The Hook

Summer 2023

I’ve known Ben Rosset for almost 10 years now, both as the designer of Between 2 Cities, and also as an employee of Panda Game Manufacturing. Ben has subbed in for our main contact at Panda occasionally, and he also approached me in 2016 about exploring a Between 2 Castles of Mad King Ludwig game shortly after Between 2 Cities was published. At the time, I didn’t give it much thought except that it sounded interesting…I do get a lot of people approaching me about various projects related to our IPs. Ben followed up a year later and set up a meeting for Jamey Stegmaier (one of his favorite games just happens to be Castles), Matthew O’Malley and himself at Gen Con to show me the progress they’d made. I was pleasantly surprised with the direction they had taken that, and after discussions with Jamey, it was decided to publish the game through Stonemaier Games. I provided a bit of development input during that process, and was thrilled with the final project. That was a great start to our relationship outside of Panda.

Since then, I was (and still am) enamored with The Search for Planet X, so much so that we ended up doing the reverse kind of a deal with Ben, Matt, and Renegade, where I designed the third game in the series: The Search for UAPs. Ben and Matt had various feedback during that process as well. So when Ben approached me (and Renée Harris, our Program Manager and License Manager) about a new project he was working on that might appeal to us, I was instantly interested. We met over lunch at Gen Con, and Ben’s enthusiasm for what he called a “simultaneous worker-aging game” was infectious.

I was particularly taken with the idea of dual-use resources where they would both be components in games you were building or items that would enhance your factory. On top of that, the scoring of different game types was related to the games themselves: war games would play out 7 Wonders-style against your neighbors, co-op games only scored based on how many other players were building them, set collection games were scored based on groups of those game, and my favorite, Engine-building games, added additional resources, which assisted in engine-building those games!

Ben’s vision was that this game would have about 75 licensed games in it, so that it felt “real” and so that players would have an emotional connection to the games they were building. That was probably the one thing that had me hesitating. While it might seem like a no-brainer for a publisher to want to include their game in this game, the reality isn’t that simple. Renée Harris’s upcoming licensing diary will go into some of those details.

Ben has a lot more details on how the game got to that point in his designer diary. Here’s what the game looked like back then:

The First Playtests

September – November 2023

Ben set up an online play session for us, which was okay, but not phenomenal (but then again, TTS can be a pretty rough experience in general). He provided us with print-n-play files so we could make our own prototype of the game, and I printed it out, cut it, and prepared it for internal playtesting. We played a few internal playtest games with the staff, and again, the reaction was just okay. It was a designer prototype, and my brain was already thinking about some of the things we could do in order to take it from okay to great. But before I did that work, we needed to verify that publishers would be on board, and also that the game theme wasn’t so insidery that it would limit our audience. After talking to publishers that we were close friends with, it seemed like we might get it to work. The next step was playtesting outside of the staff.

Every November, Toni (our CFO and my wife) and I host Post Essen Weekend, where we spend 3 days playing nothing but Essen releases. In fact, that’s pretty much the only rule…if it isn’t on the BGG Essen list, it can’t be played during PEW. Because I’m a gamer, I have found a way around that rule by inviting some of the out of town folks to come a day early, before PEW starts, where we spend the day playtesting new Bezier Games’ upcoming projects. Game Makers was on that schedule in 2023, again, pretty much untouched from Ben’s prototype. Feedback was generally positive, but there were tons of issues that were brought up that needed to be addressed, many of which I was already aware of from our internal playtesting. To publish the game the right way, it was going to take a substantial amount of development time (not to mention the licensing effort).

Meanwhile, Panda (separate from Ben) had approached us to say that they were very interested in being part of the process for publishing this game, and depending on how it turned out, would make it a showcase for all the really cool things that Panda had been engaged in for the last almost 20 years they’ve been in business. Panda had done some really groundbreaking things already for us, like the metal-plastic trains in Maglev Metro and various complex recessed boards for many of our games, so that was encouraging.

We went back and forth on this internally, and finally determined that we wanted to publish the Game Makers. We hammered out the details with Ben and signed a contract with him, and then the actual work began.

Identifying Issues

November 2023

The first thing to be done was addressing some of the issues that we were seeing with playtests up to that point:

Dice: The prototype had 3 different dice (4, 8, and 12 sided), and if they weren’t used to build a game, they were used for marketing, where one die of each type could be placed on a column, and those columns were based on a combination of components and games built. This required a lot of dice, and aside from a little bit of fuzziness on how to place them, it was going to cost a lot to include them. 

Assembly line: It consisted of 2 sets of tiles that would move along a track. When they got to the end, they were added to a discard pile and shuffled and used again. It was a big chunk of busy work to keep the assembly line going, and because the tiles (wedges in the final game) were randomly ordered between the two sets, you’d often get the same tiles very close to each other, resulting in a long wait time until the tile you wanted would be available.

Extra Components: By the end of the game, players had collected a lot of extra components that they didn’t need for making games, which ended up just sitting around taking up space.

Factory Tiles (cardboard resources): These were rectangular, and the area they were placed in was square, limiting your potential discounts.

Factory Upgrades (plastic resources): These had very specific uses to upgrade various aspects of your factory. There were a bunch of them, and each required a specific Plastic piece.

Display Cases: The 3 x 3 grid was a little limiting, even with the ability to add extra “game type tokens” to the bottom of the case.

Scoring: Each game card had unique scoring requirements, such as “4 points if you have Set Collection games in each of the 4 corners). They were often difficult to achieve, and the cognitive load on figuring out where to place game cards was extremely high.

Worker Placement: These spaces were all over the place. Only certain workers could be used for various actions, and they were spread all over the players’ factories.

Trees: Seemed like an afterthought.

Graphic Design: Lots of inconsistencies.

Deep Development

December 2023 – April 2024

It took about 5 months from signing the contract to initially addressing most of these items. I consulted Ben quite a bit during this time, and together we got rid of many of the rough edges. Here’s a look at a self-play I used to test all of these changes initially:

Dice: These were all changed to 6-sided dice, with each set having different values on them. I used extra Favor of the Pharaoh dice that we had as placeholders, though the colors were off a bit. In addition, we changed the marketing to cube tracks that would be advanced by the values rolled on the dice: one for each of the 3 card types (all but Engine building), and one for trees, which had taken a more prominent role. 

Assembly Line: Ben suggested making this a wheel. He was hesitant to do so initially because he just finished up Fromage, which also had a wheel, and didn’t want to make it seem like he was duplicating something he’d just done, but if you’ve played Fromage, you’ll realize that the similarities are few, except for the roundness. Inspired by this change, I created a layered magnetic board that turned, revealing just the resources that could be picked up when you place your player marker on that section. And those player markers? Now they were forklifts, because you are placing them in your warehouse. It seems obvious now. This wheel had 12 spaces, two sets of 6, including a new Wild space, which addressed some of the the issues with being able to pick up various resources at certain times in the game.

Extra Components: Having a Wild space made it not only easier to get the items you wanted, but it also resulted in few components that you didn’t need by the end of the game. But this problem wasn’t solved yet…so we included an option for trading any two items for another item of the same level, but this only worked for components, not items that would enhance your factories.

Factory Tiles: These were now octagons, and each player board had a unique set of items. Those items were activated when you completed the surrounding tiles. The tiles now came in 1, 2, or 3 octagon configurations.

Factory Upgrades: instead of being preprinted on player boards, there were now six spaces for them for each player. 3 of these “structure tiles” were given by default, while the other three could be obtained every time the board rotated completely around. These were powered by the plastic buildings (which were also plastic components for building games).

Display cases: Changed to 3×4, and included 2 worker placement spaces: 1 for rearranging games, and another for gaining a resources of the level based on the worker placed there.

Scoring: The cards were simplified. Now they gave you points by having a game type or component in each row or column, or orthogonally adjacent.

Worker Placement: These were significantly reduced and simplified.

Trees: You could now get Trees from Engine building cards, making them more common (though kind of random, if you drew well or poorly).

Graphic Design: Before we hired a graphic designer, I did an overhaul of the graphics to help with consistency. It was a good start, but far from where we needed to be.

The 2nd round of playtesting

May – October, 2024

In May, playtesting with the updated game started taking place both with internal Bezier Games staff and local gamers. The difference in response from playtesters was enormous. Many of them were really excited about the game, asking how long until it would be ready.

Several notable things happening during this time:

During this round of playtesting, we played a game at Gen Con with Michael Lee, the CEO of Panda, Ben, and Noah Adelman, who runs GameTrayz. Everyone playing had some sort of interest in how the game was going to turn out, so the feedback was quite different than from playtesters, but just as useful.

Ben also took the game to Stonemaier Design Day and received a lot of great feedback.

Most/fewest goals tried and rejected: A set of goals for all players to compete for was added, but it was determined that this introduced too much to this about while playing, and most players ignored them, so they were removed.

Resources placed around the warehouse: Placing the resources associated with the wedge in the warehouse both looked kind of cool and also reinforced the location of that resource in the warehouse. Trays were added shortly thereafter.

Recession: Player board factories were now recessed for marketing tracks, contracts, factory tiles, and structures, keeping them in place and making it more obvious where components/markers were.

Fully Embracing the Forklift/Warehouse design: We added a Brody knob to the steering wheel on top of the ware house, making it feel like a real forklift steering wheel. This was so consequential that I recorded a video of it to send to Panda to make sure they could do it and understand how it worked.

Forklift increase from 2 to 3: This addressed a common issue during playtesting which was that sometimes players would just wait around on some turns because they had no forklifts to move. I also got to work designing the forklifts in 3D and printed a full set of them. The toy factor in the game is incredible!

Wedges reduced from 12 to 6: This made the wedges bigger allowing for all of the forklifts (up to 18 on a single wedge in a 6 player game), and also made it impossible for there to be huge gaps between obtaining certain kinds of resources.

Structures reduced from 6 to 3: These are now handed out at the start of the game (or drafted, based on how experienced the players are).

The final development push & Graphic Design

October 2024 – March 2025

Before we could hire a graphic designer (which was desperately needed), we had to finalize a bunch of things. During this time we iterated, playtested, and iterated some more, then we hired a graphic designer to help us with iconography and overall feel of the components.

Tree Spaces and trees: Spaces were created for placing trees along the upper right and right edges of the player board factories. We created a bunch of 3D printed trees and placed them in a tray outside the wild wedge of the Warehouse.

Full Size cards: We had all of these great games, but the box shown on the cards was pretty small, because it was only in about 3/5s of the card, and the cards we were using were mini cards. This was a tough call, because it increased the size of everything else, which makes The Game Makers take up extra space on the table. But I hate mini cards, and players really seemed to appreciate the larger size for the cards.

Individual Tweenies: Instead of preprinted tweenies, they were now physical objects that were placed between factory tiles as needed.

Dice Tweaks: The dice were recolored and the pips on each size changed. Smalls are now 1 1 2 2 3 4. Mediums are 2 3 3 4 4 5. Larges are 3 4 5 5 6 6.

Plastic Building design: We had a 3D artist design our buildings for us so the graphic designer would be able to create icons for them.

Grouped icons on factory tiles: To make it easier to get discounts for placing tiles on your assembly line, the icons are now grouped together (2 of the same on double tiles, and 2 and 1 on triple tiles).

Graphic design change: Player boards are now darker with player color highlights, and icons are more consistent throughout.

At this time, we had an issue regarding the octagon-shaped cardboard tiles that we were kind of ignoring/in denial of: each level needed a separate draw pile from the discard pile (otherwise the discards would pile up on top of the drawn tiles, making the unwanted tiles on top). We addressed that later, but here you can see the temporary fix of just making a general discard pile for them outside of the tray (to the left of the warehouse trays).

Structure tiles split into 3 distinct sets: A tiles are end game scoring. B tiles use Workers to activate them. C tiles give you something for free when you gain something else.

Adjustments to the Marketing Columns: The Marketing Columns were adjusted to slightly different heights, increasing to 5x for some of them.

45˚ angles for the player board tops: Because the game takes up a lot of space, we changed the top angles of the player boards to 45˚, which allowed them to be placed closer to the warehouse on rectangular tables, and closer to each other on circular tables.

Artwork and additional Balance Tweaks

April 2025 – present

We found a graphic designer and artist, and The Game Makers started to really look like an actual game. Adding art to the player boards made them come alive (lots of fun Easter eggs were also placed there).

Player Piece Storage: A super-thematic addition was to add double shipping containers for player piece storage. These containers have a sliding plastic top, and hold player marketing tiles, forklifts, Tweenies, and marketing cubes.

Cloth Bags for tiles: We also added cloth bags to the cardboard tiles, to allow for separate drawing supplies (the bags) and discard piles (the trays). The Level 3 tiles also had become double-sided during development, so this provided a way they could be stored and drawn without players seeing what they were, and made it much easier to draw Level 1 and Level 2 tiles.

Balancing for cards: The final step was to go through each of the 300+ cards and make sure there weren’t any weird balance issues. This process continues even now to ensure there aren’t any unintentional outliers.

Rules updates: The rules were completely revamped thanks to our in-house graphic designer and now look amazing, matching the rest of the game.

The Game Makers on BGA: Finally, we’ve been busy implementing The Game Makers on Board Game Arena. It’s currently in alpha, and we hope to have it available for people to try out when the Kickstarter launches in September.

We’ve continued to iterate with small changes to the game in the last six months, but the major changes are behind us. There are a few balance issues with some of the cards, but we’re continuing to tweak them as we run across them. Overall, it’s been a hugely challenging but incredibly rewarding process to work on The Game Makers, and I can’t wait for people to be able to purchase and play it!

You can sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live in September by clicking here.