In 2015, I created my first board game prototype. I spent a considerable amount of money to have a beautiful prototype made, and in the end, the game was never published.

(Though I still don’t think it’s a bad game—even today. The Producers PNP version is available up here.)

I paid for the illustrator out of my own pocket, bought cardboard, printed colorful stickers, cut and cut and cut... It was a lot of money and a lot of work.

I usually tell this story so that beginner designers don’t make the same mistake—because after all that effort, the game never got published, and that’s a tough failure to swallow.

But the truth is, it did reach a publisher. They even took it to an international publisher, proposing a co-production. So in the end, it spread my name, which certainly didn’t hurt.

Interestingly, in 2016, my first published game came out with the very same publisher who had ultimately rejected this beautifully crafted prototype.

That being said, I put much less effort into prototypes these days. Of course, being a known game designer makes things easier, but I’ve also learned that publishers are really interested in the idea—they prefer to shape it into a final product themselves.

Right now, I’m working on a government-commissioned project, and we’re going through yet another round of revisions. I’m hoping tomorrow’s presentation will finally be successful so we can start the actual development.

The prototype is still in progress (depends on how much sleep my daughter lets me get), but there’s no fancy stuff—just standard playing cards with label stickers, Carcassonne tiles, Furnace markers, Ganz Schön Clever Kids pencils, paper sheets, and dice.

I'm already quite satisfied with the cooperative version—it's about 80-90% complete, and that's the main game.

But there will also be a competitive version, which still needs more refining—that one's more like 60-70% done.

We'll see how it goes, but I'm feeling optimistic.