I’ve always been drawn to collaborative games with asymmetrical information. I like designs with few rules, high replayability, and systems that rely on player perception from different points of view. Cards often fit this approach well, especially when paired with a simple yet rich communication system.
One day, I started thinking about a different way to mark clues—something that could be fully integrated into the system, without adding extra components or rules overhead. What could work through a simple, intuitive gesture we all know? Clipping. The act of taking a clothespin and adding it to a card was instant love. That is were the journey of Clips started.
The Base Flow The core idea of the game was quite clear: a collaborative card game where players could not see their own cards, could give and receive hints from the other players using the clothespins, and must play a card on each turn.
Clipping immediately showed several key advantages. It allows players to add and remove information quickly. Clothespins can be read from both sides, as they are usually symmetrical, and they carry only a limited amount of information. Each one can be slightly different from the others, while still remaining simple. Their number is also naturally limited, creating a shared pool.
From a design perspective, this opened up new possibilities. Each clothespin could convey only partial information about a card. The pool could be shared, forcing players to manage it collectively. And some actions could generate information simply because a player chose that move over another. The clipping gesture could be not only a gimmick, but shape the game itself.
Information The first question was what kind of information the cards should provide. I wanted the information to stay simple. In this kind of system, complexity doesn’t come from the elements themselves, but from how they are combined and interpreted. Colors, symbols, and numbers are usually the most direct way to achieve this.
However, I was looking for something slightly different. I wanted something that could naturally interact with the idea of clipping, and that would allow players to give and receive hints easily, but without being certain about their cards. I wanted to keep the tension when a player plays a card, until they are able to see if the move is good or not. The first solution I explored was bicolor cards.
With bicolor cards, the information could remain deliberately fuzzy. Even if you know that a card is red, you don’t know whether it is red/yellow, red/blue, or red/green. Players can narrow down possibilities without ever fully collapsing them into certainty. Numbers, on the other hand, were useful to keep the gameplay working and to create different goals, such as same color pairs, or same numbers. Simple yet efficient ideas on which to build a feeling of progress.
The Theme and the First Reactions The first idea for the theme came quite naturally. Vertical cards on which you clip colored clothespins = tissues. What else? It matched well, it was intuitive. Tissues can represent many things, and this was something we spent time exploring together with the publisher.
But it was clear the game was about the “Clips”, not the cards. We started testing the game everywhere we went: bars, pubs, sometimes even at the beach. Something unexpected started to happen. People would stop, watch us play, hesitate for a long time and then finally come over to ask what we were doing. They couldn’t resist any longer. In Italy, playing cards in bars is extremely common, especially traditional card games. But no one had ever seen colored clothespins clipped onto cards. The game was visually distinctive, tactile, and inviting. Those moments were just great.
The Quest For Elegance At that point, the game started to work, but the material still felt like too much. I began questioning what could be removed and what the core experience really was. Was having two separate categories of information actually necessary?
We applied the Six Thinking Hats many times.
Colors turned out to be the key element of the game: the color of the tissues, and the color of the clips. But how could numbers be expressed using only colors?
I forced myself to remove the numbers and try a different approach: one clip for one, two clips for two, and so on. The theme helped justify this naturally. If a tissue is small, one pin is enough. If it’s larger, you need more pins to keep it safe from the wind. And I could add an interesting twist. If a card has three pins on it, it clearly cannot be a one or a two, but it could still be a three, four, or five. This way, information remains partial and deliberately fuzzy.
Presenting Clips to Piatnik The first presentation to Piatnik was a key moment. Florian and I always had a very good connection on game styles, since the publishing of 80 Days. The potential of the game was immediately clear.
The gesture of clipping did most of the work. The discussion quickly moved away from rules and focused instead on player experience: what it feels like to place a clip, when you hesitate to move one, and how much information you are willing to commit in front of the group.
It took only a few weeks for the publisher to decide: even if producing clothespins is quite unusual to a board game publisher, they accepted the challenge.
Building the Levels Building the different levels of the game became a key part of development, and it was something I worked on closely with the publisher. The challenge was finding the right balance between making the game immediately accessible, for demos and first plays, while keeping it intriguing for players who would come back to it multiple times.
After well over a thousand games with my most dedicated playtesters, Stefania and Marco, I had a very clear understanding of the harder levels and of what keeps the game interesting even after repeated plays. We had some “special levels” that we loved to try and defeat.
But that also came with a risk: losing touch with the experience of someone discovering the game for the first time. This is where the publisher’s contribution became crucial. Bringing a fresh perspective, and a strong sense of how games are taught, shown, and sold, helped rebalance the progression. Together, we reviewed the structure of the levels, adjusted their pacing, and reconsidered elements such as the optimal number of cards in the deck for printing reasons.
In the end, we arrived at a more gradual and readable progression. Those phases of tuning and revision are exactly where having the publisher fully involved makes the difference.
Discussing the Theme The theme remained a recurring topic throughout development. Tissues could represent many things, and that flexibility was both a strength and a question mark. We discussed how much the theme should guide interpretation, and how much should be left abstract.
Several alternatives were explored and tested:
Morocolors - the first theme, where players are dyers in Morocco trying to deliver the best tissues to special customers from all around the world. Exotic, but straight to the point.
Gnomes stealing socks - cards represented socks, while clips marked which one to steal for the gnomes village hidden in the walls of the house. The idea played with disappearance, and fit naturally with color-based clues. Plus colored socks are visually appealing.
Naughty sheep falling into color cans - sheep fell into different colored paint, and they needed to get dried on the right thread. Funny, but could have been read as not animal friendly.
Actors having to change in the dark backstage - cards represented clothes, and clips tracked fast costume changes. All happening in the dark backstage.
Tuscan flag throwers - cards showed flags, and clips marked suggestions on which flag to throw next during performances. An Italian, culturally-grounded setting.
In the end, we decided to keep the theme simple and direct: tissues. They are immediately readable, physically coherent with the gesture of clipping, and flexible enough to support the system without explaining it. For the same reason, the title became obvious. Clips describes both the main component and the central action at the table.
Conclusion Looking back, the project stayed remarkably close to its initial question. How little is needed to create a meaningful asymmetrical information game that can scale from family to expert? In Clips, the answer is a gesture full of colorful unique tokens. A small physical action allows players to create their communication system and improve game after game.
Now it’s time to put the game on the table and see how players feel about it.
7 Wonders, first published in 2010, has now become a juggernaut of a franchise. The series has multiple expansions and spin offs. Some of the spin offs have different core mechanisms. They are different games, but they use the same theme and art style. The 2 player version of 7 Wonders has now been turned into a Lord of the Rings game. For the dice game version to get released only in
In December 2017 I was asking myself a couple of times a day whether Newton was ready, and I could not come up with a convincing answer; but since no game is ever truly ready, the very fact that I kept asking the question meant it was ready enough. I had worked on it so much, and with such stubbornness, that I was genuinely tired of board games, of players, and of myself. I therefore decided to take a few months off and focus on my main job, which in the meantime was falling apart.
Then in January 2018, Newton did what it was not supposed to do. Barely three weeks after my noble resolution, a leisure visit to one of the many castles built by Frederick II in southern Italy sparked a renewed curiosity about this figure I had already heard so much about. I read a few things from my father’s library and understood that I could not avoid starting to design a new game about the most astonishing character of that period.
So, on a feverish night, while snowflakes were falling on the heights of the Sila, I locked myself in my studio-laboratory and created the first version of a game that would stay with me for a long time: Stupor Mundi, which at the time was more simply called Frederick II.
The first version of the game was completely different from the current one; in the next image you can see the very first iteration, printed and tested.
At the beginning there was no central board, only a display to draft various types of cards and a personal board to activate them. The interesting part was that each player owned two castles, one on the left and one on the right, and allies determined how to score points in that specific castle against the castle of the adjacent player on the same side.
The idea was genuinely good, but several problems emerged. Deciding the seating order in a four-player game was the least of them. The real issue was tracking power relationships dynamically and giving players the ability to react, turn after turn, to limit losses, mitigating the despair of those who saw points being torn away relentlessly, sinking into the feeling of playing a wargame disguised as a euro.
The game was interesting, but it was not what I wanted to achieve. I had a specific type of player in mind, and that direction did not work.
Some elements, however, were already clearly defined and I would never change them; they were the pillars of the game.
1. The card system - Face down or face up? Pure emotion, hard choices, the feeling of being clever because you give something up for something bigger; pain and pleasure. This is how euros are made. Nothing is given away; every time you lose something to gain something else, perhaps better.
2. The concept of allies - Those little rascals were mini-games on a single tile, worlds within the world. If the game was a large and complex stellar system, those entities were planets, each with its own scoring cycles to be fitted into the larger design.
I kept working, with difficulty. I was short on testers and at the time I lived in Calabria. Finding suitable people for a game like this required hours of travel, which I could only afford every two or three months. In any case, I was determined to finish the job. I made many sacrifices, and by Essen SPIEL 2018 I had a new version to show to a few publishers.
The new version introduced the central castle. If I could not have players confront each other directly, I could do it indirectly. Thus the castle of Frederick II was born, the shadow fief that ties together the plots of every other fief. The castle, in truth, is not a castle. If you think it represents a pile of stone, wood, and lime, you lack imagination, and that is a problem if this is your main hobby. In the Middle Ages, castles were useful defensive structures, but they were also symbols; the symbolic value of the castle points to the concept of dominion over land. Building and dismantling the castle of Frederick II means acting within a network of pacts and agreements, those made with the little rascals: the allies.
In this version the castle had eight sides; it was all about dense construction. More than half of the actions were directed toward building, but the numbers never worked out, the game went on forever, and something was missing. Something I had already wanted to include in Newton but had failed to achieve: passive powers.
If construction dominated everything, there was no room for anything else that was complex and cerebral. For years I had wanted to design a game in which passive powers were central; yes, exactly those powers that we players forget to use, only to complain later and accuse the designer of our own negligence.
I therefore decided to change the numbers. After returning from Essen SPIEL, carrying with me a certain excitement sparked by the interesting comments of various publishers, I got back to work. I was truly enthusiastic and produced two more iterations in quick succession, but something still did not add up. Where could I place passive powers and give them a different meaning? I did not want to give up; I wanted to bring that aspect to light.
At the beginning of 2019 however, a novelty arrived swiftly, like a brigantine pushed by the most favorable winds. I had spoken with Simone Luciani; we were both satisfied with Newton and decided to start working on a new game with a scientific theme. After several conversations it became clear that Darwin would be the next project, and that I would handle the first phase of development. I therefore had to set Frederick II aside.
In September 2019, I returned to work on Frederick II. Some time had passed and I needed a strategy to restart. Destroying everything seemed the most intelligent thing to do. I deliberately deleted all files, spreadsheets, and destroyed the prototypes by burning them in the fireplace while cooking lentils in a clay pot. I bought a bottle of Irish whiskey, got drunk alone, slept for two days, and then started working on the game again.
The next image shows the step taken in January 2020. What was new? The mini-tracks with passive powers. What was different compared to all the other games with this element that I had played? Timing. The passive power was not something you kept for the entire game; it was a temporal opportunity. You had it for a limited time. Which time? You decided. You were the one saying, "This part of my life went this way. I change everything. I put myself back into play. I take a step forward." And once again that real, authentic concept returned: in life you win and you lose. Sometimes you have to let go (at the end, you lose everything and die).
Right around that time I decided to leave my main job and devote myself entirely to game design. Just like the workers in my game, who leave a space, lose a power, but immediately gain a new one - another "skill", as English speakers would say. This gave a new meaning to my existence. I lost something; I gained something else. It was not necessarily an absolute improvement; it was a step to be taken with the right timing. It was only a potential improvement, perhaps even a short-term worsening, but a move toward a major improvement in the near future - a tango danced with time and power relations. The greatest satisfaction comes when something you create speaks not only about the game, but about your life.
Does the game seem devoid of theme to you? Do you not feel the theme? I can assure you that, for me, this is not the case. I am sorry when this happens and I fully understand when players feel lost because they do not grasp the connections between things. I always try to create points of contact between reality and the game, but 1) it is not always easy, and 2) it is not my priority. A creative does not necessarily have to be a servant to other people’s needs for existential representation. In general, being someone’s servant because they have money to give you is not the most edifying goal a creative should aspire to.
At that point the game was very close to what you see today; the final step was creating a system to manage the displays with all the various elements: cards, the goods market, and the allies market. I therefore designed the board with five zones and the movement mechanism. It felt like a natural solution, something that emerged on its own.
By then the game was mature, and I found a publisher, Quined Games, who helped me greatly with their comments and experience.
The game then went through further slowdowns due to a series of problems: COVID and other personal matters. Then one day I was put in contact with the person who would become the illustrator of the game, Maciej Janik, a phenomenal artist. We talked about atmosphere, imagery, castles, and about what interested me from my point of view regarding allies - about a universalistic game in which allies spoke about a very important aspect of political life and of that historical period. The absurdity of the Crusades and the way Frederick II had addressed the problem. If on one side the game spoke about power relations and the ability to face sacrifices in order to obtain greater things, on the other it spoke about concord. A game about the Middle Ages without bloodshed, without hatred between religions or races, but only intrigues, machinations, and growth within the framework of diplomacy.
Some people believe that one medieval king is the same as another, that an emperor is nothing more than a meme, a warrior with a crown who fights like a ninja, killing armored opponents with sword blows. If you strike someone in armor with a sword you will not stop them, even if you are the protagonist of a movie, but Hollywood directors do not seem to know this. Frederick II was not just any character; he is not a boring generic icon printed on the sign of a medieval pub. Frederick II was one of the most fascinating figures in European history, but a game is not required to explain this to you.
In any case, one day this arrived at my home: the first advanced prototype of the game. I almost cried with emotion.
The rest concerns the work of bringing the game to BGA, the balancing process, the sleepless nights, creative insecurity, and the Gamefound campaign... but that is another story.
Can you fit each item on the barbecue without dropping anything into the coals? This tiny dexterity game challenges your steady hand as you try to cram the grill with meats without causing a backyard disaster.
My journey to becoming a backer of the “Almighty” Kickstarter campaign began with an intriguing Space-Biff review, followed by a note to myself to write about the thematically whimsical-yet-informative project page, and finally a surprise message from creator Malachi Ray Rempen. I had a few questions for Mal that he graciously answered for today’s post.
1. I really like that the first image on the project page leads with the words, “Why we made Almighty” (with the reason focused on potential players: That they would “make a great god” and if they like a short list including ancient mythology, emergent narratives, and asymmetric area control). Can you talk a little about the decision to “lead with why” as the first image on the page?
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that this comes directly from Simon Sinek’s “Start with why” TED talk from back in the day. On my very first Kickstarter, Itchy Feet, I decided to take his advice literally; rather than start the campaign with the product or even the theme, the very valuable real estate at the top of the page is taken up almost entirely with a statement to answer “why” and a bit of art.
That campaign did WAY better than I ever dreamed, so in a way the why statement has become a good luck charm for me, and now I always do it. I can’t be sure that starting with why is what led to that campaign’s success, but I’m not about to test that by breaking with tradition now!
It is also a great way for me to focus the marketing message. If I can answer “why” in a single, bold, appealing statement, it’s like the center of gravity around which the rest of my messaging can turn. Without it, the marketing risks just becoming another flavor of “buy this thing now.”
[JAMEY] I really like the idea of starting with why in the messaging–it’s something I need to remember more often.
2. The game looks like Root and Oath had a baby…and you got a quote from the designer of those games, Cole Wehrle! How did you pull that off?
I credit Root with making it possible for serious strategy games to present as fun and cartoony, and for that I owe it a huge debt. With the exception of Itchy Feet, all my games are mechanically more serious than they first look, and thanks to Root nobody thinks twice about that. I took a lot of inspiration from Oath, both visually and mechanically, as it’s a highly strategic game that also revolves tightly around a shared central tableau.
Almighty is lighter than either of those games, but I do consider myself something of a student of Cole’s art direction and what you might call his sense of unified aesthetic, or how every single aspect of a board game contributes to its experience…even the parts that only exist in your mind!
As for the quote, that’s from a Bluesky post that he put up totally unprompted by me, it was a complete surprise! He’s the best though, he’s a model exception to the rule that you should never meet your heroes.
[JAMEY] I’ll add that I think it’s incredible that you are a designer, developer, publisher, and artist!
3. I must admit that when a game highlights that it can be played both competitively and cooperatively, it makes me wonder which is the “correct” or “best” way to play. In other words, to me it’s more of a marketing detriment than an asset. Of course, that’s a highly subjective take. Was Almighty designed from the beginning as either a competitive or cooperative game? What’s your instinct when you (as someone who plays games) sees a game advertised with multiple modes of play?
Almighty was built initially as a competitive game. There is certainly wisdom in the idea that a game should only present its best foot forward and not dabble in different modes of play, for the sake of clarity and elegance, and I am sympathetic to that view.
But for me personally, as a publisher of a kind of games that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, it’s a question of accessibility. I know there are people who prefer or only play solo or cooperatively, and if there is a chance that I can offer those people a way to play with the worlds, stories, art, components and puzzles in my games, then I want to try to do that for them. I also enjoy the design challenge, and looking at the amazing work by solo designers like Ricky Royal it’s getting harder and harder these days to argue that it’s not possible.
As for my own personal instinct, I don’t mind if a game has multiple modes of play, as long as they preserve what makes that game unique and interesting.
[JAMEY] I love the focus on accessibility, though I can see it working the other way too–if a game isn’t super clear about its intentions (should I play this competitively or cooperatively), that can impede accessibility. I’ve also seen rulebooks where the competitive and cooperative rules intermingle in a way that can be confusing. That said, I view solo play as a necessity; even though it’s technically a different mode, you’re still experiencing the core gameplay.
4. You have a really unique and fun take on stretch goals in the “God of Upgrades”. It’s much less rigid and far more thematic than most stretch goal systems I’ve seen, and I like the inclusion of “Backers that show kindness and support for one another” on the like list and both “Speaking to the creators of this game as though THEY were deities (we are but humble mortal vessels)” and “Backers that are rude and/or combative with each other” on the dislike list. How has the response been to this approach so far?
The result of this pretty last-minute idea is that I now have the funniest and most delightful comments section of any Kickstarter campaign I’ve ever seen. It’s full of jokes, board game themed psalms, comical appeals for forgiveness, and one person even posted a photo on BGG of their cats having “built a temple” to this “god of board game upgrades” that I created for the campaign.
It’s also practical, as it lets me gauge what backers actually want upgraded or added, which is a big downside to a traditional stretch goal system. It’s interactive, it’s thematic, it’s fun, it promotes good vibes, and maybe most importantly of all, it’s optional! So everyone who has been taking part has been making it that much more fun for everyone else. I’m delighted by the response so far.
[JAMEY] I hadn’t thought of the flexibility this method gives you to serve backers base on what they really want. You’ve basically provided the perfect method for them to express their highest hopes for the game, and you accomplish this by setting a fun (not demanding) tone for the backers.
5. Is there anything else you want to highlight in regards to the fun vibe exuded by the project page?
I’m glad you think there are fun vibes, that’s certainly the goal! It’s my belief that crowdfunding campaigns have a magic circle, too, not unlike the one we’re familiar with around the tabletop; for a limited window of time, you and other like-minded people gather together and participate in the creation of something that did not exist before and cannot exist without you. That is a wonderful, rare thing in this day and age, and worth protecting. I am a little saddened when I see campaigns that are not much more than a dolled up preorder system. To me it’s more like I’m lighting a bonfire, inviting you to join, and after our festivities you’ll get to take a burning log back home with you to light your own hearth. I dunno, maybe that’s a totally overwrought metaphor, but it’s how I feel!
[JAMEY] Thank you so much, Mal, and I’m excited to play Almighty around this time next year. If you (dear reader) have any thoughts on this conversation, feel free to share in the comments!
Take A Number is an advanced version of the classic game from
Wolfgang Kramer, Take 5, also known as 6 Nimmt and
Category 5. My copy is a gift from Allen, and it is a 2-in-1 version
containing Take 5 too. It is recommended that you play
Take 5 before Take A Number, which makes sense, because the
game mechanism in Take 5 is a subset of
Take A Number.
7 Feb 2026. We had a playtesting session at Nasi Kandar Apollo on a Saturday afternoon. I didn't manage to take photos of every game played, not even every game that I played. I did a rough playtest of one idea I came up with just the day before. I wanted to make a simple card game that can be played on a road trip, needing no table. Everyone has a stack of 5 cards. They are ordered. The highest
Remember the Reach with your Halo: Flashpoint rules & reference!
As mentioned in yesterday’s video, I’ve updated my Halo: Flashpoint rules & reference to encompass the two new expansions, Rise of the Banished and Feet First Into Hell! But if you were quick and immediately downloaded it, check again, because I discovered a keyword was missing and have updated it again to v2.1. Enjoy!
Nobody asks to be a hero, it just sometimes turns out that way.
Peter unboxes two new expansions for Halo: Flashpoint by Mantic Games!
It’s great to see more stuff coming out for Mantic’s Halo: Flashpoint game, and I’m especially happy to see more aliens on the battlefield. Check out the new stuff – Rise of the Banished and Feet First Into Hell!
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Anmelden
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