This blog is where game designer Amanda Vallerand records her thoughts about designing and self-publishing board games, and the lessons she has learned along the way.
Subsurface’s New Game!
After wrapping up the fulfillment of With a Smile & a Gun in 2021, I had to take a little bit of time off for myself. The business side of game publishing (and also the whole pandemic thing) had burnt out much of my creative juices, and it took a while to get them back.…
Dynamic Markets… in reverse! (SISIGIP #2)
Every now and again, I manage to play games, sometimes even play new ones, sometimes even good ones! And when I do, there’s often one mechanism that just sticks with me, a mechanism that I think about in the shower, in the car, in front of the fridge… This is what the SISIGIP series is…
Reviewing “Go-to Questions to Ask Playtesters”
A few years ago, I wrote this post about my go-to questions to ask playtesters. The last one was this: What do you think should happen? This is more of a question during games, but it still is one of my favorite tools: if players run into a corner case and ask “so what happens…
Subsurface Games 