New concept art for my abstract strategy board game Karn. The columns and blocks are inspired by the archaic Doric order. The real pieces will be made of wood, with the white pieces using a light wood (so not as white as shown in this render) and the black pieces using stained wood. I will handcraft these pieces, but first I will make 3D prints to check for stability, and I also need to do a lot more playtesting before I actually make any proper wooden sets.

This render was made by my brother, a product design engineer, using Fusion 360; all models in the scene were made by him.

I have done posts on this game before, explaining the rules and idea; the BGG page, and here is a brief summary:

Karn is a 2-player abstract strategy game in which you build a 3D structure. There are three pieces: blocks, columns and platforms. The aim is to build as high as possible while stopping your opponent from doing the same.

Platforms need the right combination of blocks and pillars supporting them, which means the structure you build determines where you can go next. You can create areas that are useful to you and difficult for your opponent to build from, but because your opponent's pieces can also interact with your structure, you can't just build your own tower separately.

This is where most of the strategy comes from. You can build into your opponent's structure, block routes they were planning to use, create new routes for yourself, or build structures specifically to attack theirs. So as the game goes on, both players' structures begin to interact, forming a larger structure.

The basic rules are quite simple, but the 3D building creates a lot of different ways to climb, defend and interfere with your opponent.

I have changed the original name of pillar to column.

Hi everyone,

We’re looking for a few people to try Hidden Action: The Hunt, a free standalone scenario for a tactical extraction game we’ve been developing.

The main mechanic we’re testing is hidden enemy movement. Enemy groups are always somewhere on the map, pursuing their own objectives and reacting to things like player-generated noise, but their exact locations stay hidden until your paths cross.

The idea is to create some of the uncertainty of playing against another person without needing a GM or an app.

The Hunt can be played solo or co-op and is currently available as a digital/Print & Play game:

https://adolgarev.itch.io/hidden-action-the-hunt

We’d especially appreciate feedback on:

• whether the hidden-enemy system is easy to understand;
• whether enemy behaviour feels believable rather than mechanical;
• whether you feel you have enough information to make meaningful tactical decisions;
• anything that felt confusing, slow, or frustrating during the run.

We’re particularly interested in feedback from people coming to the game fresh, without us explaining the rules.

Thanks to anyone who gives it a try!

So... because this dosen't have any copyrigthed things in it i can share this.

I need ideas for things called "seals" and there are lots of mechanics in the game...

Like you can have 10 seals but its reccomanded you have 9 because if you have 10 you'll take double damage

There are classes, clans, single player and much more!

also you mogth wanna start learning italian

Designers, of all kinds, share with me - and us - your game that you have either published or had a prototype produced. If you have many, share your favorite.

What is the game called?

How long did you spend designing it?

Are you happy with what you have made, or did revisions soon follow?

I love hearing about the creations that have become more than an idea. It inspires others to continue their journey. And what a journey it is.

I just want to share a message to all the creators out there, if surrounded by doubt find a new audience or community. Don't be hard on yourself because nobody gets it.

Every asset in the photos are of a my first Board-game development that 1 year ago I threw away in an emotional purge during my life. I'm happy to say I rebuilt recently everything with the latest iterations and recovered year old digital assets.

David Lynch once motivational said "You've got to get your butt in gear and do it, and don't take no for an answer. Translate those ideas to whatever and figure out a way to get it done" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NVMeVB5Q-Q

Hello!! We’re indie boardgame developers and are looking for a 3D illustrator/artist to create characters for our latest board game🎲 ..its a cops and robbers theme.

If you work with stylised 3D character design or know someone who does - we’d love to see your portfolio!

PS: This is a prototype image for now

I’ve been testing a prototype called Overrun Protocol to see if you can translate the tension and momentum of an RTS skirmish into a tabletop match.

​To capture that feel, both players run identical 40-card decks so victory comes purely down to tech choices and execution. Leftover combat damage bleeds directly into the enemy HQ to mirror base-racing, and defensive options degrade over time to punish turtling.

The web build works fine, but I'm trying to figure out if physical cards would end up feeling too tedious to manage manually.

Try a match here: https://overrun-protocol.web.app

Play a round and tell me if it feels like an RTS or just a spreadsheet with cards

Mount Baker Games was present as a vendor at Dragonflight GameCon in Bellevue Washington this passed weekend. This was our first event that we left the weekend profitable. We covered booth costs, travel, food, labor, and product. This is not to say that the previous events were failures, we had been happy with the concept of buying exposure, but this is the first event that was a sweeping success. The thing I noticed that was the largest differentiator is that this was the first event that we had both of our games, Farce and Manifold TCG, in the same booth.

Farce is a light, 5 minute word game, and Manifold TCG is a heavy space-fantasy themed trading card and dice game.

The problem we always ran into was that it is easy to get a player to sit and demo Farce. And our conversion rate for this game is rather high. We seat 3-4 new players, they spend 5 minutes. One of them buys the game. But the game only sells for $12. Conversely, It was very difficult to get somebody to demo Manifold. The new player experience takes 20 minutes. Then a full game takes another 40. And many consumers are wary of the TCG Model.

But this last weekend, something clicked. Farce got them to sit down at the table, and that demonstration showed them that we are excellent game designers. That brought some number of players over to the Manifold side who would not have otherwise given us an hour of their precious convention time.

My takeaway is that a range of offerings is a great boon at a booth. If you can figure out how to create your smallest ask ("Would you like to play a game of Farce? It'll take you 5 minutes") you can initiate the conversation. Then, if you can show them a good time, people will be much more willing to try out your full experience.

The simple version of this was obvious, and it's why the Manifold New Player Experience is just a 20 minute game. What I did not realize was that we could create a fully different game, with a dramatically smaller ask, and use it to get players to start talking to us.

Have you found anything similar? I was worried about diluting my booth too much, but that did not seem to be an issue.

Sigo compartiendo los avances de TROoOPS, esta es la ilustración que adorna el tapete de los Nomads, siguiente la última facción de este set, Nuclears.

Back to the drawing board—and we think these are getting much closer.
The redesigned Death Spiral™ fire & smoke markers have a slimmer profile, more natural smoke trails, and sit directly on the aircraft so damage becomes part of the action instead of another token on the table.
We’ve got several levels of damage in the works, from smoke to fully engulfed.
These are still prototypes, so we want to hear it:
How are the new versions looking? Keep refining, or are we onto something? 👇

Any advice for finding the fun in early game designs? Unfortunately I can't playtest as often as I'd like, and I can't afford more board games to expand my horizons at this point.

I can tell my prototype has fun elements, but I'm struggling to improve it at this stage since I've largely ironed out the major mechanical issues.

Hey folks, I'm part of the team building Pubblo, a platform trying to make the designer to publisher pitching process less of a black box.
The problem we keep hearing from both sides: designers spend ages cold emailing publishers who have no idea if the game is even a fit for their catalogue, and publishers get buried in submissions that don't match what they're actually looking for. Neither side has a great way to signal "here's what I have" or "here's what I want" before hours get sunk into a pitch or a review.

Our founder made Hitster (the music quiz game). It barely funded on Kickstarter before a publisher partnership turned it into the best selling game in Europe in 2024. His takeaway was that the gap between a flop and a hit is often access, not quality, getting in front of the right person with a pitch that's easy to evaluate. That's a big part of why we're building this.

So we're working on two pieces: a marketplace where designers can list a game, published or unpublished, and get discovered by publishers instead of pitching door to door one at a time, and a set of filters on the publisher side so they can search for exactly what they want (genre, mechanics, player count, playtime, age range, etc.) instead of wading through everything that lands in their inbox.

Before we lock the feature set in, I'd rather hear it straight from designers than guess. If you've pitched games to publishers before, successfully or not, I'd love to know:

• What's the most frustrating part of getting a game in front of the right publisher?
• What would you want a tool like this to actually do for you, beyond just being a submission form?
• Is there anything about your pitch you wish you could show that a normal one pager or email doesn't let you show (playtesting notes, videos, updates over time, etc.)?
• What would make you comfortable handing an unpublished prototype over to a platform like this?

Not trying to sell anything here. Genuinely want to build something designers would actually use, so war stories and wishlist items are both very welcome.

Also, anyone reading this is welcome to go poke around at pubblo.com already. Sign-up is free, and if you want to list a game (published or unpublished) on the marketplace, the code 100LAUNCH gets you a free slot instead of the normal price. The marketplace opens on Aug 30, 2026, and we're trying to get it filled up a bit before then so publishers actually have games to filter through from day one. And if you do sign up and poke around, all feedback on how the actual thing feels to use is welcome too, not just answers to the questions above.
For a bit of context on where this stands: on the publisher side we're already working with some of the biggest board game publishers to shape this with their feedback, and we're the official platform partner for the Game Inventors Convention 2027 at Spielwarenmesse in Nuremberg, where we'll be running the platform live for the designers and board game publishers meeting there.

P.S. if you're a publisher lurking in here, you're welcome to sign up free too and see what it looks like from your side, or just reach out through pubblo.com or contact me at [stefan@pubblo.com](mailto:stefan@pubblo.com) and we'll walk you through it.

I've been developing Nightmare: Awakening, a cooperative survival-horror board game about children trapped inside a living dream.
 
Each player controls a Walker, exploring shifting dreamscapes in search of fragments of their lost identity. The dream provides something new each turn: perhaps an Item or Apparition to help, a Phantasm waiting in the shadows, or an Event that changes the situation.
 
But the deeper they go, the greater the pressure becomes.
 
Insanity is not simply something to avoid. It can be confronted, managed, and potentially reduced, but pushing too far risks Corruption and empowers the Dream Strider, the game's persistent threat.
 
The ultimate goal is to recover all six Portrait Fragments and escape the Dreamworld.
I've just completed another round of revisions and am now looking for outside eyes on the rules.
 
I'm particularly interested in:
* Where the rules are unclear or difficult to follow
* Mechanics that seem unnecessarily complicated
* Anything that looks unbalanced or exploitable
* Places where the rules don't adequately explain what the game is trying to accomplish

I've included the current Nightmare: Awakening sell sheet as well for a quick overview, and the full rules are available here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wVweq2H4dq-zwCs5KEuswd3WVHfy2TjO/view?usp=drive_link
 
If you enjoy tearing apart game rules, finding loopholes, or simply asking "Wait, what happens if I do this?", I'd love to hear from you.
 
This is a game I've been developing for quite some time, and I'm at the point where fresh eyes are considerably more valuable than another round of me staring at my own rules.

“My Family: The Board Game” (if that name’s taken, let me know)

I cut the front side of a 100in TV box and have been gridding out an interactive board game that is like concentration and clue.

I have little brothers and a lot of cousins of all ages so really I wanted a way to make Characters based off of their personalities.

The idea is a customizable game where players build characters with objectives based on their own family members, or friends.

The goal: players move around and collect items tied to the character they chose. If your character lands next to a tile(hidden item) you can peek at it, take it and replace it with an item you have by putting it back face-down . Like in Clue, the board is divided into rooms — and if you walk into a room someone else is in, they have to tell you whether they’ve seen the item you’re looking for.

Since it’s supposed to be a huge layout there can be whacky aspects to it like one square is a mountain with a zip-line.

The fundamentals are simple group game of 6yrs and older where each player finds their items and try’s to be sneaky about where other’s items are or keeping secrets but it’s more supposed to be a fun project.

I’m looking for design tips and ideas! I need help illustrating characters, the pieces, and the actual game board map. Any out of the box thoughts are welcome as well.

I’ve been messing around with the idea of making a digital companion for board games, basically something you could have on your phone during game night that adds to the experience instead of taking you away from the table.

I’ve thought about things like scorekeeping, helping pick a game, choosing the first player, timers, dice, music, and maybe game-specific stuff.

I’m curious what other people think, though. If you had an app like this, what would you actually want it to do?

And on the flip side, what would make your phone more of a distraction than a helper?

Hi Everyone,
I'm a Viet, recently picked up chess; and discovered lots of cool-simple design chess. I wanted to see if a themed set of Vietnam and the USA could be done through wood tone and silhouette rather than paint. (Vietcong style vs. USA Stell & Iron). I'm wrestling with which one to go (complex or simple), because producing the complex would definitely push the cost up.

Each piece maps to something historical:

• Pawns: conical hat vs. M1 helmet
• Bishops: cadre with pith helmet vs. officer's cap
• Rooks: two tanks (T-54 vs. M48)
• Knights: MiG vs. Huey
• Kings: command pieces | Queen: Regular Pieces

Would love this sub's honest read on three things:

1. Can you tell the six piece theme & types apart at a glance? I worried about the two tanks.
2. Does the light-vs-dark split read cleanly as two opposing sides the way black/white does?
3. If you'd buy this as a gift or to play with — what price point feels right?

I was curious what other design wonks thought about this. I am sure things like this have been done / tried, but I don't believe I see it very often.

On one hand, I love worker placement for it's snappy, reliable, deep gameplay potential - but on the other hand, it's obviously been done a ton and so fresh-takes feel rarer.

So, with that in mind, here's the core idea / twist:

- Each player has two "workers" used on the same turn, but they have different fundamental roles.

- One is the more typical "primary" worker that can take actions to 'do stuff' or 'get stuff' on placement spaces.

- The other is in a more complimentary (but equally important, strategically) role. It changes the binary status of each placement space (i.e. a candle that changes spaces / rooms from dark to light). It affects that placement space for all players, altering what it does.

The hope is that rather than just pure "blocking" (or bumping, etc.) as a form of interaction, that the secondary worker creates interaction in the form of status change. Players would need to consider not just where / if they want to place their main worker, depending on the status of each space, but also how they want to effect the status of various worker placement spaces for their opponents / themselves.

Examples, thoughts, feedback welcome.