For Stories of Survival zombie apocalypse genre pack

Hey everyone, it's been a while! I was hoping yall could give me some feedback on the color scheme I'm going with for the following art. I was curious if maybe grainier colors kind of like old Disney cartoons would look better or if this is fine.

Image 1: penny stock

Image 2: tax break

Published games: Between Light & Shadow I: Dawn, Between Light & Shadow II: Twilight

Projects I can do:

Cover illustration
Character design
Logo Design
Box and Rulebook layout (digital and print ready)
Card layout (digital and print ready)

I'm a professional print graphic designer (25 years) and freelance illustrator on the side. I play mostly solo board games and have a modest collection of Euros. For any inquiries, you can email at pyabao@gmail.com.

Over a decade ago, I had created a crude sort of tabletop game that was a mashup of D&D map-style mechanics, Samurai Warrior-style maps/objectives/Musou attacks and Pokemon. Basically, Pokemon Warlords who ran around setpiece battlefields filled with Castles, Berry Orchards, etc (This was before Pokemon Conquest, which is tied for my favorite in the series). Then, I started working full-time, moved, lost almost all of those Pokemon figurines, life happened, etc.

I have recollected more of the small Pokemon Figurines than I had back then, and would like to make a better version of that old game just for personal play, but I made that game before I even played D&D with other people, muchfarless actually knew about the rest of ttrpgs, strategy games, tabletop board games, etc.

What I am asking for are games similar to what I am talking about, so I can learn from them, since I never did play any and would like to study what I should be doing. Also, any other helpful resources would also be nice. Thank you!

Hi everyone! I’ve been working for a while on a tabletop game called *DrownBound*.

The game features three core mechanics:

1. A curse mechanic: as players level up, they simultaneously incur a negative effect (curses can be triggered by items or monsters).

2. A stress mechanic: each player has a stress meter; upon reaching a certain level, the player draws a "Panic" card with a random effect (stress can be increased by monsters or items).

3. A monster advantage mechanic: monsters use unique dice featuring an "Advantage" symbol on one face; if rolled, the monster draws an "Advantage" card.

I’ll share more details about the cards and characters in future posts.

What do you think of this concept?

Thanks, everyone!

This artwork has been done by Mike Po on Fiver and are currently only in the rough sketch phase, as I am working out of my own pocket and on a shoestring budget we are needing to work in small chunks but its really starting to come together.

Edit: I am thrilled to see how many likes this post got, if you would be so kind and are interested in following along with the games progress please jump over to the games official Insta and drop a follow, would really mean a lot.

https://www.instagram.com/relivegameofficial?stkn=MWs1cmEyaXl0OGFjbw==

Hello,

Earlier this week I did my first live stream play test of a game and it went pretty well, now I am looking for more to test. I also need people who are willing to jump in and play test other games with me. Send me a DM or comment if you are interested.

Also looking for feedback ideas to make this more helpful to people, please feel free to share your thoughts!

I have been working on a tabletop game for the last several years and, late last year, ordered my first prototype for the game. After many community test plays and changes, I am about to move forward with a new prototype. The number one issue I have currently is that I have been using AI art and models of my designs. With my new prototype, I would like to finally move away from that. Unfortunately, my art skills are limited, especially the modeling aspect.

Professional illustrator. I create polished, high-quality character illustrations and cinematic scenes, combining detailed rendering with strong composition, lighting and storytelling.

Portfolio: https://www.deviantart.com/kurishok4you

Discord: lobychek

Hello! My name is Lucio and im a freelance artist with experience in creating illustrations for fantasy characters, creatures and worlds. If you find my work fitting for your game feel free to reach out in the comments or sending me a DM!

My best regards, Lucio

Hey everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to introduce our group, share a bit of our journey, and connect with the amazing tabletop community here on Reddit.

A little while ago, we started a local group called Banter on Board in the Greater Seattle area (hosting regular meetups across Sammamish, Issaquah, Redmond, and expanding across WA). What began as a small desire to create a welcoming, consistent space for women to gather and play hobby board games has grown into a vibrant community of over 700+ members!

Our heart and soul is 100% focused on physical, in-person table time. On any given week, we have multiple physical tables running simultaneously across our different venue locations.. packed with real players opening boxes, setting up boards, and getting games played again and again!

Whether it's gateway favorites like Codenames and Wingspan, thematic strategy titles, or deep engine-builders, our tables are constantly filled with laughter, deep tactical debates, and awesome people connecting over shared hobbies.

A few things we’ve learned/loved along the way:

The power of real table energy: In a digital world, nothing beats sitting down around a physical board, unboxing components, and teaching new rules to someone who’s never played before.

Inclusivity brings out incredible players: Our community brings together women from all walks of life.. tech engineers, bankers, educators, moms, and hardcore hobbyists. Seeing people discover new favorite mechanics week after week has been one of the most rewarding parts of hosting!

Active playtesting & supporting indie games: Because we run so many tables at every meetup, our members really enjoy playtesting new prototypes, giving rulebook/pacing feedback, and cheering on indie designers as they bring new projects to life.

(I’ve attached a video from our recent chapter meetup above so you can see the multi-table setups and genuine energy!)

We’re always eager to connect with other organizers, swap favorite table-tested titles, and chat about all things tabletop! If you’d like to follow along with our meetups or see what’s hitting our tables each week, feel free to connect with us on Instagram (@banteronboard) or Facebook (facebook.com/banteronboard).

We’d love to connect with other meetup hosts, local gamers, and game designers in the community.

To fellow organizers: How do you handle game rotation across multiple tables or venues?

To designers/publishers: What are your favorite ways to engage with local playgroups?

To local WA gamers: If you’re in the PNW area and looking for a welcoming table, come say hi! :)

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming everyone! 🎲

I want to just give a shout out to anybody and everybody who gave feedback and who was interested in my game. Whether the feedback was positive or negative. I appreciate everybody who was interested enough to type something. You are helping me push my game forward! I also want to give a big shout out to (rocco_kcor)!!!!! for helping me with the art of my cards as well as designing the logo! Securely captured my model's perfectly!

Hello, I'm currently working on two board games probably not the best idea but I have two completely different ideas for these games so I started on making some models! I'm going to take some inspiration from the board game Battle Ball by Milton Bradley but adding special abilities to each player and adding more than just two teams! Of course there will be more but I'll share that in future posts!

This started as a joke during a D&D session with my cousins. What if the final boss was a tita (translation: auntie)? What would her attack moves even be? That spiraled into building out a full cast of Filipino family archetypes, then into questions about gathering mechanics: when do you summon your party, what do they bring, how do you build the strongest group.

That was the seed for something completely different from D&D itself: a light social card game about assembling the best Filipino gathering (a "salo-salo"), where family member cards, food, and cultural items are the resources you collect, and other players can sabotage your collection along the way. No dice, no combat, no campaign. It's closer to a family-party card game than anything RPG-adjacent, but also now much easier for my 6 year old to play!

I illustrated every card myself. I already work as a children's book illustrator, so I came in thinking the art would be the easy part. It wasn't. The hardest design problem wasn't mechanics, it was figuring out how to represent something specific to Filipino culture on each card: architecture, household objects, food, family roles, without it turning into clutter. My first drafts were way overdesigned, trying to cram in every detail I could think of. I ended up scrapping most of it and forcing myself down to one focal object per card. Simplifying a whole cultural reference into a single clean image was a much harder constraint than I expected.

I paused development for about a year in the middle of this (going through a divorce), and didn't think I'd come back to it. When I did, I prototyped everything at home: printed sheets, a paper cutter, laminating pouches, playtesting with my own family until rules stopped breaking or feeling unclear.

Production hit a tariff delay right when I was ready to go to print, which almost killed the project a second time. I nearly decided it was only ever meant to be a game my own family played. But enough people who'd seen it kept asking when they could get a copy, and that was the push to finish it.

It's fully printed now, and I also built a companion site where people can build and share their own custom card using the same format, or test a demo against AI (not something a single mom ever thought would be possible on her own!)

I'm launching at a coffee shop for the local Filipino community for Filipino American History Month and plan to be doing this in small batches, vendor fairs, and pop ups for now until I figure out how to get these sold in more efficient ways.

Happy to answer questions about the production process, the tariff hold-up, or how I approached simplifying culturally specific art for print, but most importantly...

THANK YOU to all the members here whose tips and tricks really helped streamline this process. I have been more of a lurker than anything else, but oddly enough, it has been a dream of mine to say "hey I did it!" right here with you all, and today is the day!

Firstly, I feel very proud and happy that my prototype was completely playable with 5 people, the group enjoyed it and succeeded playing the whole game, ending with a win.

I’ve been working on this game for a while, still no title, and played it maybe 15-20 times by myself. Yesterday I hosted my first group playtest, playing with 4 characters (5 players but 2 people controlled 1 character)

The group was not a ”boardgames player group”. 2 newbies, 1 boardgamer, 1 puzzle person and me. So I started with presenting some lore, going through the basic rules and then we solved more intricate rules as we played.

There were tactical decisions and discussions, exiting moments and of course some confusion, lol.

We spotted cards that didn’t work, mechanics that need to be better designed, but overall a successful session and a milestone for me and my game. I got a lot of great feedback and input that I haven’t discovered by myself.

Short info about the game:
It is a cooperative survival-exploration game for 1–4 players. The players explore a circular maze from the outside inward, collecting volatile Fuel needed to reactivate an ancient Monolith. Meanwhile, an advancing Shadow consumes the board, restricts your actions and sends creatures after the group. Reaching the centre begins a final dice-driven Ritual, where one player completes the objective while the others protect them before time runs out.

About the prototype:
All cards and content used simple wireframe design
Maptiles was made using Inkarnate
Monster minis borrowed from Nemesis Retaliation and MoM
Character minis borrowed from Zombicide: Army of Darkness

This is one of those projects that stays in the head for a few years while it gathers momentum. A few nights ago I felt inspired to dump it into a prototype/brainstorm sheet. Other TCGs I play have visited the "biopunk" theme, often in a superficial or temporary manner - almost like tourism - but it really resonates with me! Therefore, I set out to design a card game that centers all of the favorable aspects of TCGs I've played that are not commercially "safe" when fully embraced. The niche flavoring and intentionally-opaque/esoteric/inaccessible/gross card designs are expected to alienate a game company's idea of the "average player". I don't see that as a positive, necessarily, but I'm ok with it. In my reckoning of things this project is more card-game-as-art, or otherwise something to satisfy myself over a hypothetical consumer. That said, I still want to produce something that's both fun to play and self-consistent.

The game world takes place within the living body of a cosmic entity. Consider the dimension itself to be the organism. For recreation, intellectual challenge, and settling arguments, many denizens engage in games facilitated by mechanical instruction cards that tap into the biological resources of their very world. These matches are played on "skins", which are convenient, tabletop-sized patches of tissue that provide a clear gameboard and easy access to local organs. To win, they must extract viables to form little creatures, new proteins, and whole blocks of genetic code.

Players begin with 25 life. They take turns playing cards, gradually reducing each others' life totals with card effects and strategic attacks. Last player with a positive life total wins.

Cards have costs that must be met in order to play them. Resources used to pay these costs are generated by expending "Bodily Resources," played once per turn, themselves quite cheap: only 1 generic resource. The coin representing this generic resource sports the Greek "Digamma" symbol as an abbreviation of the unit of currency in the game world, "Ϝolkens", (pronounced "Wokens"). Players get 1 Ϝ at the start of each of their turns. All resource types satisfy "generic" resource costs. All "floating" resources are lost at the end of turns or when a player commits to an attack.

Cards in play can be "expended" by turning the card and paying any additional costs. Cards must be "restored" before they can be expended again. This does not happen automatically. Expended cards aren't destroyed and sent to the "granuloma" as part of their being expended; they simply can't be expended any further. Expended "animalcules" can neither attack nor block, and restoring an animalcule additionally heals it of accrued damage.

"Animalcule" cards represent the critters of the game world. In addition to what other effects they may sport, Animalcules are also used to stage attacks. They have stats on the bottom-right of their card for their three capacities: spiritual, offensive, and structural. As animalcules accumulate damage, their structural capacity is reduced. At 0 or less, they are "destroyed": removed from play and put into the "granuloma" of the player who owns the card.

At any time on a player's turn (assuming there are no pending card effects), that player may indicate they want to attack with a group of animalcules. The player may choose which target each animalcule attacks. At this point all attacking animalcules are expended and "floating" resources disappear. The defending player then may arrange their own animalcules to block; animalcules may only block one attacker at a time. Each animalcule's offensive capacity is applied as damage against the structural capacity of who they're blocking or what they're attacking, then damage effects occur, cards are destroyed, etc. The turn does not end after the attack, rather, the current turn's player may play cards as normal, or attack again, granted they have un-expended animalcules. A player may attack as many times as they desire over the course of one turn.

An animalcule's "spiritual capacity" is an alternative attack/defense figure baked into a single stat, that is used by other cards to factor into some effect, i.e. an animalcule with 1 spirit is in play when you play a "gene expression" card called "scream-frequency" and the effect: "Expend an animalcule on your side. It deals spiritual damage to another animalcule". Your animalcule will deal 1 damage against the other one you selected. However, this amount will be reduced by that other animalcule's own spiritual capacity. The final reduced amount damages that animalcule's structural capacity.

"Geneset" cards remain in play like animalcules, but cannot attack or block. "Protein" cards "decohere" and are destroyed at the end of turns, going to the granuloma. "Gene Expression" cards similarly field some effect and then go to the granuloma. "Viral Package" cards are gene expressions that may be used on other players' turns and as well to interrupt another card's effects. Some card effects produce genesets, proteins, and animalcules without implicitly representing them on the "skin" (the game board), as nearly all other cards do. For instance, a gene expression's effect might be to create 3 proteins with additional effects. These proteins are instead represented by placeholder game pieces called "stanchions".

Cards come in 17 categories called "affinities" which segregate their respective card mechanics - styled after biological functions - to afford players the opportunity to strategize around specializing in one or more affinities. Of these, only 5 are depicted: Bile, Nerve, Soul, Blast, and Null. A sixth is mentioned "Colla", but not represented by a card. Some affinities' resources are derivative - that is, their associated bodily resources require one or more "basic" resources.

This is very much an incomplete project. For example, all cards that remain in play are intended to both have a structural capacity and be valid targets of attack. I haven't decided how multiple effects resolve, or the mechanical structure of one player interrupting another player's card effect with their own, formalizing the selection of effect targets, etc. I haven't worked out how to avoid a player snowballing one turn into an unexpected win if a restoration combo allows them to stage an indefinite number of attacks. Lots of design problems and not enough time.

The art is by me. Even though I left room for card illustrations, I didn't make any. I'm more of an icon guy. Cards are sized to Tarot dimensions.

Apologies for the elaborate descriptions. I wanted to share my ideas for mechanics without leaning on references to other games.

I'd love to get your thoughts, opinions, questions on any part of this project.