How To Make Your First Prototype

The number one piece of feedback we get from folks playing Rescue for the first time is about the cards' incredible illustration and graphic design. It makes sense, the cards are full of vibrant color and dogs oozing with quirks and personality. Before all of that, though, there was version after version of blank rectangles with Helvetica text. As bland as the cards may have been, this stage was critical in Rescue’s development.

Rescue is a tableau-building card game about running a dog rescue, organizing dogs into packs, foster homes, and finding forever families through Adoption Events. We knew what we wanted the game to feel like, in theory. We just needed to figure out how to make it real without breaking the bank or losing momentum every time we wanted to test a new version.

What We Needed from Our First Prototypes

Our goals were straightforward: cheap to make, easy to update, and usable enough that it doesn’t detract too much from playing the game. We were still revising rules daily, tweaking numerical values on cards, and testing different ways for dogs to interact with each other. The important aspects in the beginning were the raw mechanical elements of how players actually play the game.

We accepted early on that these versions would be scrappy. No final art, no professional layouts, just functional cards that let us see how packs worked and whether the gameplay loop felt good.

Tracking Cards and Generating Layouts

Every dog started as a row in a spreadsheet that contained all their abilities and scoring conditions. When we finally had a version we wanted to test, we'd use InDesign's data merge functionality to generate the cards on a printable sheet. The spreadsheet would automatically populate the card template, and we'd have a fresh deck ready to print in minutes. This process helped streamline our ability to make quick changes in order to print and test. For any changes greater than a small numeric adjustment or copy change, we would create a duplicate of the sheet to preserve prior versions.

Building a Cost-Effective, Highly Editable Prototype

To begin, though, we landed on a thrifted home printer, standard copy paper, Dragon Shield sleeves, and a pair of scissors. That's it. No fancy tools, no print-on-demand services for early versions. Just cheap materials we could iterate on quickly. With each new version of the game, we’d print a full set of dogs, cut each into poker-card size, then pop them into a card sleeve, usually with a dummy card to give it more structure. The sleeves make it easier to swap out either the front or the back, giving it a more “legitimate” feel for players testing it rather than trying to shuffle a stack of printer paper cards.

For smaller revisions, we would just cross out outdated text or numbers with a pen instead of printing a full new set of cards. Eventually, we would update enough to make it worthwhile to print fresh, but those crossed-out numbers saved lots of hours and stacks of paper.

As the development process progressed, we invested in some tools to help improve the prototypes, like a laser printer, heavier card stock, and a plethora of paper-cutting tools. These are by no means necessary, but they helped us print faster, cleaner, and higher-quality prototypes.

Lessons Learned for Other Prototyping Designers

If you're starting your first game, here's what I'd tell you: start with what you can make quickly and cheaply. Your first ten prototypes are going to be wrong in ways you can't predict yet, so don't invest in perfection before you know what you're perfecting. So if V1 of your game is notecards with hand-written text, that’s perfect, you’re getting your idea to the table, and that’s exactly what prototyping is for.

Let your theme and player experience guide component choices, not just novelty. We explored components that have been removed from the game for one reason or another, like plastic dog bones to pay for tricks. While they provided a fun, novel tactile element to the game, we ultimately concluded that it didn’t improve the game’s experience, so they had to go. These kinds of decisions couldn’t have been made if we hadn’t just made them and tried them out.

Where the Prototype Journey Goes Next

Now that Rescue is in it’s near-final form, we have moved our process for generating printable sheets away from InDesign and onto Component Studio to make ordering through The Game Crafter easier. They are a small US-based board game manufacturing facility with no minimum order requirements. It was still the same core workflow—spreadsheet drives everything, templates handle the layout—just with better integration for professional printing when we needed it.

We are well outside of the rapid prototyping phase at this point in the game’s life. Dog abilities and scoring are all but finalized, with small adjustments made here and there. For our upcoming playtesting at Unpub in Baltimore, we opted to get decks printed through The Game Crafter. While they won’t be a good fit for mass production (our prototypes for Unpub were approximately $33 for a complete set of cards), it’s hard to describe the feeling of holding the professionally printed cards in your hand.

We are still printing at-home versions of the game to address any ongoing updates for playtesting, and will continue to do so until we’re ready to order the final product. Even after the finished product (hopefully) lands stateside for fulfillment, there will be revisions needed that will have to come in the form of rulebook updates or card pack “patches.”

I’ve kept every version of Rescue that we’ve printed and cut up until this point. Sometimes I enjoy getting lost just looking back through old versions and get nostalgic for how far the game has come.

Garden Club

Welcome to the Garden Club, where fruits, veggies, and flowers flourish into clever combinations. Match, grow, and out-bloom your friends in this lighthearted game of strategy and charm! In Garden Club, players compete to grow the most vibrant and well-balanced garden in the neighborhood. Each tile you place will plant fruits, veggies, and flowers — all carefully arranged to create stunning patterns and score points. On your turn, you’ll select and place a tile into the collective garden, connecting matching icons to form combos and fulfill unique objectives. Then, you'll select one tile as a point multiplier for what's in your garden. The challenge lies in planning your layout — every placement can unlock new scoring opportunities or block a path to a perfect harvest. As your garden grows, you’ll earn points for completing arrangements, surrounding trellises, and meeting your character's preferences.

Grumblestone

Pick one of four Golems, each with asymmetric abilities and an epic neoprene playmat. Collect "grumbles" to upgrade your grid using polyomino pieces. Roll your two dice and assign each to either a vertical column or horizontal row. This triggers all the icons in that column or row, allowing you to collect more grumbles, heal yourself, attack a rival golem, or protect yourself with shields.