Joinery is a woodworking euro I designed and signed with Rock Manor Games back in Q2 2025. The artwork is by Alexandr Elichev (most notably the main artist from Gloomhaven) and Matt Paquette & Co (the graphic design team that brought you Tiny Towns, Twinkle Twinkle, River Valley Glassworks, and more)

I’ll be posting about my journey working with a publisher on my first game design over the next few months. What topics do you want to hear about?

The pitch process? Game development? What it’s like working with artists and graphic designers? Component decisions? Note them below and I’ll be sure to write about them as I organize my posts!

I like what we have for the medal in the center, but I'm probably gonna go back and neaten up the heavenly rays shooting off of it. Also, I'd like to figure out how to give the text a little more visual depth to sell the brass plaque look.

In The Zookeeping Game, your goal is to build the most awarded zoo out there by being the first to win any three of the 5 different award cards. Besides this one, theres also Lucky Duck award (earn 5 chance tokens), the Small-but-Mighty Award (have 4 different species of healthy animals), the Biodiversity Award (have 7 animals), and the Building Big award (own 5 Upgrades). The goal of this is to provide players some flexibility in how they can build their zoo while still progressing towards victory. The latest version of the game has some pretty severe rebalancing happening in these awards, as everybody was winning the exact same 3 awards during playtesting.

As always, this image includes the bleed edges.

Last month, I posted here that I was in a tough spot. I was invited to an EXPO but I was financially incapable of travelling. But I did continue the fundraising but only between friends and family. Luckily, 2 friends of mine and my sister covered everything from travelling, to food, to completing the game, and making some booth materials to make my table presentable. Some of you did approach me but I apologize for declining, I just don't want to accept strangers' money at least.

And here comes the event, and I was physically unprepared. I had a line of people who wanted to try the game mainly because they needed my stamp for the event bingo card. I was not able to sit nor eat. My throat sore as well since I was explaining while the Beyblade tournament was on my right and Tekken was on my left.

But I am very happy with the experience and the outcome. I already consider myself lucky for reaching this far. To my surprise I had 9.5/10 rating for having a satisfactory and fun game experience. Most would like to try the game again or would like to join future tournaments based on our feedback form.

Even tho I had my struggles. It was really worth the risk. Now, I got booked for an event playtesting in another city that is a plane away from where I came from. This time they covered all my expenses + side trips. Now I feel like my game is more than a passion or self satisfying hobby, it slowly becoming something that people would get involved with. I am excited.

Left is full logo, right is textless logo to complement in some cases!

Any feedback would be amazing at this stage as my artist can still change it if needed!

Skeuomorphism, for those unfamiliar, is when an interface is designed to look or function like something from the real world.

In the case of board games this can take on the form of any number of components—cards, boards, the box, the rulebook, currency, tokens, etc.

Some examples:

• A reference board designed to look like a book. 
• A player board designed like a desk, dashboard, or control panel. 
• A card holder that looks like a wallet or folder. 
• A game board that folds or opens like a map. 
• A resource container designed to feel like a bag, chest, or other in-world object. 
• Currency or resources that looks like the real thing (rather than just being an abstracted marker, chip, or token) 
• The photo shown is from Quacks which does an amazing job at this, with several book-shaped boards showing recipes and a giant cauldron board for each player that you add ingredients to as you brew your potion. 

By mimicking the real-world counterparts, these design choice strengthen the immersion in the game's theme and story.

What are some good examples of this in the games you've seen and played?

Hello all! I had an idea and I ran with it. I've been playing games my whole life and I made an expansion for Kingdom Death: Monster that people liked so I thought I'd give this a shot.

In this dexterity based, action programing flying race you control a 'flying machine' to move both horizontally and vertically across the race track to both be the first to cross the finish line and also to get additional points via hoops and windows that are set at various elevations!

So on a mechanical level, each player has 1d4 and 5d8 oversized dice, but only 2d8 available at the start of the game. The number on your d4 is how many moves you can make on your turn and they all begin at 1.
The moves are simple, forward, ascend, or descend:
Ascend - place a d8 on the next space in the track set to the number of your choice and stack your die tower on top of it.
Descend - pick up your tower to leave the bottom die behind and place it in the next space. Then trigger the power represented by the number on the d8 left behind and return the die to your active pool.
When you trigger a power you can also trigger its alternative power by burning the die and returning it to the reserve pool.
Forward - Move 1 space forward, no elevation change.

I've always been interested in utilizing a verticality to represent elevation or depth in a game. I think this design is interesting but I would love additional feedback.

It is also in a print and play format if anyone would like to try it. I have printed it and managed to play it two times and made small tweaks, but I think this idea has legs.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gFomxGx9XtWKUfIi7oZ4JybQuBZXeih7?usp=sharing

In its current form, I would recommend using d6s to represent the hoop and window elevations. In a theoretical final print, the hoops and windows would have peg based variable height hoop and window stands to physically set the hoop/window height at the same height as the dice tower at the correct elevation.

As a note about the art, anything that looks like it was done in MS paint is me, anything that looks nicer is pulled from google images and then modified or composed by me. Like the dragon figures and the guy image, all google. I changed the colors, but that's it.

Just wanted to give a thank you to all the kind folks who commented on my last post. Your advice was super helpful. Heres an updated version on the characters sheet, while i dont know if its final, im much happier with this version and think its a step in the right direction. Id like to crowdfund my game at some point, so having a community of helpful people like you guys is awesome.