we had to come up with some words.

Funny story, we originally had Ahab on the Moby Dick side, and then realized that it wouldn’t work with most other books. You need such specific yet also generic words for this game.

Oh and Filip already started working on the art side.

5:16 PM: The final piece for Alien Theory

Today we came up with the new name, so why not also come up with some completely new mechanics? Haha.

We were wrapping up the proofing and double checking all of the final balance and ended up with two extra cards. George suggested something that worked off of the red aliens, so we came up with the card below.

Then we played some games with it and started to sweat. The tension is strong because you don’t want to have this card in your zone. A great suggestion led to great implementation and an all around better game.

8:20 PM: Nightly Lorcana

And we closed the night with two games of Lorcana. I won one and lost one with my Mickey Mouse broom people deck. We also were able to try out my new board from the Gateway edition of the game. It was pretty awesome, especially compared to the paper playmats.

And with that, my day was over. I may not be back for the rest of the week as I will be heading South for a few days. But everything keeps moving here. If there’s something interesting to say, I’ll make it work. Catch you later!

7:21 AM: First discord post

Way back when we released Agropolis we ran out of room and couldn’t include a scoring example. We assumed everyone played Sprawlopolis and wouldn’t need it so we moved the scoring example to a link and QR code.

But it doesn’t currently work. And…

Yeah, I don’t know if we uploaded it. And I don’t know if anyone ever asked about it? I really do think everyone started with Sprawlopolis and didn’t even need the rules for Agropolis. Maybe someone else will know more about this.

This goes to a link, that takes you to another link, which says “Coming Soon”. Sounds about right.

8:13 AM: Final Dreadstock card text

I think we’re done with the card text and balance updates after this last round of tweaks.

This card is getting +1 Dread, basically provides like 2 mana instead of 1 if we’re talking Magic The Gathering terms. That’s a boost we wanted to give a few cards to loosen up the dread production for the monster players. And the ability at the bottom was nerfed a little.

The abilities are for the farm player and this one let you remove anything from the game. So if your the monster players built up something really big, you could just tear it apart and remove the best part of it from the game.

I can say this has felt awesome in testing. As long as you are on the farm side. It was just too harsh on the monster side. So now, it’s limited to just unexhausted cards (cards that haven’t been contributed to mana), and it adds the card to the bottom of the deck instead of removing it from the game.

Two other cards had updates, and I think we’re good to go!

9:32 AM: Dreadstock logo and cover

Next up was passing the logo over to Filip to wrap up. He decided to knock out the logo and cover at the same time, assuming it’s because they go hand in hand.

This was the first attempt.

I didn’t think the logo felt as “dready” as it should, and really as mundane as it should. This should feel like the harsh day to day life of a farmer dealing with some unknown elements. Anyway, here’s the second take.

We liked where it was going but the monster was too much. Take 3 nailed it.

10:45 AM: Delays to our boxed games

So we’ve touched on it here, but I laid it all out at Kickstarter. I wrote a super long update detailing every issue and our plans to fix them next time. I think it’s worth reading instead of summarizing, so I’ll share the link below.

So far the support has been really strong. Haven’t heard any real negativity yet, which is very good. These update comments are tough to monitor sometimes.

Here’s a link to the full update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/239309591/button-shy-wallet-games-spring-2026-collection/posts/4767214

11:44 AM: Astronotl development

Ian and Erica have been working had on Astronotl and everything is due for some internal tests before it goes to editing. I have a copy of the latest cards and rules to check out with the team tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve played so I imagine it’s going to feel all new, especially from having a peek at the development channel at discord.

11:50 AM: My Gen Con Haul came in the mail

I didn’t get to go to Gen Con this year but a few discord friends hooked me up with some goodies. The one thing I really wanted wasn’t a game at all, it was a silly bling packaged mini kallax and mini game boxes.

This merges so many of my interests into one product. I love blind boxed toys so much and have way too many (but not nearly as many as my wife). So I had to get some of these.

I spent lunchtime at home today opening up my packs and putting together this awesome little shelf. I have no idea where it’s going to go, but it looks super cool.

7:07 PM: Out There tweaks

This started this morning but went into the evening so I’m adding it here. We’re so close to being done the cards but I was able to chat with designer Kyle Day about cleaning up the hypothesis cards. Currently they are split into two and you get bonus points on the fewest side. But I was suggesting that we lean way into it to help players grasp the reasons behind all of the mechanics.

The above image is where we started, and after talking a bit and Kyle suggesting the term “endangered”, which is exactly what we needed. The updated cards are below, which I will pass onto Filip in the morning so he can make them look way nicer.

If that works out we might be done the cards tomorrow.

9:08 PM: Some DIE Ball stamps

We wanted to spice up the envelopes for DIE Ball packages a little and I suggested that we buy some rubber stamps.

After looking at the timelines for all of the companies, we decided against it. Basically because the shortest arrived in about a week, and we can start shipping in like 24 hours or so.

Then I thought “let me ask my wife”. She has every craft tool and machine you can think of. She handed me these a few hours later.

They are too cool. I’m so excited to stamp like 100 envelopes with these. No two will be the same.

Catch you tomorrow!

But that theme implementation… I wanted to improve on it as we were playing it. Oh well. good stuff overall.

6:34 AM: First discord post

This morning we worked on a secret unsigned project that we’ve been playtesting and essentially developing before signing it. Here’s the semi-grumpy early morning me.

But this wasn’t really grumpy just a comment on icons that were really similar. Can’t wait to share more on this.

Lots of gaps today because we were doing all kinds of things, and for me it was driving my daughter to the train station in between dealing with technology and ultimately just trying to hit deadlines. Not a ton of successes today there.

9:17 AM: Out There (name to be changed) has more art

Filip here has been shaping this space explorer deduction game and today it really started to find its style.

We did a print and a test to see if all of the cards work as is, and there were a few little tweaks needed. But the look is really getting there.

It’s just retro enough. Next up is locking in a title. We’ll see if it happens as fast as Dreadstock did.

10:50 AM: Worder version 2.0 rules

This morning we worked on the rules for Worder version 2.0. This is a non-final version (the example images have extra layers of cards on top of each other as we were just roughly building the examples. And the words “wallet” and “straw” on panel 4 were changed to “slow” and “flawless”

But you can get an idea of the changes to the game in this version with the rules above. More cards, more turn based, more chances to play with a longer game, less penalties, etc etc etc. It should be out in a few weeks.

6:50 PM - Button Shy games at The Nerd Mall in Woodbury, NJ

After work today I was passing by The Nerd Mall and decided to stop in to see if they had some specific trading cards my family was looking for. While there I decided to grab a picture of their pretty hefty selection of wallet games. Some of these can be a little harder to find.

That’s about it for today. It was busy but I was off of discord for a lot of it, just scrambling to catch up. See you all again next week.

7:48 AM: First discord post

This was the first of my discord posts on our private servers today.

And today was quite the opposite of nothing. I posted 214 more times after that onour two private servers. Let’s see what the day was all about.

8:42 AM: Working on some aliens

I mentioned the game Out There recently (and I don’t think that is not the final name), but today we started working on the artwork a bit. Filip went through a bunch of variations and then settled on something we loved. Here’s some of the progress throughout the day.

First is the designer prototype:

And then an attempt at an alien style

My initial thoughts were that these were too similar (the ones on the right need to be memorable at a glance and I feel like they are too similar), but also a bit too geometric.

Then I think we got a little more geometric haha, but also more bug-like. I think these are cool, but with this game the icons pull almost all of the weight, so this just wasn’t right yet.

Then Filip nailed it. This is looking a little more retro, and also using shapes to help differentiate between aliens. Looking forward to the next evolution of these.

2:12 PM The farm game now has a name!

We’ve been working on this one for a few weeks now but without a name. And today we ran a few more tests and decided that today was the day. We were naming this thing.

Now sometimes a name can take forever but this one came so quickly.

We started with a bunch of keywords and then Andrew said it shouldn’t have “farm” in the title. I agreed and said but it would be ok to hint at a farm, “like instead of livestock, deadstock”. We all loved that but decided to keep looking. Then George said “what about Dreadstock?” and we just locked it right in.

This was just some tinkering with it as a simple logo to hand off to the pros, but it hits things in a fun way. Dread is a main sort of mana source in the game that you need to build up and use as the monster player(s). And Livestock is getting killed, but also trying to be preserved. Stock is also an interesting word on its own, so It all just hit the right vibes. I assume we’ll have a logo to share very soon.

2:26 PM - We had some long meetings today

There’s a lot to sort out right now. We’re shifting our release schedules a lot to align things for our boxed games, which are taking longer than planned. But also a bunch is all hitting at once. DIE Ball will start to ship in a week or so, so we’ve been building up our release plan for it.

There’s so much that goes into a release, even for this tiny little game.

And along with this we started to work on a better release schedule for all of the follow up DIE Ball stuff.

None of this is finalized yet, and we keep making and adjusting this list, but it’s getting there. We are so close to having the first sets out and I can’t wait to see it reaching everyone.

And with that going out the door, it looks like the next modular campaign will be launching very soon. I’d expect Out Of Print to launch in the next two weeks, which is wild.

9:05 PM: Back to nightly Lorcana

After being away we got back to nightly Lorcana and I won one and lost one with a new deck. I’m playing the purple / steel deck from the Deep Trouble Illumineer’s Trove, and basically managing a million Magic Brooms. It’s been pretty fun to explore all of the starter decks.

Off to bed, catch you next time. Tomorrow is a weird short day for me, so we’ll see if I make it here!

7:05 AM: First discord post

We started off with an issue first thing in the morning.

You’ll notice my not-messing-around lack of punctuation. :)

But this wasn’t actually a new issue, just one that still needed to be resolved. But today was seriously all about issues. Misprints, near-misprints, destroyed packages, and then delays, delays, and more delays. I was quite stressed and it probably showed. But we got through the day and tomorrow we’ll keep pushing forward.

8:59 AM: A different issue with Astro ROVE

I think one of our weaknesses is the back of the boxes. Which is funny and probably 100% because we’ve never had boxes before. But on the top here is our back of the box text for Astro ROVE, and below that is our text for Aqua ROVE. We caught it in time to update Astro to be more like Aqua, but these first 16 boxed games have been a whirlwind of trial and error. Looking forward to less error.

All morning and afternoon: Typos and misprints and destroyed packages

It seems like we were hit with everything at once today. I’ll save the bulk of this because we are resolving it, but it was just a few hits of mostly minor, and some bigger but fixable issues. All of them just add a little time to our timelines, but thankfully we can get by.

1:19 PM: A puppy at the office

Anthony (our mail department) got a new puppy and his mom brought it by the office today. If there was ever a day we needed a puppy it wads today, haha.

This is George likely trying to steal it.

1:29 PM: The Word Lists For The New Bookmarks

We came up with lists of words for the bookmark freebies for the summer campaign.

If you haven’t seen them, the bookmarks are simple: Art on one side, game on the other. The game is called Peruse and you choose a book, flip to a page and see how many of the words you can find. It’s all about choosing the right book, and then flipping to a good page. These turned out pretty fun.

3:55 PM: Out There thoughts and feedback

We’ve been working on Kyle Day’s Out There (a 2-4 player agame of hidden information and wild predictions) for a while now, but it’s bumped way up in the priority schedule due to some recent shifts. We’ve been testing it internally and we had a bunch of notes to share.

While this looks like gibberish, there’s a second image that’s nearly unreadable. Thankfully I just needed the numbers in the middle.

4:40 PM - Playing non-DIE Ball with DIE Ball cards

This was an interesting development. There’s something fun coming to the DIE Ball universe in the next few weeks (basically something coming to the weekly newspaper, The Queen’s Courier), and it’s super gamey. So we were looking how to turn it into a game. (It’s really hard to talk about this without sharing information, but we’ve been strict about no spoilers for the newspaper).

But it works out that you might be able to play the game with the cards we’re designing OR existing DIE Ball cards. This is kind of fascinating and will be fun to explore more.

5:56 PM - A Crushing Blow Of Defeat

So today was tough, but tonight we got the news on our boxed games and the timeline for them. On August 17th we’ll have photos and videos of the prototypes, and if good they can move to production. But production is 10 weeks, then shipping on a boat is another 2 months or so. This means our games will be a bit later than planned.

I can go into full details on this at some point, but the way that we do things everything is dependent on each other and it’s all very complicated just trying to align things.

The Board Game Of The Month Club members are supposed to get something new each month. But we don’t know when this is coming and need to make sure any other months have games. Then our Kickstarter backers are owed a copy of the game, and the longer we wait for these games to arrive, the less we can proceed with new campaigns.

I know we can have up to 3 campaigns outstanding, but it doesn’t feel good to have a few pending campaigns, and it doesn’t feel good to launch the next without fulfilling. At this rate we’d be launching a few more before this is fulfilled, so we’re looking into alternatives just to keep things moving.

That was the hardest part of the day and will takeover tomorrow and the foreseeable future until we figure it all out.

6:48 AM: First discord post

I got started pretty early today after needing more sleep than I got, and then this was my first post. I don’t think we’ve shared this game yet, so you’ll just need to figure out the context on your own.

Side note, I have no idea why Discord is masking the message I’m replying to. I’m seeing a lot of that nowadays. It used to be when the original message was deleted, but this isn’t the case here or recently. Oh well. Any guesses on the bear?

7:41 AM: A different Bear game

We’ve been working on some example images from each game, and Filip started tightening them up. We paused on it after some work, but it’s looking great.

But this is not the bear game mentioned above. :)

9:56 AM: Summer Campaign cleanup

We’ve been working on the backend of the Summer Campaign for a bit now. Today I took a look at the graphics to try to give some direction on the how to play images, which is something that I think we struggle a lot with. We didn’t even get to the how to play images today, as we put it on pause to discuss in the office tomorrow. But I did offer some notes on what we have so far.

Mostly it was making sure the 4 games were in the same order throughout the campaign:

• The Cursed Cat

• Reawaken

• Forest Rivals

• Crime Sprawl

And then trying to nail the images of the promo card and the freebie bookmarks.

This one is getting there. It’s been tricky to show the bookmarks because they are double sided and one side is art and the other is a game, but if we show both sides, it looks like two bookmarks. We might go with this since the art side is more visually interesting and then later we will show both sides when there’s more room to explain it all.

11:46 AM to 9:30 PM: The neverending DIE Ball rules

I’ve expressed how much I hate rules. Well these have consumed my day. They are getting there, but it’s just so much work and the work is all very important to take your time and make sure it’s done correctly and not rushed. It’s getting there.

Big thanks to Justin Antezana for lots of great feedback today.

Aside from this today was extremely quiet. And well needed for a first day back.

7:39 AM: Alien / Monster / Farm game progress

Yesterday we finished (not really) all of the card date and today Filip plugged it all in. We eventually noticed an issue though.

At a glance these looked great and we kept moving forward. Next with the cardbacks.

These were extra spooky, and do the job perfectly. But once I saw the backs I realized that the 3 farm cards are supposed to be landscape instead of portrait orientation. Whoops.

Filip quickly converted it, and it looks great. This was my fault as I never noticed it as we were going. I guess I was just looking at all of the pretty art.

1:46 PM : Worder wallets

Worder was a 9 card game that’s now being made as an 18 card game, and we’re ordering wallets for it this week. Yes, it’s still a wallet game. We have a few of these still working through our system.

But we had to choose all of the colors and proof the wallets today.

The wallet color looks a little hard to read, but we’ve used this color combination before and it looks really nice in person. (Smoke & Mirrors for example).

All Day - Checking out the Richmond, VA area

We spent a little time in Richmond, specifically the Carytown area. I’ve never been here before and we had a little extra time to check it out. World of Mirth was such a good shop and had a small board game section, but if you want a bigger selection go down the street to One Eyed Jacques.

I’d say it was a medium sized store, but had some of the best organization I’ve seen in a while. Games were divided into clearly labeled sections like casual, strategy, party, staff picks, etc, and they felt really well curated. I always appreciate that when shopping.

That’s everything for today. I’ll be working in the morning but then away for the afternoon again tomorrow. Will try to post either way!

First let’s look at the last few days

I spent the last few days in California at San Diego Comic Con (outside events only as I didn’t have a pass), and then Warped Tour in Long Beach over the weekend. I’ll spare you all of the cool music I saw (but you can check that out on my photography page), but I did get to see some fun board game adjacent stuff.

I saw these awesome tiny dice at a book store in the Little Tokyo area of Los Angeles. They could ALMOST fit inside a Button Shy wallet. I thought they were 4mm, but looking back they might be 5mm. They almost feel in between the two sizes.

At San Diego Comic Con they were giving away everything. Free food, free drinks, free hats, free parking (or so I thought until there was a parking ticket on my car), and free card games. Well one specific free card game.

I ended up with a few copies of Liquid Death Flip 7. This has two new actions (Kill a Card and Murder the Modifiers), which I always love to see in a licensed / retheme version of an existing game.

I also got to see Vince (our lead playtester that you may know as Malarkey), and his whole family. He happened to be right around the corner while we were between Comic Con events, so we got to meet up.

Vince assured me that there was nowhere to park near the convention, and I was happy to prove him wrong, and then him prove me wrong again when I got a ticket. So we’re calling this one a tie.

San Diego Comic Con was really cool and definitely takes over the whole downtown. The lines were long, but I think it’s worth going even without passes to get inside. We were able to see so many things (there were pop ups everywhere) and do so many things (got to play the new Nintendo Switch Sports Resort game well before launch). Anyway, super fun.

8:48 AM: First discord post

Not much else to say about this one.

Although I have no idea how to spell traveling apparently.

9:22 AM: New Peruse Bookmarks

Filip started working on the new bookmarks for the next campaign. The words aren’t right but he was working on the graphics.

If you haven’t seen these, it’s a silly game that you can play with just one bookmark. We’re making them as promo giveaways to go alongside each of our new boxed games.

It took a little work to get the Crime Sprawl one just right, but the second try on the right was purrrrfect. (Sorry)

12:10 PM: Our first Button Shy Dice Drop

We have a fun new project called Button Shy Dice Drop where we choose a game and roll a d12 to determine it’s price (normally $15, but now it’s randomly $1 to $12), and we roll a d20 to determine how many are available at that price.

What a way to start this off though. Sprawlopolis at $6, but just 1 copy, haha. But we started it off and that’s the most important thing. It was supposed to be yesterday, but I was traveling home and Mondays are tough overall due to us being short staffed. But keep an eye each week. We’ll reuse the same link: https://buttonshygames.com/products/button-shy-dice-drop

2:43 PM: Alien / Monster / Farm game card abilities

We have been pushing through the dev on our alien / monster / farm game and it’s time to start playing on a nicer copy of the game. This helps us make sure the graphic design is doing exactly what it should be doing, and really assisting the gameplay instead of taking away from it. So we tried to read our chicken scratch, and made a spreadsheet for the graphics team to implement. Here’s a peek at it.

Some of this will definitely change, and the terminology is still being tinkered with, but I do like to edit right on the cards after a few plays. I would expect to see that soon.

3:18 PM: Our first Today’s Giveaway

We started up a second fun thing today, called Today’s Giveaway. We won’t do it every day but we’ll do it as many as we can. Basically we ask a question at discord, you can answer and then we pick one of the submissions to send the game to. It’s free, but it’s US only unfortunately.

I imagine we’ll do these most days, often Tuesday through Friday. Here’s a peek at some of the upcoming games.

Finally this question came up on discord and I thought it would be fun to bring over here.

8:54 PM What is up with music themes in games?

I feel very strongly about this and I’m so tired that I feel like I’ll barely scratch the surface of it.

We were talking about our upcoming Banned Books reimagining in the game Booked Bands. It’s nearly identical outside of the theme (and a bunch of special abilities moved around to different cards), but it’s definitely a music themed game now.

The thing about music themes is that I think they are impossible to get right, and sales suffer as a result. The issue is that you can go all in on a genre (a punk game for example), and you only get fans of that genre. Everyone is very specific about their tastes in music and if something is outside of those tastes, it’s very much ignored.

Then the other option is you go very generic. This happens a lot, and you’ll see the stereotypical country music character, the stereotypical metal character, the stereotypical hip-hop character, etc.. And my thoughts on this is that most people don’t love it because it plays things so safe, leans way too far into stereotypes, and doesn’t really connect with anyone. People will like it and enjoy it, but with it being partially a mockery and super generic, it’s hard for anyone to love it.

With Booked Bands we leaned heavy into alternative rock club, and tried to avoid a lot of the stereotypes. With it being one genre (but so many sub genres), we could make it all feel more sincere. I’m excited for this to get out there, and I hope we can make that real tough break through to the non-alternative rock fans. It’s tough!

Here’s an image of the work in progress band cards from a few weeks back.

Those are just my thoughts. Happy to share more another time, but I am passing out from this time difference.

Catch you soon!

7:47 AM: First discord post

Today’s first post isn’t mine, but one that I jumped right into after an early morning meeting. Milan has been working on more of the how to play images.

My suggestion here was to change the circles to shapes that match the group that you’re scoring, just to make everything a little clearer for first time readers.

While on the call, more images came in. This time from Crime Sprawl, which should have some visual tweaks over the next few days as we start to finalize it all.

There’s a lot more of these and it’s all going to be super helpful as we need to pull from them for social media posts and campaign images.

9:58 AM: The alien game that used to be about killers and might be about killers again, just in a different way

We’ve talked about this game previously, and it’s been getting some rapid changes. It was originally an asymmetrical game about a killer and their victims, but the killer player is now a farm. We swapped things so that the victims are now aliens possibly invading the farm, but I said it was cheesey, so Filip here tried out some kind of spooky chupacabra-like monsters, which now feels like killers again, just in the other role.

I kind of loved the creepy aliens here, but the farm / monster vibe is working better, so we started to lean in that direction. Filip made some more characters, as there are 4 different values in the game.

I felt like we were now leaning a bit silly again with some of these, so Filip came back with some more tweaks, and I think we’re really starting to get there.

There’s also a color tweak on the leftmost one, trying to look closer to dusk when the monsters would emerge.

We ran through a lot of games of this today, tightening up the 3 player game and messing with the 2 player game, which should be pretty balanced but has a quite different feel when it’s head to head as opposed to 1 vs many.

3:30 PM: Out There playtesting

Out There is one of our upcoming games from designer Kyle Day, and it’s due to start on development at any moment. I would say that we officially already started, but today we jumped back into it to refresh ourselves.

I generally try to write notes right on the rules to have everything right next to the context, and we did exactly that today. I also try to write scores right on the rules so we have everything together when it comes time to discuss it again.

Fun fact: we were essentially revisiting some of the work we did a little while back, but the time between sessions and deciphering Andrew’s handwriting had us basically starting over.

4:16 PM: Recording videos for Button Shy Dice Drop

Next week we’re starting a fun little promotion called Button Shy Dice Drop. If you have been around for a bit you may have seen some of our Game Of The Week sales where we dropped the price of a game for a week. Well we decided that it was a failure (our fault), when the same game was still listed as Game Of The Week a month after its launch. It continuously fell through the cracks, and we realized that we were just bad at it, for whatever reason.

So we decided to try something new. George had the idea to roll a d12 to determine the dropped price, making for a discount no matter what we roll since all games are normally $15. And then a d20 to determine how many copies of that game will be for sale. Here’s our instagram teasaer video.

The plan is to release a new video on Monday mornings, and then release the game(s) at 12 noon ET. We recorded the first 8 week’s of videos today, using these brief marker board notes. Oh and I should mention… some of these are doozies. The dice were interesting, for sure.

The current schedule should be as follows:

Monday July 27th - Sprawlopolis

Monday Aug 3rd - Twin Stars: Adventure Series I

Monday Aug 10th - Anthelion: Conclave of Power

Monday Aug 17th - Fishing Lessons

Monday Aug 24th - Shallow Regrets

Monday Aug 31st - Wonder Tales

Monday Sept 7th - Liberation

Monday Sept 14th - Downtown Las Palmas

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I will be traveling a bit (starting at like 4AM ughhhh), so I expect to be spotty… which means I may or may not have a post. Probably not, knowing the time difference, but let’s see what happens!

6:05 AM: First discord post

I jumped into some Reawaken discussion first thing in the morning. We are handling some very late stage card tweaks as we wrapped development just recently and we’re currently at the end of the editing phase, which can lead to a few tweaks here and there. This one is a bit of a beast so there’s more tinkering than normal.

Our discussion here was a result of some notes from players (most recently Jay Yeates), our developer (Justin Antezana) and our editor (Mike Lee). The notes mentioned that the arrows were the same size and color, but meant two different things. Here’s Jay’s original comment:

We decided to try a few more things beyond just color and went through a few tweaks.

The first didn’t have the colors just right, and was WAY TOO MANY EYES.

Then we started to get a little closer in tests.

After all of this, we got things to a solid place, and we should have a new build of the game to review tomorrow. It’s getting there, with each of these little tweaks adding up.

6:32 AM: The Cursed Cat example images

We started a new project of having example images of everything possible, even if the cards aren’t ready. This way we can pull from them for social media / kickstarter / etc…

Milan started working on The Cursed Cat images today.

7:32 AM: Forest Rivals example images

And then he made some for Forest Rivals. Gotta love the “Bear” and “Bee” labels.

8:13 AM: A very special The Cursed Cat card

Here’s something we’ve been working on with this cute little mouse. We’ve been trying to make a shadow that feels like a monster. I think after some back and forth today, we’ve got it.

My initial image was a bit of a mess.

But Andrea was able to nail it.

12:08 PM: Working on some giveaways

Do you know our Black Friday giveaways at discord? We basically open up a question like “which Button Shy game do you always have nearby?” or “what’s your favorite restaurant ever?”, and then everyone can answer. We pick a random winner and send them a prize.

Well today we decided we’re going to expand on that a bit.

Step one was to pull the games. Tomorrow we’ll try to prep everything else to start giving some games away. Stay tuned.

(and an initial note - due to international shipping costs being out of control, the giveaways will be US only, sorry)

7:42PM - Catching up on Crime Sprawl

Tonight I had some messages with the Opolis team about Crime Sprawl and the latest tests. I have some thoughts about the difficulty and whether it should be mandatory or if we want to do an optional stepping up of difficulty.

I strongly believe that easy modes get skipped, but hard modes become goals and it’s the better route, but there is a small group that will play an easy mode and dismiss the game because it’s too easy. So skipping the words “easy” and “hard” might be the first step to getting this right. But I sent this over to the team for thoughts, along with some of the new artwork. Yesterday we shared the sketch of the superheroes Law & Order, and today we have a full illustration.

That’s it for today. We were too busy for Lorcana, and I was too busy for everything else it seems. I thought tomorrow was pretty straight forward and realized I have an appointment in the middle of the day. Oh well.

Now it’s sleep time!

6:53 AM: First discord post

I was super tired this morning, struggling to sleep overnight and then really feeling it when I woke up, but I still got a fairly early head start.

This was about Reawaken, which is getting its last edits before the upcoming Summer Kickstarter campaign.

I had suggested a handful of edits to the cards just to really drive the theme. Now, I feel like these were suggested before but skipped over, so I don’t think I was breaking any new ground here. I just wanted to get things moving on it.

The current version of the card is on the left, and the suggested edits are on the right. We’re trying to do a few things.

1. Reorder the two elements of the card, as the brown section happens at the start of the game, and while cards are still unclaimed from this location.

2. Label the two elements of the card, to express that one is problem you are dealing with and the other is a reward. I think it’s fairly obvious which is which after a little bit of playing the game, but without these labels your early games were a little more confusing than they needed to be.

And here was another suggestion:

This one is pretty simple and I know for a fact it was suggested by the team a while back and I feel like I suggested against it initially. The original card on the left has the full goal of this card “Search the Jungle for Veda’s Map” at the top. But I think the card is just “Veda’s Map” and the action at the bottom is “Search the Jungle”. Without that label at the bottom you sort of lose the connection of spending research or movement to search the Jungle.

I think we’ll have updated versions of all of these tomorrow as the graphics team dives in some more.

6:57 AM: Replacing icons

This is another one that sort of got ahead of us. The original game of Reawaken wasn’t an exploration theme or even close. It was quite a different theme.

I think the magnifying glass in the top left corner of the cards is a bit of a holdover from that old theme - although the original had an eye there instead of a magnifying glass.

In recent plays, it’s really shown how it isn’t a great fit. The biggest reasons for me are that it’s used in the attunement phase, which is about awareness which I think is different than the examination that a magnifying glass symbolizes. Another big reason it isn’t a great fit for me is that it doesn’t really express the threat of this phase. You need to have 5 of the icon across your cards and locations, and it is definitely a struggle that you will have to work against. The magnifying glass just didn’t have that edge to it.

Filip had a few options and we tried them out. I think the eye is right. Which is super funny because the original game also had an eye, but a very different theme.

I’d like to say that today wasn’t all about Reawaken, but a lot of it was. :)

8:04 AM: Working on promo / how to play images

More Reawaken, and this time it’s the promo / how to play images.

Milan has been working on a bunch of them, and we were all trying to shape the look and feel of them. My contributions aren’t super helpful, but I just keep looking for bigger text and more arrows.

8:55 AM: Some art direction on the new alien game, which may no longer be about aliens.

And before that, it was a game about killers, and no longer about them.

I worked with Milan and Filip on the concept and they have some really cool ideas. I’ll share the little bit we have so far, and let you know that it all may (will) change. For now, here are the farmer player’s cards.

You’ll see the three action cards, but also you might see that it’s a top down view of a farm. Then the other players all play these cards:

These have the other players info at the top, and a farm silo at the bottom in case they end up with this card in from of them. We originally had it as a bit of engine building, but these cards are quite powerful for the villain player so we swapped them out to be one time use.

Filip has some real neat ideas on this and I have a feeling you’ll see some progress sooner than later.

1:10 PM: Crime Sprawl expansion art is coming in

The Crime Sprawl expansion adds superheroes (even though the email below says Supervillians), and Steven De Waele has started to send them over. They are so exciting to see.

These are pretty much done, but one (kind of two) is still a sketch. Check out Law & Order below. What a cool style.

1:31 PM: Rearranging the office shelves

Since it was so quiet, I just cleaned the office today. Not a lot to show, but here you can see some of the bins I was basically moving from one shelving unit to another.

I was able to free a few shelves, which is always a win.

9:07 PM: Now nightly Lorcana tradition

I don’t get to play a lot of games at home. There are a ton of reasons, but it mostly comes down to being pretty busy. But last night we started to play (and sort) some Lorcana. Tonight we played again, so it’s become a bit of a tradition! I’m not sure how long we’ll keep it up because I’m kind of all over the place for the next two weeks or so, but I want to pick this up afterwards and keep it going.

Back at it tomorrow!

7:31 AM: First discord post

This one is just funny. I thought about leaving it without detail, but I’ll get into the detail.

This was basically approval of text for some of our upcoming how to play images for the Summer Kickstarter Campaign, but I went back on it later in the day thinking that we need to reconsider our approach to how to play images.

This is the initial draft and my thoughts are that it’s fine, but the text needs to be punched up a lot. But over the course of the day I realized we also need to punch up the images to give them more detail, more action, more movement, and overall just more excitement.

Here’s an example that came up of an older one that worked pretty well.

It just has a lot more style, but more important it has a lot more energy. So we’ll be working on making those better next week.

9:13 AM: Launching the PNP Friday post at PNP Arcade

I usually handle the launch of the PNP Friday post at PNP Arcade, which is just giving our blog a final look, posting it at the PNP Arcade Substack, and then sharing it in a bunch of places.

I share it at the PNP Arcade discord, the Button Shy discord, PNPArcade.com, on Martin’s PNP Hideaway at Facebook, and on the PNP Arcade Facebook. It sounds like a lot, but it’s generally a bunch of copy/paste after the first one. The trickiest is PNPArcade.com because it requires the embed code, when all of the others use regular text and links.

If you’re curious about that weekly blog, here’s a link: https://pnparcade.substack.com/

12:15 PM: Tinkering with a new design

We are playing around with a few designs to potentially fill in some gaps in our release schedule and Andrew here brought out a small version of a bigger old design, which we converted into an all new version of that small version of the bigger game design.

There’s not a lot to see here just yet, but it’s a one vs many game that was originally horror themed and we played around and ended up with a solid but maybe too-tight system, with a potential theme of a farmer protecting his farm from aliens. I expressed my straight up dislike for this theme because it hits a few spots that I usually shy away from (I don’t generally like fun, haha), but I was pretty much alone in that so I said we should see if there’s something there. I feel like that theme doesn’t always need to be on the silly side, so we’ll do a few things. 1) Keep playing and make sure the system is loose enough for replayability, and 2) explore some art styles that make the theme more appealing to me. Curious of what you all think of that theme.

7:50 PM: Tried to get a photo of the red sun

This has nothing to do with anything, but I said I’d throw in some personal stuff here and there. I took a quick run to the store and saw the red sun through the haze near my house. The air quality was 172 when I took this. It’s all wild.

10:09 PM: Going to tinker all weekend

I brought home a bunch of blank cards and borrowed my wife’s markers, and I’m about to spend the whole weekend seeing if any new designs pop.

Hopefully something good comes out of it, but I need to start with some restrictions. Earlier today I said carnival games and carnival rides, but I probably need a backup plan to help inspire things.

10:15 PM - The monthly Button Shy designer chat

Once a month, Ian Howard hosts a Button Shy discord designer chat. It’s tonight and I might join in. I’m pretty beat, but I always like to join on for a few minutes just to say hello and see what’s going on with everyone.

If anyone wants to join in, come to the Button Shy discord and ask to join the designing out loud group. It’s open to everyone.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Catch you all again on Monday!

6:18 AM: First discord post

I woke up and jumped into rules editing right away. Thankfully I don’t have to do much of the rules editing here anymore because we have a great team, but I get called in for approvals and sometimes to be an essential tiebreaker in a discussion. .

This one is about our upcoming game Reawaken and the identifiers for the starting cards.

Basically we were trying to see if we needed more than the asterisk next to the card title to show this was a starting card. Something like a star icon for example. But Milan reminded me that early on we made a decision to be pretty minimal with it simply because the game already has a lot of icons. This is one that you need during setup, and then need to ignore from then on. So we’re keeping it as is. Very light rules work this morning, thankfully.

6:41 AM: Something extra for The Cursed Cat

For the Spring Campaign we had a bonus promo card for all backers with ROVE: Lander Mode, and we wanted to do the same for the summer campaign. The issue with these promos is that there are a lot of rules. It has to have rules on the card (or the back of the card), and it can’t shuffle in the deck (because it’s being printed at a different printer).

So for this campaign we reached out to Scott Almes to see if he had something for The Cursed Cat. If you’ve followed our Simply Solo line, these games have had a ton of expansion content over the years, so I thought Scott would have no problem coming up with extra content, and I was very right. He sent us The Mouse.

The Mouse is a monster with two sizes. One side shows 0, the other shows 7.5. Every time the Mouse is moved, rotate it 'after' it moves to it's new location. All normal size rules apply based on whichever side is currently face-up.

You win under the normal conditions, with one additional requirement: the Mouse must be on the Cat/Spellbook instead of the Portal, showing 0, when the game ends.

As the team gets some hands on with the new card, we started to get the artist on some concepts. Here is a mix of mine and Milan’s attempts at saying the same thing essentially. The mouse is at the bottom, and it’s big shadow forms a monster on the top half. There’s also a 0 and 7.5 there, but I’m sure none of it is legible.

Looking forward to this one, and many more single card promos. I hope you all like them too.

6:48 AM: Back on the Out of Print covers

Yesterday we tried some covers for Out Of Print that looked like bookcases, but deep down I knew it wasn’t right. It was too realistic, and not nearly as pretty as the game. So the team took some new stabs at it today.

This one felt a bit too modern, so we stepped away and tried some more options.

Then we stepped back again and asked Filip to just remove the round rectangles. They were a little too app-like, and here’s what he came back with.

We think this is the way to go, so I imagine it’ll be very close to this. We also tried another game, The Tell-Tale Heart, which is looking like the second in the series.

These are really exciting to see come together. And we have so many more to come.

10:01 AM: Launching today’s issue of The Queen’s Courier

It’s Thursday, so we need to launch the new issue of The Queen’s Courier. We’re actually over a week ahead on these now, so it really was just a quick and simple launch.

If you don’t know about The Queen’s Courier, it’s the weekly newspaper in the DIE Ball universe, basically featuring the sports section, the scores from this week’s games so you can follow the full season, and a whole bunch of other stories, ads, and silly details. It’s been some awesome worldbuilding for a tiny little modular game.

My favorite part of this week’s issue has to be Randell the seagull’s obituary.

Follow along at the DIE Ball instagram: http://instagram.com/dieballleague

10:13 AM: Starting up the promo machine

We’re starting to ramp things up for the Summer Kickstarter campaign and I need a lot of images from the layout team. The first that we want to share is the components image for each game, because hey… who doesn’t love a components image?

Below is one from the last campaign and we’re basically just repeating it.

The envelopes haven’t been made yet. so Andrew here has started putting together the text details for the envelope.

Those mechanics and their values are completely made up, and more of a texture than something more academic. They’re just fun.

11:01 AM: Development work on Crime Sprawl and Reawaken

We all jumped in today to get some hands on both of these as we lead up to the Summer Campaign.

We played through some Crime Sprawl including it’s superhero expansion, which is not what you think. The superhero just makes the game harder! They add some extra restrictions but they also steal your cards. If you work hard enough, you can get them back.

Then we spent a lot of the afternoon playing through Reawaken, discussing things with the developer (Justin), the writer (Ian), and making notes for the layout team.

I hope these late changes will improve and tighten the game up for everyone. They definitely felt good so far.

Anyway, today was a doozy! By the end of the day I had 193 posts on our staff discord servers. So tired. Onto tomorrow!