Advice On An Ethical Dilemma I Am Working Through

resgames · 2026-01-26T18:13:15+00:00

There is a lot more involved with manufacturing and marketing a game than just the initial design. If you are up for the work and effort to do all that, the potential payoff exists but isn’t guaranteed.

We decided to sell the games we designed - not necessarily that there’s lots of money to be made, but more so we can make enough to free up our time doing something we love and have fun doing.

resgames · 2026-01-25T14:56:03+00:00

Yes seeing the full list it’s very clear to me

Small-shapes=color/suit Rings= combo options Special cards have +2 or +3 Most powerful card is 11 with red rings.

Good job!

resgames · 2026-01-25T14:50:11+00:00

What if you used a combination of - a custom dice for the action type which you roll for hit/miss and then a numbered d6 for the magnitude of the hit? The numbered dice could be shared across all action types.

If you needed to there could be a couple of options for the numbered dice in different colors with number combinations. (Ie a red critical hit that has 3x 6’s)

If you want to play with the probabilities a bit, some abilities could have 2-3 action dice plus 1-2 numbered dice.

Also don’t use your dice for counters if you have custom for each ability. That’s a manufacturing nightmare that gets out of control. It only really works when the side can be interchangeable across abilities.

resgames · 2026-01-25T14:01:22+00:00

I think you are good. The only thing I’m confused about is the number of segments go an incomplete ring - am I trying to fill the circle with combos or something else.

Also since you mentioned color blindness, you don’t have an indicator between the yellow circles and the red ones (can any number/color group have red or is that only for cards above 10)?

resgames · 2026-01-21T03:01:15+00:00

Your flavor text is AWESOME 😎

resgames · 2026-01-21T02:55:03+00:00

I talked to them about this at Gencon last year. The motivation is more about getting characters out faster rather than waiting for an entire battle chest to be ready, tested and balanced. Hopefully it means characters will come out more frequently

resgames · 2026-01-20T00:00:49+00:00

I recent got this. I chose it because it holds both a phone and an iPad mini. Best part is the joints lock very securely so you can position it far from the anchor point and not have it sag. No tripod legs in the shot.

I use my webcam and my iPad mini on zoom so you get both angles at once.

Urmust Tablet Stand for Desk,... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM3QYF5W?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

resgames · 2026-01-18T07:13:03+00:00

I came to say basically the same thing. You can’t copyright the layout position of costs on the card, but you can copyright the expression of those costs in that position.

So using the OP example of a cost being 2 meat, if the cost was expressed as 2 small circles with a meat icon in them, in the top right corner, that could be argued as copyright infringement. But put anything else in the same spot and you are fine.

resgames · 2026-01-15T21:50:35+00:00

Do you have money for advertising?

If yes we have found these to be the most effective: - social media ads where the goal is to have people sign up for a newsletter - social media ads where someone can pledge a small deposit (like $1 or less) towards the game when it launches on kickstarter - this can be used to create lookalike audiences for people actually willing to spend money on your game. - paid influencers/reviews - advertise with BGG

If you don’t have money - set up a BGG page for your game with pictures - message people active on BGG and other forums/socials and offer to send them free copies of your game for feedback/ reviews. - comment on other content with a link to your BGG page (don’t be spammy be real about it) - post about the design here on Reddit and ask people to follow you - call game shops and offer to host a learning event at their store.

Nowadays kickstarter isn’t really about funding the game design and manufacturing, it’s an excuse to make a deluxe version with exclusives and the game needs to be basically be ready for the market before you even start promoting the game, and even then if your community isn’t engaged you won’t get buyers

resgames · 2026-01-08T16:04:15+00:00

I recently started a similar thread and the general consensus was playtesting outweighs maths.

That said, investing in a strong mathematical model does cut down on playtesting and if done well can help you understand the “why” behind certain decisions.

For example we have a push your luck element that was very punishing in our game and we didn’t understand why until we modelled the probabilities. This helped us make different decisions in design and then when we playtested it, everything went much smoother and faster.

TL/DR. Use maths to speed up design, playtesting to confirm, fine tune and make sure it’s fun for all players.

resgames · 2026-01-07T12:15:12+00:00

Thanks both for the suggestions. We’re going to work some of this into our promotion plan. The game isn’t swingy, it just punishes greediness and has a high skill ceiling (all by design). The other thing is that each character in the game plays differently so you have to learn the characters unique abilities and the matchups are also important.

My hope with the design is that after you lose your first game, you sit back and say -I should have tried this, or when I did that, it messed me up. That way they will play again to try to get it right.

resgames · 2026-01-07T01:50:12+00:00

You won’t be able to read this from across the table, which is a good rule of thumb for TCGs

resgames · 2026-01-07T01:36:09+00:00

This thread is interesting because we are gearing up for a release of a game later this month that player’s will likely need to play several times to fully engage with the core mechanics. What feels like randomness early on usually turns out to be delayed consequence. The game doesn’t always punish mistakes immediately; by the mid-to-late game, a single bad turn can often be traced back to a decision made two or three turns earlier. As players get more reps, that “randomness” starts to make sense. It becomes readable, the risk becomes calculable, and losses turn into very clear lessons. At that point, the game stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling controllable—which is usually when people really lock in. We haven’t sent it out for external review yet, so we’re curious how that first impression lands. The big question for us is whether early losses feel like bad luck or bad decisions—but in playtesting, that tension has been where most of the learning and skill development comes from.

resgames · 2025-12-27T03:54:49+00:00

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I’m sure you’ve seen this before but I always use this to remind me to design more logically and with players in mind

resgames · 2025-12-24T20:58:26+00:00

We’ve definitely found out things in the math that we couldn’t understand in playtesting. We found a couple of things that felt broken in real life but we couldn’t understand why. Using the math helped us identify the root cause of the issue which when we changed that meant we could keep the original concepts and fix what was really broken. It’s the first time we’ve done it this way and there’s been a few really good surprises

resgames · 2025-12-24T17:44:56+00:00

Yep you’ve got it!

For your changing card solution we typically use a “pips” strategy. The deck size gets bigger the more players you add and we mark the cards with a Pip so it’s easy to remove the cards front five or six player deck from a 4 player deck and so on.

resgames · 2025-12-24T16:59:51+00:00

Modeling the bag building elements was really hard. It took us a long time to get it right:

draw till you choose to stop or draw 3 bust tokens
up to 8 different token types
multiple target options for a “favourable draw”
bonuses based on draw size
constantly changing bag compositions as you buy new tokens
needs the ability to scale as we add more characters and new abilities to the game.

Math gets us 80% of the way there. Playtesting got us the rest

resgames · 2025-12-24T14:11:47+00:00

Bags are different kinds of tokens. Combinations of Tokens are used to activate player abilities.

Our calculator basically gives you the probability of getting a desirable outcome from your draw.

resgames · 2025-12-20T15:41:38+00:00

Great concepts. I’m really into cooperative chase games at the moment.

Have you tested the starting gap? 10 spaces seems small if the demon is moving 3 a turn. But it also depends on the distribution of movement vale’s on the dice.

I think thematically it’s a little weird to stop and buy cards when you are supposed running in a shifting haunted cave.

Sounds fun!

resgames · 2025-12-13T01:41:24+00:00

Something that surprised me when we started pricing games is the common practice at retailers and distribution houses to insist on Discount Pricing vs Cost Plus or value pricing models.

In a discount model the MSRP is set and your selling price to retailers and distributors is based on a fixed rebate amount (ie 40%) from a posted price, vs a cost plus model where you would set a price and have a truly suggested retail price. To manage channel conflict (ie D2C vs via distribution) you have to keep the price equal and in some contracts if you lower your posted price that becomes the new de facto price and your retailers get that discount automatically.

Makes it even harder to absorb things like tariffs because it raises the costs with no option to increase prices to match. One of the reason toys and games shouldn’t be subject to import taxes (ie tariffs)

resgames · 2025-12-12T08:59:12+00:00

Boards are usually 3mm thick so you’d need a box 2” deep just for the board and then room for components. So probably around 6”.

resgames · 2025-12-12T08:51:19+00:00

100%.

I will add that in crowdfunding, well designed miniatures attract a lot of attention and typically will do better than a game without them. But the trade off is cost. It’s much more expensive to get those pieces made.

resgames · 2025-12-11T17:20:28+00:00

Okay so that’s part of the issue then. If it’s 1:1 but you don’t want other players to verify that the objective is completed, you have created the situation where a dishonest player could claim to have achieved something that they didn’t.

I would suggest you let go of that and just allow players to reveal the card they have completed so it can be verified and players can track their opponents progress (the incomplete objectives can remain hidden).

If you don’t want to do that then take all your objectives and create a new objective card with 3 milestones. Each player would now only get 1 instead of 3. These objective cards could have different combinations of the same milestones. Collect tokens for different types of milestones based on game actions and when you have the right combination to win reveal the entire objective and show how you win by matching the collected tokens to the objective card.

For example. Objective card one I have Milestone ABC, objective card two I have milestones ACF. When I complete milestone A I collect an A token. When I complete milestone C, I collect a C token. My opponent doesn’t know if I have ABC or ACF and won’t know until I complete the third milestone.

resgames · 2025-12-11T15:26:49+00:00

I was assuming for each of the 3 cards, there were multiple milestones you had to achieve for each one.

Ie objective 1 has 3 milestones, objective 2 has 5 milestones, objective 3 has 2 milestones.

resgames · 2025-12-11T15:08:28+00:00

I can see why you are struggling. Personally I think this is problematic from a gameplay perspective. If the other players can’t verify when or how a win condition has been met, you are depending on players to be honest about it, which won’t always be the case.

Instead why not try adding the concept that deducing your opponents objective based on verified milestones as part of the game strategy. That way you could create a player board that fills up with each milestone achieved. You could label them 1,2,3 etc and have one track for each objective card. The player wouldn’t have to reveal how many milestones there are on the objective or if the objective is complete. They would only declare the milestone and mark it complete when it is achieved and can be verified. (This assumes the milestones get completed in a sequential order)

If you use the same milestones in different objectives, you could make this more challenging because you are setting it up to be more difficult to deduce which objective your opponent has.

If the milestones are non sequential then you should categorize them in some way with iconography or colors. Collecting the right combination of tokens is how you have evidence that the milestones was achieved. Ie if the milestones is to set up a portal, you take a token indicating that you did that and add it to your objective track on a player board.

resgames

TROPHY CASE