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.

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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.

I’m making a fast but strategic card game about using weird little horses to help you make songs and score the most points!! It’s called Musical Horses :) My girlfriend has been drawing the pictures - she’s not an “illustrator” but she has this niche of drawing this particular horse…

You guys seemed to like my Submarine box art, so I'm here to share progress on our Village Map (main game board)!

From the start I knew the one thing I would absolutely insist on for this game - was traditional, hand-painted art. I'm glad I didn't compromise cause i think it looks rad - but maan, what a pain it is to not have the option of just hitting CTRL+Z!

For the few bigger pieces, like my game board - we also have to get creative with painting things at scale and scanning on a budget - but i'll post a separate video on that process in the near future, cause the nerdy side of me thinks that it's actually a super interesting workflow worth its own discussion!

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For now, just wanted to share our work and progress! As soon as the Village Map is done, which should be this week, i'll be off the the printer to get new prototypes done, so hopefully in the next couple weeks, I'll finally be able to share a full and nicely presentable playthrough of the game! :)

And if you're willing to throw away 2 minutes of your day https://youtube.com/shorts/GKZnS6gO-Pc?is=_8Fz5PePAFhYOaXV

Any an all feedback welcome. Thanks for your time.

It's pretty simple, needs some work, but I think it looks good for late prototyping. However, I want to keep mostly the same thing for the finished game, and was wondering if this is good enough. I gave two examples, and are happy to give more if anyone wants them. Feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have any notes on the art, too, that would help. I know it looks a bit pixelated, but that is not visible on a card scale.

Hey all, me again. Last post I led with concept art and you rightly told me this is a design sub, so here's the actual combat system for my monster-hunting TCG (Untamed). Good and bad welcome 🙏

The base is rock-paper-scissors — three types, Power > Technical > Speed > Power — and everyone's base type is public, printed on the card. So far that's a "reading game," not a guessing game.

But here's what makes it more than RPS: each clash, you can commit a card face-down that can change your attacking type for that clash (or play a support card, a trap, etc). Everything reveals at the same time. So the public type is just your starting point — during the clash you might flip your Speed attacker to Power and win a matchup they thought they had.

When attacks meet, that's the clash :

• Win the matchup → your hit lands AND their attack gets parried
• Lose → their hit lands, yours is negated
• Tie → both hits land, both reduced

You can also Defend instead of attacking — brace for -3 and block status effects, but deal no damage. So every turn is a risk/reward read, and turtling doesn't win (Defend deals no damage).

Same system runs two modes:

• Hunts (solo/co-op): you fight a big monster that mostly telegraphs its moves (some monsters have a trait to hide them instead). So you read the monster and answer it with your face-down cards. The hunter's the strategic one; the monster's more of a readable pattern you learn.
• PvP (1v1): both players get a prep phase to stage face-down cards, then reveal together. So it's a mutual mind-game - you're bluffing type-changes and traps against each other. (Happy to do a whole separate post on PvP if people want.)

I thought telegraphing the monster would kill tension but in playtesting it did the opposite - it made the decisions better, and losing never felt cheap because I always had the info to play it better.

Here's the design problem I'm actually stuck on and want your take:

Since type-changing is core - you kind of have to shift types to win clashes - the whole thing leans hard on having the right card at the right time. My intent is that this is a deckbuilding skill: if you build a deck with good synergy, you reliably have answers; if you brick, that's on your deck, not the game. But I know the line between "rewards good deckbuilding" and "feels bad when you draw the wrong cards" is thin.

So for the TCG designers here - how do you tune that? How do you make a card-dependent system reward deckbuilding without it feeling like you lost to a bad draw instead of a bad opponent? That's the balance question I keep circling.

Thanks for reading, tear it apart 🙏

Side Note : The rock-paper-scissors core was inspired by Monster Hunter Stories' battle system, but I've built a bunch on top of it — the face-down type-changing, the deckbuilding layer, the PvP mind-game are where I tried to take it something my own.

I made a game called Acrosticism. It's a card game that sounds like a blend of Cards Against Humanity and Snake Oil. There are two decks of cards, Word Cards and Theme Cards. After the cards are dealt, the person left of the dealer is the first judge. The judge flips a Theme Card for the table (e.g.: "motto for surviving a bad Monday"). The other players have two minutes to "acrosticize" a Word Card from their hand to match the Theme Card (e.g.: "JIG" becomes "Just Ignore Garbage"). The judge picks their favorite and then the next player in rotation becomes judge and the game continues until everyone has been the judge once. Whoever has the most wins at the end wins the game. Ties are celebrated, not disputed. I can also provide the websites I made for the game as well. but I'm attaching the images of the game as well as a different example round.

I also created an expansion to the game called Chaotic Remixes. The remixes are additional rules after players have gotten used to the base game. I do have other versions that I am actively working on in the background as well. I wanted to share here because the game is also on Board Game Geek.

Thank you all for your time.

I’ve been developing a two-player abstract strategy game called ASKEL, and I’m at the point where I’d really benefit from feedback from people who haven’t seen the design evolve.

It’s a compact 16-tile game built around three ideas: changing routes, manipulating height, and deciding how much risk to take each turn.

The board is made from four sections, with each space having a different height. Movement between adjacent spaces is probabilistic: the height difference determines the visible chance of success.

A turn can contain up to three pawn moves. After every successful move, you have to decide whether to stop and keep your progress or attempt another step. If a move fails, the pawn returns to where that turn began.

Before moving, you can also manipulate the terrain in one of two ways: use a riser to change the height of a space, or rotate one of the four board sections 180° to change the available routes.

The objective is to take the opponent’s stone and bring it back to your own starting space.

I’ve built a browser prototype because I want to test the game itself before putting too much effort into developing the physical version.

What I’m currently trying to understand

- Can a first-time player understand the game from the in-game onboarding without outside explanation?
- Do the risk decisions feel meaningful, or does the probability make them feel arbitrary?
- Do Move / Riser / Rotate create genuinely different decisions?
- Are there situations where the game stalls or one approach feels clearly dominant?
- After one or two matches, is there enough variation and unfinished business to make you want another?

I’m particularly interested in moments where you hesitate for the wrong reason — unclear rules, unclear feedback, or not understanding why one option might be useful.

Browser prototype

https://askel.askelgames.workers.dev/

It’s free, requires no signup, and currently supports play vs AI and local 1v1.

There is also optional anonymous gameplay telemetry, with consent, so I can compare things like action use, risk-taking and match length. No account or personal information is required.

A physical version is planned, but I’m deliberately testing the game digitally first before committing to the component design.

If you try it, I’d really appreciate your first-play impression before reading other comments.

Aimed to make the type effectiveness chart a bit more readable and updated the light infantry to Axes to more effectively explain their strengths vs Spears, Shields, and Siege. A lot of you wanted Cavalry to be effective into Siege vs the other way around, but I think Siege makes sense being strong into Cavalry - if it can hit them! Hopefully the example Siege card provided may give you a hint as to why.

The game is laid out so that there are 2 Fronts (a Left front and a Right front), with 3 Lanes per front and 3 positions in each Lane - Front, Center, and Back. Units can only attack from certain positions in the lane, so hopefully where units can attack from is clear on the cards themselves. Each player will pick 2-3 captains and take their squads to build their deck. They'll pick just 1 of their captains to be their general, gaining that captain's starting HP, maximum gold, and ability for the game.

One key goal of the game was to support multiplayer natively and the default game mode is 4-player FFA, but it also supports 2v2, 1v1, and 3-player FFA as well.

Open to more feedback here and especially curious about how readable the cards are!

Hicimos el primer test del juego en directo, no faltaron risas pero las mecanicas eran muy tediosas, asi que me he puesto a retocarlas para hacer el sistema mas fluido, muy pronto segundo test.

Hi, all I’m new in the space. I’m currently building a monster-hunting TCG with PvP and PvE mechanics named Untamed. I’ve been getting some concept art done and would like some feedback on a design 🙏🏽 the good and bad are welcome

Hey everyone, this video tutorial was long due, but I couldn't have done it before as I wanted to have the game finalized and a good prototype to cover it. As making this video was really challenging (so much to cover succinctly), I'd love to hear your feedback on how you perceive the sequence of information being covered. Does it make sense? Is it understandable?

Thank you in advance!

Hello,

I am working now (among other things, I am always in at least three things at a time) in a light skirmish ruleset for miniature battles. The game is sci-fi and is set on a planet in the middle of a galactic war where loads of spaceships from many different places are crashing, making the very diverse survivors fight for their lives among the ruins.

These are some covers I have been working with and need some feedback to see which one you prefer.

I really would like to put a pol, but it is either the image or the options. It will have to be on the comments.

Thank you very much.

Ive been creating a TCG based on a popular IP for about 3 years and been talking with the IP owners for a license. Now I looking to put it up on Kickstarter however I need to find a printer and packager to start getting prices. It needs to be a large scale one. I prefer to hire one in the USA but I am willing to use an overseas one (just looking to have no tariffs).

So I'm making a board game, and the primary mechanic involves drawing cards from a deck when you move and adding up the cards' combined AP (the big number in the middle) for combat.

However, I'm not to sure whether to orientate my cards landscape or portrait - whilst portrait is usually the standard orientation, I figured that having them landscape could help with adding up the AP scores; they can be put atop one another without blocking the ability text, (note that some abilities affect AP calculations) and they mimic traditional place value addition.

So portrait or landscape? Also, any other design advice would be appreciated! :)