We never really started with the sort of hand-made, pen-and-paper prototype that most designers start with. I already had decided on all the components I wanted to make and I wanted it to look good from the start, so I ordered some blank playing cards (amazon.com), some blank hex tiles (thegamecrafter.com), and a blank board (amazon.com). Samantha and I spent an afternoon or two writing out all the cards, I printed and glued the tile faces to all the tiles, and ordered some custom dice (customdice.com). This last part was dumb. While the guys at customdice.com did a fine job, and I was able to get the 8 dice I wanted for about 50 bucks, it was a needless expense. It was too early in the process to order such specialized components. We’re not even using those dice any more.

Honestly, we should have started with an ugly, pen-and-paper prototype and saved some expense. I’m confident that we could have discovered changes we’d have wanted to make even before committing to buying blank cards and tiles. In any case, you can see some photos of the first prototype on the Photos page, and Sam has written some about that already, so I’ll get my point: that it was obsolete pretty fast. After a while testing with that first version and collecting a list of changes that couldn’t be made by scratching out text on our handwritten cards, we ordered a fully printed version. The cardboard parts all came from thegamecrafter.com, and the cards I had printed at makeplayingcards.com. Why split it up? Really it’s only because I don’t like the card designer interface at The Game Crafter. I found it impenetrable, and their help videos only convinced me further that it was needlessly complicated. MakePlayingCards had a simpler interface, and incidentally more card sizes as well.

The cards came out as good as I could have hoped and they arrived in about a week and a half (I’m pretty sure they print them in China). The cardboard components, on the other hand, took over a month. I appreciate that The Game Crafter has an order status page, where you can see the progress of your order as it’s being printed, but it failed to explain why my particular order sat at #7 in the production queue for three weeks. It wasn’t until I called them on the phone that I learned there was some kind of material supplier problem, and they were out of cardboard or some such thing. I’m not writing this blog post to disparage The Game Crafter. In fact, I have ordered more components from them since, but come on! Out of cardboard? That’s the one thing you know you’re going to need!

So after a month of waiting for the board and tiles, we finally get the package, and the tiles are wrong. The total number of tiles was correct, but there were several different designs in varying quantities and they had printed extras of some and none of others. So I sent them an email with some photos of the incorrectly printed tiles, and they sent replacements after another week or so. Again, I’m not trying to bash The Game Crafter here. I get that these things happen and I appreciate that the service they offer exists at all. But if you work with them you should be aware that you can’t count on them if you need a prototype printed for a tight deadline.

It was certainly not the most cost-effective design process, but It’s worth mentioning that having a professionally printed prototype made getting testers to take it seriously a lot easier. I’m not sure that justifies the expense, but I do think that confidence is worth something.

All told, I think this second prototype cost about $180. Expensive, I know. That’s $50 for the custom dice, around $70 for the cards, and $60 for the cardboard components. I have no idea at this point how those prices would translate to a full production run. I know custom components come at a premium, but I suspect that a lot will have to change before the production cost would be low enough for a retail run.

After a few months of testing, we decided that we had enough of a backlog of changes that we’d have to replace everything but the plastic miniatures. So it was back to MakePlayingCards and The Game Crafter for another round. We reduced the number of cards, but did so by increasing the number of tokens. We also decided that the custom dice we had been using weren’t necessary. This meant that the total cost of the new version dropped significantly, but mainly because we didn’t need custom dice. For this version, we decided that six-sided d3s (1-2-3-1-2-3 dice) could do everything we needed dice for, and I found some pretty cheap ones on eBay.

I should mention that this time, The Game Crafter came through on our cardboard components within a totally reasonable amount of time (about a week and a half) and the print quality really is very high, if a bit shiny. So it’s back to testing with this third iteration of the prototype game. I’ll take some time later to write up the design changes we made through these three versions, which is what I meant to do now, but this post is long enough already.

We use Google Sheets and Google Docs to stay organized. We shared the files between us so that anyone could edit them, and so that all our notes, lists, and calculations were in the same place.

Our ‘Grim Tide data’ Google Sheet is basically the foundation of the game. As you can see in the screenshot below, we use it to track pretty much everything about the game:

I cannot stress enough how important it is to document everything! Especially during the first several months of developing the prototype, keeping an electronic record really helped us see what was finished, what was left to do, what needed to be revisited, etc. And using Google Sheets made it easy for us to do calculations and probabilities as we worked on balancing the point system (we’ll talk about this in more detail in a later post!).

We tried to make the content in our spreadsheet as dynamic as possible, meaning we included formulas to calculate percentages and totals that linked to other sheets in the workbook. So, for example, we could immediately see how adding an extra fish tile would affect the total Renown available, or how switching an island tile for an encounter tile would change the probability of discovering a monster.

We also used a Google Doc to take detailed notes every time we play tested, and to write out the rules and jot down ideas. It was super easy to update whenever an idea struck- We’ve whipped out our phones and jotted down notes in our Google Doc while out to dinner, at the grocery store, laying in bed, etc. And when it came time to create a formal rulebook, we already had most of the content written out and just needed to copy + paste it and punch up the wording.

So the main takeaway here is to stay organized! Developing a board game is time consuming and complex and so much fun, and if you try to keep it all in your head you will inevitably forget some of your best ideas. Keep notes on what doesn’t work and what does. Whether it’s a Google Sheet, a Doc, an email chain, or even an old fashioned pen & paper, keep your game development organized!

As soon as you come up with an idea for a board game and flesh out the mechanics, you’re going to want to make a prototype to start testing the game. Full disclosure, as soon as you finish the prototype, you will immediately see things you want to change. This is part of the process, and something we encountered over and over! For that reason, making simple, early prototypes is key. You’re going to change so many things, so don’t get too attached to your first (second, third, fiftieth) prototype.

Game Board & Tiles

For Grim Tide, we knew early on that the main mechanic would be tile exploration. So we needed a board and tiles.

Chris designed the board and we had it printed at a local FedEx. We used spray glue to glue it to a blank game board, which we ordered here.

We ordered blank hexagon tiles online for our prototype. We used spray glue to stick plain blue craft paper to one side of the tiles, and cut them out with exacto knives. For the face of the hex tiles, we printed an outline of the tiles with their symbols on light blue craft paper, then glued the tiles onto the paper following the outline guides. Then more exacto cutting. We made a few extras in case we made mistakes (spray glue is contentious) or wanted to change things during development (these came in handy later when we tested ideas for other types of tiles).

Player Boards

There’s also a lot of stuff to keep track of in Grim Tide– Renown (the object of the game is to earn Renown by fishing, trading, and fighting monsters, so we need a way to keep track of how much each player has earned), Morale (which represents the physical and psychological health of your captain and crew), how many items each captain is storing in their ship’s hold, etc. So we needed player boards to show information about each captain and keep track of all their stuff.

These were really simple. We printed them at home using our regular color printer and glued them to chipboard.

Cards

We also needed cards. Lots of cards. We have events that are drawn every round, items to gather, tattoos, crew members, and encounters. All of those require cards.

We ordered a couple decks of blank playing cards online, and spent several hours drawing each card with a sharpie. This was a lot of fun, and Samantha got way too into drawing the monsters.

Tokens & Pieces

We use tokens to designate items, fish, morale, and monsters. Similar to the hex tiles, we printed the token designs on red, blue, and brown craft paper, and used spray glue to stick the printed paper onto chipboard. We spent a lovely Sunday afternoon on the front porch punching them out with a hammer and punch like this.

We ordered a pack of four plastic ship miniatures from here.

Ta-Da!

And with that, we had our first prototype! Making an early prototype was definitely worth the work. It let us immediately start testing mechanics and get a feel for the size and shape of all our components. And of course, it’s super exciting to see your ideas take shape into an actual playable game!

This blog chronicles the development of the board game, Grim Tide. We hope you enjoy the story behind Grim Tide as much as we know you’ll enjoy playing it!

We’re a group of four board game enthusiasts – Chris, Samantha, Miranda, and Steven – who make up the Magic Square Games development team.

During a really inspiring trip to PAX South 2017 in San Antonio, the four of us were sitting by the Riverwalk after a great day of playing games and talking to developers, and started a conversation that went something like this…

“If you could make a board game, what kind of game would it be?”

“It would definitely be dark. I want more horror games!”

“Yeah but not like, zombies or ghosts. Those are cool, but overdone.”

“You know what’s cool?  Krakens.”

“Krakens are cool…”

That conversation was the spark. After returning to the real world from PAX, Chris kept thinking about “sea monsters” and “ships” and “this could be a real board game”. That led us to “let’s make it darker” and “this is really fun” and “wow, we’re actually doing this!”

We’ve spent months brainstorming and refining ideas, and made a first prototype by hand with paper and chipboard and hand-drawn cards. We’ve tried and trashed all kinds of mechanics, and created characters we love. We’ve designed and printed a legit prototype, and learned so much about what it takes to go from an idea to a real game.

We’re going to share all of that with you on this blog.  Read along, learn from us, as our ideas become reality!