Every year since 2022, we've built a new tabletop game for our nieces and nephews at Christmas. Like everyone, we started without any experience or knowledge of the process. Over the years, we developed our own process and the game experience improved each time.

Here's what that process actually looks like, using our 2025 game, Snow Jumpers, as the example.

1. Brainstorm the vibe and the goal

Before any rules exist, we ask three questions: 

• what kind of game is this, 
• what's the energy supposed to feel like, 
• and what's the one thing a player is trying to do? 

For Snow Jumpers, the idea came together the day after Christmas the year before, right after wrapping up a massive RPG-style game. We wanted a high energy game with short rounds, more like a brawl or a race, and the players would try to dominate the centre and accumulate points.

2. Sketch it on a whiteboard

For our second game, we came up with the idea to put down a foamcore white board from the Dollar store flat on the table to brainstorm ideas and layouts. 

For Snow Jumpers, that meant drawing a circular board with paths leading from home bases to a center zone, with the goal of getting tokens to the middle and keeping them there. We could not design a final board without knowing how many tiles in the path or at the center, how many game tokens, and how the energy felt while playing.

Using a white board allowed us to easily adjust the board design by quickly erasing and drawing different configurations.

3. Mock it up with scrap cards

When our games involve cards or other similar items (like point trackers, tokens or tiles), before touching real components, we make placeholder cards out of plain dry-erase cards or just cut-up pieces of scrap paper. Cheap, fast, and disposable, so changing the rules costs nothing.

Since we started doing that more seriously, we got ourselves a set of dry-erase cards we can now reuse for creating our games. It gives the playtest a closer feel to using the real cards.

4. Playtest, repeat, and cut what slows it down

Our first version had eight winding paths and four players per team, and it was nearly unplayable, it took forever for even one player to reach the center. So we erased it and started over with four tiles instead of eight, fewer defensive cards, more forward momentum. Even then,  it was still too slow. So we cut again, dropping to three players per team and removing a center spot. That third version finally worked, the game became fun to play.

The lesson: if a game isn't working, the fix is rarely a patch. It's almost always "cut more than you think you need to." For our second game, we had five lands, and we edited one out entirely. For our third game, we cut all the side missions and we removed two full worlds and replaced them with one giant medieval castle. If we were to revisit them today, we would cut even more out. 

When you test your game, remember the objectives you set during your original brainstorm. Does it have the vibe, energy and beats you were hoping for? Is it aligned with the type of game you were planning to make? Are the players spending time doing what they are supposed to be doing?

5. Build a rough mockup and add the bells and whistles

We like to build interactive games mixed with a digital experience. Once the core game is genuinely fun on paper, only then we add all the fun extra stuff. For Snow Jumpers, that meant RFID sensors and a Raspberry Pi controller to automatically track which team held the center longest.

Doing that is a lot of work and requires a lot of planning, so before we assemble the final board and final assets, we create a foam and cardboard mockup using scrap pieces. This way, we can test the gameplay experience with the digital components and electronics to do some final adjustments before using the expensive materials or going to professional printing production.

If the base game is not fun played on a piece or paper or a piece of cardboard, it’s not the lights, electronics, or sounds that will save it. Adding complexity to a game that isn't fun yet won’t hide the problem.

6. Playtest with people who aren't you

Once we have a working physical mockup, we test the game with other players who’ve never seen it or played it. Watching people who didn't design the game try to learn it in real time told us things our own playtesting never could. When you design your own game, things might make sense to you, or stuff that is simple to you might be really complicated in reality.

7. Build the final game and test again

Only once the game had survived outside testing did we move to final materials: the real board, the final minis, final card art, final assembly. Even at this stage we kept testing, because a board that works in foam and cardboard doesn't always behave the same once it's solid and permanent. You might craft your board with foam, 3D print it, or send it to print to a professional facility. Even at that time, you might get surprises.

Sometimes, the creases on a folding board can be in an inconvenient place, the provided tokens might be too light or small and 3D printed minis might be too fragile for the gameplay style. You might need to redo or adjust final assets as well. Make sure to allow time to test these and plan potential redos.

The point of all of it

We mainly build these games for one big surprise night a year for our family. By the time the kids sit down to play, all the planning, testing, soldering, and redone assets disappear in our minds. What's left is just whether they're having fun. That's the only metric that's ever actually mattered, from the first whiteboard sketch to the last round on Christmas Day.

You can watch the whole Snow Jumpers making of here!