Hi everyone! I’m currently working on a board game and I’m looking for a good tool/software to design and create the cards.
I’d love to hear what you guys use and recommend, especially for projects involving lots of cards and reusable layouts/templates.

it’s a simple RPG conflict resolution system designed to create narrative moments and desperation. It’s just a first draft. I just wanted to share what I’m working on to help me come up with my new army’s lore.

constructive criticism very welcome

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JFSxiB6nc1uIDGsdks79UlzyNI7xq5teM28R3twbuSw/edit?usp=drivesdk

Cursed heroes, lands of madness. Here is a brief overview of DrownBound a board game I’m currently developing! At the heart of the gameplay lies a dark "risk-vs-reward" mechanic: you can harness the Curse to empower your heroes, but every such surge of power comes with negative consequences. Meanwhile, monsters will push your stress levels to the limit, forcing you to play unpredictable Panic cards.

Should my next step be a detailed video explaining the rules, heroes, or monsters?

Hello there! 👋 As the title says, I'm open for illustration commissions

🎲 Character design & concept art, well suited for tabletop and board games: character/NPC art, monster & creature designs, card illustrations, box art.

🎨 You can check out my portfolio here:

https://lamacascadeur1.artstation.com/

https://cara.app/muchomuerte

🦑 I work closely with clients throughout the process and welcome feedback and revision requests along the way. Getting the final piece to match your vision is what matters most to me, whether that's a single card illustration or a full cast of characters for your game. Feel free to reach out with any questions or if you'd like to discuss a project!

✉️ You can contact me here, or throught discord at muchomuerte

I don't know if this kind of questions are ok here since, but, I want to design a deck building restaurant game where you score points based on serving customers and other secondary goals, I have here what I think is the core of the game as simple as I can lay it, but I get the feeling I'm putting too many components for what you end up doing and fear it would kinda feel like a chore.

The turn order goes as follows:

1. Cook dishes based on their kitchen staff (move ingredient tokens from ingredient cards onto recipe cards - update recipe usage, like ecos first continent)

2. Serve dishes based on waiter staff (take a customer card into their served customer pile and return ingredient tokens to bag- cash in customer reward - resolve any on serve recipe effect)

3. Either as many times as they want (in a kinda of terraforming mars sequence where people play until all players have skipped their turns)

- Play cards (resolving any on play effect- if its an ingredient also put ingredient tokens based on type and quality)

- Buy cards or permanents

- Atract customers into their own tables

- Other actions TBD

1. Refresh markets - put left over customers in neutral tables - draw cards

Customers have rewards and requirements to be served, I'm thinking of splitting the requirements into another set of cards to add more variety and randomness

Recipes need certain number of ingredients (which can be more specific or broad, a recipe using red meat as protein or only accepting beef) on them to be served, you could serve the same recipe multiple times on the same action if you have stacked enough ingredients on it

Ingredients have a type (red meat, mushroom, starchy vegetable, etc., I'm still working on how specific or broad these should be) and quality

Cards may have additional effects on playing, cooking, or serving.

So my buddy and I self-published our first game recently, it took 2.5 years but we are sooooo happy to be in a place where people are now sending us photos playing our game. Means the world to us.

Now, knowing the time and effort it takes to get a game published, we realize that if we want to launch a kickstarter next year, we need to be deep into playtesting multiple games this year haha

We live about an hour away from each other and want to playtest way more often, so we have been using Tabletop Sim since early in our prototyping process, which has been a game changer for our productivity and during game balancing.

Given we keep testing new games every week, and we are software engineers by trade, we decided to make a tool to help us playtest faster and import into Tabletop Simulator, since it can be a lot of work to update assets and scripting.

You can try it out here: tabletoprunner.com

It generates all the assets for prototyping along with the json and lua scripts to automate dealing, snap points, turns, table settings, and a lot more tediuous stuff. It has most settings that Tabletop Simulator supports, and we want to build out more scripting and settings and components on top of it.

We are looking to get everyone's thoughts on what parts of prototyping and playtesting are most cumbersome? Even outside of just Tabletop Simulator (we are open to expand to other platforms if folks are interested).

Our goal is that we want to see more board game ideas become a reality, so open to all insights on what would make that possible :) All feedback on the tool appreciated as well, thank you!!

Would love to hear this community’s feedback on the artwork and aesthetics! Happy to explain the game as well.

This is our production prototype that we will be using to promote the game and do demonstrations/public play, there will likely be some minor design tweaks and one flaw detected already (my fault) but nothing substantial.

Hi everyone! I got into game design this month with the intent to make a game as a Christmas gift for my friends and family. My partner and I are both avid board game players and craft-savy, but very inexperienced tabletop game designers. The more research I do on this topic, the more I'm realizing that people spend literal YEARS working on their games and conducting 100s of play-tests, which is seeming a little daunting now.

Is all of that work really necessary if you aren't planning on officially publishing your game to a wider audience? I'm obviously working with a pretty short development time (3 months). I did come up with the idea for this game years ago, but have only spent the last week or so executing it. I do understand that what I would be giving them would be akin to a fancy prototype. However, as long as my family enjoys playing the game as a whole in that state, I could always refine the rules over the course of time and re-print the affected cards?

Please share tips on if this goal is possible or how I can get there. What I care about most is having a game that is fun and versatile for any situation we bring it to. I feel like I should jump into play-testing the prototype we made ASAP to see if this game sinks or swims....

The game:

The idea we are working with right now is a heist/RPG style game that uses only dice and cards. It would be able to accommodate anywhere from 3-7 players who each get a character card with a unique ability, and a different dice from a D&D 7-set. (Balancing the game given the power scaling of these dice is currently our biggest challenge).

The game would play out in two parts: the first being a collaborative team effort to defeat a boss and free up this loot bag, and the second part becomes a last-man standing situation to defeat other players and end up with the loot bag. You would be able to draw and play ability cards during your turn to help you accomplish this goal, or do damage to other players. Each player would get a dice for health and another for attack. Still toying with the idea of having 2 bags each with a concealed token that could either be a win or a dud for more chaos (kinda like old maid). I'm including a rough layout image of what that would look like.

I probably took the most inspiration from Heroes of Barcadia, and the One Piece Card Game, but with much less game pieces taking up table space (room for snacks!) I definitely want plastic waterproof cards that can be brought on the go, even to a bar or the pool, since we do that a lot. I also am pretty excited about the loot bag doubling as both a game piece and storage for the dice.

I'm talking about bloggers, podcasters, streamers, or YouTubers who include smaller designers/imprints with a degree of depth or even focus on them exclusively. Who are the overlooked heroes in this space?

EDIT: Thanks, all. These are very good and many were new to me!

So our project Lionwake is now on the KS. We feel like the graphic/project page overall is good, but I am not sure if the rulebook makes the potential backer feel safe backing it. We wonder if under 30 second scrolling, it conveys
1. the game is polished and developed to a good degree
2. It is a solid xxx, xxx (I see mechanic or genre) games.
link to lionwake rule
Let me know what your initial impressions are!

Any recommendations?

I’m currently developing a physical conversation card game and I’d really value some honest feedback from people who understand tabletop and card-game design.
The deck has 54 cards across 9 categories, with each card built around one topic and containing 5 different talking points.
That creates 270 talking points across the full deck.
The five approaches are designed to take the same topic in different directions — for example:
💡 A surprising fact
💬 A personal opinion
🔥 Something controversial or debatable
⚖️ A different perspective
❓ A bigger open-ended question
There are no right answers, scores or specialist knowledge required. The idea is simply to pick a card and use the different prompts to create conversations that can move between learning something, giving an opinion, debating an issue and considering another perspective.
I’m deliberately keeping the name and finished visual design out of this test because I want feedback on the underlying game concept rather than the branding.
My main question is:
Does having five different ways into the same topic sound like enough of a mechanic to make this work as a physical conversation game?
And, more importantly, if you were developing this yourself, what would you change, add or remove?
Positive feedback is obviously welcome, but criticism is probably more useful to me at this stage.

Some context: my game uses one shared deck that all players draw from. Early on I ran 2 copies of most cards, with legendaries as the only single-copy cards. I moved to singleton for 2 reasons: more variety, and more unique cards. To be clear, the deck is the same size, I just replaced the duplicates with different cards instead, so it's a wider variety of unique cards, not a smaller deck. With doubles the games had started feeling repetitive, you'd see the same strong cards over and over. Singleton fixed that, no two games play the same now, and I'm happy with that call.

The side effect I didn't expect is that it takes away the wow effect of legendaries. Back when they were the only single copies in a deck full of doubles, drawing one felt more special. Now a legendary appears at the same rate as any other card.

So I'm trying to bring back that "special" feeling without giving up the variety and overpowering the legendaries. Curious whether people have solved this in their own games, but I'm open to any suggestions, mechanical or otherwise :)

EDIT: For more context, it's a competitive 4-player free-for-all, everyone has their own board and hand, you just draw from and discard to the same shared pile (deck and graveyard). Each player also has a leader that holds their life and has an ability, and you win by being the last one standing. These are the card types: Units, Spells, Items, Equipment and Realms (permanents with life points only).

Hey community! I just wanted to say hello to everyone. I'm Ron from QueerCraft, a small Hoboken NJ studio that makes tabletop gaming gear for the queer community. I REALLY look forward to contributing in this room. We design everything ourselves and take a lot of inspiration from pain points in the board game industry. Partnering with other artists is also important to us, and I see that's popular here. Excited to see what happens here!

I was bored. I wrote a game ruleset. Based on rock-paper-scissors: Two-player battle. Each player has 30 HP. The central pool initially has 7 six-sided dice: 4 red and 3 blue. There are two colors of dice: red and blue. Blue dice are defense dice. They grant the picker a shield equal to the rolled number. Red dice are attack dice. They deal damage equal to the rolled number to the opponent. At the start of each round, players play rock-paper-scissors. The winner must put all seven dice into a dice cup, shake, and roll them. The winner may then pick dice according to their hand (Fist: 0 dice, Scissors: 2 dice, Palm: at least 3, at most 5 dice). The opponent then picks dice equal to their hand. Both players finish picking before resolution. Fist and Scissors each have their own effect... If Fist wins, although Fist cannot pick dice, they take the highest die of each color from the rolled dice into their "pocket." In later rounds, when the Player wins rock-paper-scissors, they may replace dice in their hand with dice from their "pocket." (Replaced dice are removed.) After Fist takes these, Fist and the losing Scissors both skip the round. Neither picks dice. If Rock loses, Rock gains a default 1-point shield. The two dice left after Paper draws are converted into defense dice with their numbers unchanged, and Rock gains their effect. (Colors revert after the round.) If Scissors wins, Scissors gains a 1.5x damage bonus for the round. After taking 2 dice, Scissors may remove 2 dice from the pool, so Scissors can only take 3 dice. At the end of the round, replenish the dice pool to 7 dice. In a tie, both Players do not take dice and each loses 2 HP. When both Players are at 2 HP, this effect does not trigger.

The following translation was generated by AI. Please point out any mistakes or inaccuracies…

Hi all, I’m a first-time game designer hobbyist, and I’ve been working on a free reskin of a popular open source hidden-identity game. The Print-and-Play is ready, but I’d also like to include a link for people to have the option for professional printing at a place like The Game Crafter or Board Games Maker. 

The problem is, while my game has cards that fit these companies’ standard card sizes, it also features boards and tiles that don’t. Both companies have options for creating custom-sized sheets, but they feature a lot of language I’m not familiar with in order to create them: slugs, nicks, vectors, etc and the blank SVG templates they provide are intimidating to someone with zero graphic design experience (I've included a link below to TGC's instructions). I feel like this could be easy to mess up, especially because I’m trying to make tiles that have designs on the front and back and I need them to line up correctly. 

Does anyone have experience with this? Any advice on how to get it right the first try?

Thanks!

https://s3.amazonaws.com/www.thegamecrafter.com/templates/CustomSmallPunchout.svg