by Martin van Rossum

“Cat Saga is a cooperative, story-driven adventure game. Explore the world together and make decisions that impact your unique saga.”

In this Designer Diary, I will take you on the journey of creating Cat Saga. We have worked on this game for over four years and are very proud of the result. Hopefully, the design lessons will help other aspiring designers bring their games to life.

How the Game Works
Before we dive into the journey of creating Cat Saga, let’s briefly talk about how the game plays. As a team, you will make decisions that impact the story, engage in combat, and use your abilities to overcome danger. You will create a wonderful saga together attempt epic actions, get into fights, find valuable items, and level up.

There are no turns; players simply move through the story together, with different paths leading to different endings. To overcome obstacles, players must complete a Try or Fight, using dice, abilities, and items to achieve a good result.

The Vision (4 Years Ago)
I have always wanted to create a story-driven game. As a young kid, my dream was to become a writer first and a game designer second. It felt great to combine the two crafts. The idea started when I realized I couldn’t find a good story-driven game or RPG that my wife and son would enjoy.

We began working on different concepts for a game that mixed TTRPG and board game mechanics. Quickly, we struck a balance of complexity that we enjoyed and started the in-depth development. A key goal was to make a game that would also play well solo and allow the “forever DM” to experience a campaign as one of the players. So there is no DM in this game, but we still wanted an exciting story with different paths to explore.

From the start, I wanted a game that plays quickly (under one hour) and carries your progress over to the next chapter. We began by designing something as rules-light as possible while still capturing the feeling of a fantasy adventure game.

It really helps to define your vision and target audience up front. For example, it made sense to keep combat simple and limited, given the targets I had set and the family-friendly nature I wanted to achieve. There are plenty of games with a heavy focus on combat; there was no need for this game to try to be everything for everyone.

Setting
We decided to make a family friendly light-hearted game. And we wanted a twist on the classic fantasy tropes. As a family we were discussing at the time to bring a cat into our home. That is when the theme was decided. Cats are cute and loved by many. This was before we called games "cozy" but looking back, this was a decision to make the game look the way it plays: simple, accesible and friendly.

Early Prototyping
It was clear that this was going to be a very accessible game, so we decided to only use paper, pencils, and dice. Since dice are the randomizer, it was important to decide how they would be used. In one early prototype, we used classic RPG dice: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, etc. But to differentiate from well-known games and keep the system accessible, we decided to use only the familiar d6.

Adding the numbers on the dice to reach a certain threshold felt familiar, but it did not offer enough options to mitigate the dice. After some testing, we landed on a system where each number is represented by a trait. This means that rolling a 6 is not always good, it might be great for a Strength Try, but useless for another type of challenge.

For players, this allowed us to add options like flipping a die, adding or subtracting one, and, of course, re-rolling. Testing showed that re-rolling abilities were far more fun. They added a push-your-luck element to the game. Will you use that potion now, or save it for later? When you don’t know the exact outcome, the decision becomes much more interesting.

Development & Artwork (2 Years Ago)
The game was in a good state, and we decided to commit to creating artwork. In the meantime, we focused on intensive online testing. Shortly after the art was completed, Lucky joined our family as a cute little kitten.

"When we took these photos two years ago, the game was 90% finished. We have now finished the other 90%, and after the campaign we will complete the final 90%."

Looking back, I remember thinking the game was almost done and that it was time to create the artwork and start more blind testing. But during that phase, an enormous amount of work was still ahead of us. And I know that even after the Kickstarter campaign there will still be plenty left to do.

At this stage we hired an editor. I am not a native English speaker and wrote most of the stories myself, so it was important to have them reviewed and improved. The artwork also grew beyond our initial scope, and we eventually hired several artists to create all the pieces for the game. And we moved into heavy blind-testing. Besides regular playtesting sessions where people played at the same time, we also did a lot of “play-by-post.” We used RoleGate and attracted many blind playtesters from the RPG side of the hobby. Since there are no turns in the game, it flows very well online players don’t all need to be active at the same time.

Now (2026)
Lucky is more than two years old and no longer a small kitten. As much as she matured, so did the game. And now it is finally time to share it with the world!

Lessons
- Create something YOU are missing in the market. A game you would love to play. Ultimately a lot of hours will go into a design, make sure you will enjoy it.
- Start with a clear vision for your game. Whenever you are unsure on which decision to make, going back to the vision and target audience will help you decide. Stating this up front is not a marketing method, it makes sure you end up with a game that hits the targets you set out to achieve.
- Tap into other communities. RoleGate was a great way of testing for this game. Perhaps the gameplay or theme can help you find new groups of playtesters.
- Games are never finished, but at one point they are printed. Yes be a perfectionist, but also work towards completing a project.

Cities (2024, Devir) was a very late cut from my list of the top 10 games of 2024. I loved Cities, but competition was fierce that year. Cities was my second-favorite “long filler” of 2024, just after Tower Up, another city builder, and a game that was such an elegant and easy teach for gamers of all shades. (This is another reason why I think 2024 will eventually go down as one of the best years in tabletop…it was such a deep year for new releases.)

Had Cities hit the market in 2025, it would have been one of the top three or four games I played. But, that’s the difference, isn’t it? With thousands of games hitting every year, it’s a crapshoot trying to figure out the best time for a game to hit the market.

A box showed up on my doorstep recently…and when I opened it up, I was overjoyed to see that one of my most anticipated games of 2026 was inside. Cities USA is a standalone expansion to the Cities system, with 90% of the rules from the base game and a host of new city boards modeling major US city tourist destinations.

As a man who is pre-sold on the Cities system, I’ll save you some time: Cities USA is…

The post Cities USA Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

On August 7, 1539 the last resistance of the Spanish garrison of the Albanian village of Castelnuovo (Novi for the Turks) ceased. After 22 days of open trench and more than a month of combats, skirmishes, assaults and bombardments, the last Spanish defenders fulfilled the destiny they promised themselves when they rejected the offers of surrender that, according to the rules of war, Jareidin Barbarossa, admiral of the Ottoman fleet and general in chief of the operation, had made to them. The city and its fortifications, rather meager and outdated, had been taken by the forces of the Holy League in October 1538, so as not to close the campaign with the bad taste of the naval defeat at Preveza. Fourteen companies of Spanish infantry under the command of D. Francisco Sarmiento de Mendoza y Manuel, some 3,500 soldiers, were garrisoned there for the winter. The following summer brought a tide of 54,000 Turks and a fleet of 200 sails before its walls. After Venice’s defection from the League, there was no possibility of naval relief and the Spanish command authorized capitulation, however Sarmiento and his men decided to respond to Barbarossa’s offer with the phrase “Come whenever you want”, which sealed their fate.

In Castelnuovo 1539, two sides face each other in a desperate battle: the town and its fortifications will eventually yield to Turkish power, but the question is, at what cost? In Castelnuovo we will manage our army with wooden pieces in vertical with sticker, where we will not be able to see the type of unit of the opponent. The board is divided into areas and we will have other types of units such as cannon batteries, walls, bastions, trenches, etc. The confrontations will be made by rolling 6-sided dice and a deck of cards for each side, allowing us to play them to give orders, improve the fighting, dig trenches and special events.

-Grant

This video on the attempted hacking of XZ (and therefore, all of Linux and most of the Internet) is great, not only for the story but for the clear/concise descriptions of key exchange, public key encryption and compression work¹. (And I wasn’t aware of some of the other aspects, like audit hooks).

How far back can you understand English? A story where the language jumps 100 back every few paragraphs.

Play NetHack … in Factorio.

Why water infrastructure is so hard to get right, and the noble efforts of Ek Son Chan to fix it in Phnom Pen, including facing down an Army general and his body guards while personally installing a water meter on the general’s house.

That famous shot of Bigfoot has finally been exposed as a hoax (according to a new documentary).

Benjamin Franklin apparently coined many common terms related to electricity, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

Brick Technology (a video channel of Lego builds) programs cars to act like (simple) humans or robots and then sees how changes jam traffic.

I might have bought a Vizio TV in the past, before they required you to have a WalMart account.

A Crossword from Wei-Hwa Huang.

1. Because of my background was aware of some of them, but even so, well done. ︎