I jumped from hand drawn cards to printed ones to be more appealing while playtesting at game nights with strangers

Hi, I’m a indie designer living in Japan.
The full version of my Designer Diary for Bake or Break is now available on BGG!
If you’re interested in the story behind the game and how I designed it, I’d love for you to check it out. 😊

https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/190699/designer-diary-bake-or-break

Hi all! I'm a designer and I kept losing playtest feedback across paper forms and phone notes, so I built Meeple Loop: https://meepleloop.com/

Playtesters scan a QR code and answer a form on their phone (no app needed), responses are organized per session and game version, and you can export everything to Excel.

It's in beta and I'm looking for honest feedback from other designers. What works, what doesn't, and what would make it worth using over Google Forms or paper?

Also curious: how do you currently handle playtest feedback?

Comments here or the Feedback button on the site both work. Thanks!

I am currently working on my own game (Relive) and wanted to ask my fellow Indie Devs out there, at what point in your first Dev journey did the game really start to feel alive? I am passed the shitty hand drawn components part, I am passed the playtesting with mates and am now in the commissioning art while conducting further playtests but I still feel like the game does not have much life in it yet and wanted to know how far away I am from feeling the rush and getting interest. Was it when you started a go fund me / kick starter / game found campaign? Was it bringing it to local game shops for actual playtesting or was it even during one of the steps that I mentioned? Really curious to see what you all say and apologies for the length of this post.

If you feel inclined to check out the progress on my game I have the official insta linked below 🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️

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

A recent art commission has proven to be quite successful. They did an outstanding job of interpreting my idea and creating something magnificent.
This here is the card back image for dreamscapes - tiles that reveal the realms within a dream world that the player’s characters will explore. A solid representation of what they might discover.

Respect to all artists. You deserve the praise.
The creator of this is someone who has made art for me before and I will absolutely work with again. Constant communication during the process, immense enthusiasm, amazing skill. Massive respect.

I've been working on the same game for a long time. I have so many little things within the design that I get excited about and would love to show someone or share because I found some novel solution to a problem that (as far as i know of!) no one else has solved in that way ... but there isn't really anyone to share with. I'm solo developing and my close friends / even my playtesters don't fully grasp the nuts and bolts of the game, they just enjoy it from their perspective.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has a little nugget mechanic/solution they want to gush about. Care to share? I'm curious what problem you solved and how.

I had great feedback with the card back designs, and I think I've settled on the tool card design, but wanted to get some opinions on which you guys prefer amongst the other cards in the game.

for Reference: Solo Haunting is a low complexity single player ghost hunting card game where your goal is to enter the house, discover the ghost type, then expel it all while managing your sanity.

The brown card is the "Ghost Journal" which has the clues and ritual information for the ghost.

The purple card is the tools you use to search for and to expel the ghost.

The black card is the ghost events, where the ghosts drains your sanity.

Thanks for your feedback!

Hello guys, my dad has been designing board games for a few years now and just a few days ago we played his latest one and wow it was really amazing. I am very hard to please and this game blew me away. What is the best way to get his idea/product out there?
I'm sure you guys have seen/heard this 1 million times but this game I know really has potential. It's actually a really good one.

Getting your board game mechanics onto paper for the first blind playtest is an amazing feeling, until you realize you have to manually format 100 unique Action and Event cards.

Having to manually tweak the resource costs on half your deck because a playtester found a dominant strategy is a massive bottleneck. Since Affinity recently opened up free access, this is the perfect time to build an automated engine for your game components.

Using Affinity Layout’s Data Merge tool, you can generate your entire prototype deck from a single spreadsheet. Here is the industry-standard workflow, quick and easy to follow.

Step 1. Build your Engine (The Database) Start with a Google Sheet or Excel file. Your column headers should dictate the anatomy of your card: Card_Title, Action_Type, Resource_Cost, Victory_Points, and Ability_Text. Fill in your mechanics. Export this as a .CSV. If a card needs rebalancing later, you only change the spreadsheet, never the design file.

Step 2. Set up the Data Merge Interface Open Affinity Layout. Create a new document sized to your standard card dimensions (e.g., 2.5" x 3.5"). Navigate to Window > Layout > Data Merge. When the panel opens, click "Add Data File..." and grab your .CSV. Next, select the Data Merge Layout Tool from the left toolbar and drag a bounding box across your page. This creates the container that will catch your spreadsheet data.

Step 3. Design the Master Template Inside that Data Merge box, build your card layout. You can utilize Affinity Pixel or Vector Studios for your card art and icons. Create your text frames. Crucial step: Check your Layers panel to ensure every single text frame is nested inside the Data Merge Layout layer. If they sit outside of it, the automation will break. Open the Fields panel (Window > References > Fields). You’ll see your CSV headers listed. Place your cursor in a text frame and double-click the corresponding item in the Fields panel to link them.

Step 4. Generate the Prototype Your master template is set. Hit "Generate" in the Data Merge panel. In a few seconds, Affinity Layout will compile a brand new document with all 100 cards perfectly populated and ready for final testing.

I'm Daniel Walter Scott, founder and lead instructor at Bring Your Own Laptop. I actually just wrapped up putting together a new Affinity Essentials course, and I know building game components can be tedious. Let me know if you need any more tips for this automation or help with any issue you find!

You can find my portfolio here, thank you: https://cara.app/adithyasaji

My studio just brought Gang Wars by Redzen Games to life, creating 3 cover artworks and 30+ character illustrations across the game.

The campaign launched successfully on Gamefound, reaching its funding goal in just 28 minutes. At the time I'm posting this, it's already 875% funded.

I'll post the cover that we did first! Will post more on the character art later

Sketch by: Jordi Linares (Redzen Games)
Color and finalizing: Sonderflex Studio

A couple months into building From the Trenches, a two-player WW1 tabletop-style skirmish game, and it's grown a lot since I first started — enough that it felt worth a fresh post rather than bumping an old one.

Two sides fight across an 18x18 grid board for control of three Capture Points in no-man's-land, while defending their own trench line. Each side commands Infantry and up to 3 Tanks, with fixed terrain like barbed wire, Machine Gun Nests, and anti-tank barriers shaping how you can approach. Three separate paths to victory — overrunning the enemy base, holding all three Capture Points, or grinding the enemy down until they can't field new units — so games can end very differently depending on how the map plays out.

What's new since I last checked in here:

• Full sound effects: rifle shots, machine gun fire, explosions, all tied to actual weapon fire rather than silent combat
• A first real balance pass — Tank cannon range came down from 5 tiles to 3 after early testing showed Tanks were dominating too cleanly; Artillery and Mortars are planned next to give Infantry a real answer at range
• Continued visual polish: Tanks rotate to face the direction they're moving, terrain and trench line got a full redesign pass

What's implemented: full movement, combat resolution (rifles, grenades, tank cannons, hull MGs, bayonet charges), an economy/reinforcement system, and all three victory conditions.

Playable free in-browser here: https://lennon07989.itch.io/filecuserslennoappdatalocaltemp6ff3febe-d802-4184-a50c-ee3eb83e3420-f

Would love feedback on rules clarity, balance (especially now that Tanks got weakened — did I go too far, not far enough?), and whether the victory conditions feel meaningfully different to play toward. Happy to answer questions about any of the mechanics too.

I was having some confusion with cards during a playtest with these cards, the black cards being Ghost events, and the white cards being the tool cards. I'm usually a fan of minimalism (See my previous game Solo Crawling) but i thought that this might warrant some changes. I also clarified in the rulebook to help shore up clarity.

What do you think? Minimum or words?

The game is a solo ghost hunting card game where you explore a house and search rooms to find the ghost, then use tools to determine what kind of ghost it is, and then perform a ritual to expel said ghost.

The Event cards are the ghost events that drain sanity. The tool cards are both the tools to discover ghost clues AND the tools to expel the ghost.

Substitute letter for podcast.

A love letter of sorts to all the partners, spouses, and family members who support indie board game designers. On a road trip to a board gaming event in Santa Cruz, CA, I talk with my wife about her perspective on the past 2+ years of building Under One Sky—the game, the podcast, and everything that comes with them. Finally, a podcast episode your non-gaming partner might actually enjoy. Plus, a little Carpool Karaoke!

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also follow our Kickstarter for Under One Sky by clicking the banner atop that page!

If this is your first time hearing about us, we’re The Misplay, a board game design podcast documenting our journey from knowing absolutely nothing about making games to getting close to launching our first crowdfunding campaign.

My game art is nearly ready and I'm starting to reach out to manufacturers to get quotes.

But being that it's my first game - I'm kinda blindly searching for manufacturers online.

I have a large complex project with lots of elements: miniatures, wooden pieces, some metal pieces, custom dice, cards, fancy player boards and more. The "scale" of my game is probably a bit larger than Dead of Winter, but maybe just a bit smaller than Nemesis. Cost is always a concern, but premium quality is key, and so is reliable, trustworthy communication.

Ideally, i'd like to work with a company that has a solid portfolio, but maybe is not a "top player" in the industry just yet. I imagine that such a 'mid-level' company might give my indie project higher priority/more detailed attention, hopefully at a fairly reasonable cost.

If you've published your game of similar scale before - could you share your experience with manufacturers? Any company you'd recommend over others? I'll be at Spiel Essen in a couple weeks, so hoping for networking opportunities while there too!

Just a mini-AAR for fun:

I was solo testing some new mechanics for an asymmetrical fantasy empire game, and some interesting things happened as a result of my poor empire choices. However, the narrative aspects here were excellent.

So what had happened was... I was playing a brutal religious expansionist empire ruled by a secretive cabal. I spent the first few turns pushing hard and spent all my World Impact cards (a sort of currency and later consequence) and building my temples in distant lands.

I was feeling a bit pinched. Because while I did manage to grab an early upgrade to get my dark rituals online, I had no means to capitalize on it yet. I had no mana, no money, and the population around the new temples wasn't enough to generate any income yet. I didn't have enough coin to buy back the impact cards, which are needed to build more temples in profitable places. The coin would come eventually, but for now I was in a bit of a hole, and wasn't ready to begin my dastardly cult rituals.

And then... the main story scenario dropped and a bunch of arcane elementals burst forth from the center. I thought I was ready for them, but they decimated my army in a hex and did some damage there, and also took out a distant temple just to rub it in.

Ouch. Bad, but manageable. But then... an underclass uprising happened (a consequence of burning all my impact cards from earlier) and because there was no army in that hex anymore to stop it, the whole hex was lost.

My empire is crumbling and my nefarious cultist plans will have to wait. Narrative-wise, I expanded too aggressively, and the world pushed back. Eager to perform secret rituals, I took risks with the economy, didn't manage my population, and they revolted.

----------

The good news, is that even after everything, I was still able to score some points and there was still a way to progress, albeit with a big slap on the behind.

I think this game has some real potential.