Behind the Build

When I was eight years old I designed a video game.

It was a side-scrolling underwater platformer — a Super Mario rip-off in every meaningful sense, except the whole thing took place under the sea. I designed eight levels, one per page, on ruled notebook paper. Each page was its own world: the layout, the obstacles, the pacing of the scroll. I knew exactly how it was supposed to feel to play.

The problem was I couldn't draw. So I did what any sensible eight-year-old designer would do — I outsourced.

My friend Todd drew the characters. He was genuinely talented, and he produced this cast of underwater creatures that were exactly right. I had the systems. Todd had the art. Between us we had something that felt, at least in my eight-year-old estimation, like a real game.

I wrote Nintendo a letter explaining the concept and asking if they would please make it. My mother packaged everything up — the level designs, Todd's drawings, the letter — and actually mailed it. I want to be clear: she mailed it. To Nintendo. In Japan.

I never heard back.

Actually, that's not true. A letter arrived on Nintendo stationery — the logo at the top, the whole thing. It said, in terms an eight-year-old could understand, that they appreciated the submission but could not use outside IP, and that they happened to have something similar already in development. They returned my package. They let me down easy.

Now. My mother is a resourceful woman who loved me very much. I was eight. You can do the math on that however you like. All I can tell you is it was on legitimate-looking Nintendo stationery with the logo at the top, and I believed every word of it. I still do. Mostly.

Game Two

I'm a UX designer by trade. Designing systems, anticipating how people move through them, documenting decisions so they survive contact with reality — that's the job. It turns out those skills transfer directly to board game design, which surprised me less than it probably should have.

Blue Prince (the video game) arrived in 2025 and I put roughly 100 hours into it myself, then watched at least two full expert playthroughs on top of that. At some point during all of that, something clicked.

The way you draft three rooms feels like cards being dealt off a deck. There's a dice roll mechanic built into every door. And the tiles themselves — the specific way each one is designed, the door positions, the room shapes, the border colors — they feel like they belong on a table. Tonda Ros, the video game designer, hints at this throughout. The game plays like a physical game that happens to live inside a computer.

So I decided to find out if that was true. Designing digital expereinces, I was good at. Designing something like a physical game, that's new territory.

Why So Many Documents

Turns out, adapting a video game to a physical format requires translating a lot of things that a computer does invisibly. The computer tracks your steps. It manages the draft pool. It knows which rooms have trunks. It applies item modifiers automatically. None of that is magic — it's just logic — but it all has to become physical procedure when the computer goes away.

Every document in the Board Game Design section of this site exists because something needed to be decided, written down, and cross-referenced against everything else. The Shopping List exists because someone has to actually buy the gem tokens and padlock charms. The Production Guide exists because "print it at home" is a different answer than "send it to a print shop" and both answers have consequences. The Expansion List exists because things had to be deliberately cut from the base game, and cutting them meant writing down "expansion pack" ideas. To quote an old design mentor of mine: "The documentation IS the desgin."

The process is iterative and ongoing. Rules change after playtesting. Components get reconsidered. What felt right on paper fails at the table and gets replaced by something that works. All of that is documented here — not because it's tidy, but because the mess is the work.

Everything behind the build lives in one place:

Board Game Design →