by Christian K

This is a designer diary for Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones

Prologue
We, Michael and Christian, met at an event at our local Board Games Café Papas Papbar, for a release party for Biotopia. We quickly got chatting about games and even had a few beers (or at least it felt that way). This kind of meeting between game designers is always an interesting and exciting moment. At the end of the night, we hugged goodbye, and one of us whispered the lovely phrase “we should totally make a game together”.

10 Years Later
Nah just kidding, it was like half a year later or something that we seriously started working together. We started meeting up regularly and experimenting with games. We tried various ideas, but it was hard finding a good common project that actually worked. After we added like five tracks to one of our other games (which surprisingly didn’t make it any better), we felt a bit stuck and like we hadn’t quite found the right game.

"Faunas" (as we called Combo Creatures at the time) emerged as a breath of fresh air. The initial prototype was fast playing and delivered a lot of crazy moments that occasionally had one of us pause and say... “Is this allowed?” The answer was always yes.

The Game
The game is super simple, and surprisingly, most rules are exactly the same as in the very first prototype.
You have a hand of cards. On your turn, you pick one to play. It has a cost, which you pay by discarding other cards. You put it into play, and it has a play-ability that you trigger. Those abilities tend to be quite wild and powerful, often allowing you to play more stuff (sometimes even for free). We wanted to give you the feeling of playing a crazy combo deck in a TCG, but with almost no rules, no complex timing, and very simple and powerful abilities.
[Michael: I remember coming home from those early playtest sessions with an overloaded brain just sitting there staring into space, trying to figure out whether I could have played my hand more efficiently, all while new ideas for cool card abilities kept popping into my head – And right there I knew we were on to something!]

(Ok ok, occasionally on your turn, you don’t have a cool card combo to play so you spend the turn picking up new cards to load you up for a powerful next turn. But most of the time, you are just playing cool combos, we promise!)

To prevent too much time from being spent reading the cards in your hand, we found it useful to limit the number of different cards in the deck. When you play, there are just 7 different ones. You quickly know the cards so you can use your energy to find the best possible ways to play them, rather than reading an endless stream of cards.

A Weird System
With only seven cards though, we were looking for creative ways to increase the variety of the deck and the number of situations that the players will face. We made the deck modular, so you wouldn’t use the same seven cards every game. But within each game, we also wanted more variety.

We came up with this weird system that felt like it shouldn’t work, but surprisingly it did.

Each card comes in three variations. The same ability, but with costs of 1, 2, and 3.
However, the cost is also how many points that card is worth. So, if you play the 2-cost variation of a card, you discard two cards for the exact same ability that sometimes costs one, but you also get an extra point.

So, the dilemma the player faces is, do they play a lot of cheap cards, not getting so many points but triggering a lot of abilities, or do they prefer playing a single expensive card for big points but only the one ability.

The next step was to figure out how strong the abilities should be to make this dilemma work. So that you sometimes go for the cheap option and sometimes the expensive. An especially tricky thing to factor in here is the implicit cost in spending your turn playing the card.

[Christian: I actually remember writing some equations to try to figure out if this concept even made sense, and if so, how strong an ability would need to be so that one option wasn’t always strategically superior. The math dictated that each ability needed to be SUPER DUPER STRONG. This was something we would have to accept as designers. No innocent little “Draw 1 card” abilities, sorry!]

We had a good excuse to put really powerful abilities on the cards. In fact, we had to do it or the game wouldn’t work. This fueled our combo machine to even greater heights. Coming up with simple yet exciting and powerful abilities is one of the most enjoyable things as game designers, and this game was a blast to work on.

Pitching and Publication
The excitement we felt for the game turned out to be contagious; several publishers became very interested, which is an amazing feeling as designers. DV Games was particularly excited about the game. It is not uncommon for publishers to take many months to play your game and give feedback. However, with DV Games, Luca wrote immediately after SPIEL Essen asking for the files, and a few days later they proposed an offer of publication.

DV Games has been great to work with. Marta, our editor, has been tirelessly testing, evaluating, swapping cards around between sets, proposing minor changes etc. It is great seeing someone else match the passion you have as a designer for your little baby game. Seeing the game come alive with the beautiful artwork from Jeff Hong was one of the absolute highlights during development.

Two different boxes (with completely different cards) are being released simultaneously, Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones. Each one is stand-alone, but they can of course be mixed. Either one is a good starting point. The Quick Ones is a bit more approachable, while The Witty Ones leans into more involved and tricky abilities.

After many years of hard work from a lot of people, the game is at the finish line. But in a weird way, the finish line for a game, where it finally comes out, is also the starting line. This is the first time the wide public gets to see and play it. Fingers crossed you like it as much as we do! Cheers and happy gaming.

by Justin Bell

Every time my family joins me at an ice cream shop, the same thing happens: one or both of the kids want to sample a bunch of flavors before they have to commit, especially if we are at a new-to-us spot.

Is espresso-flavored ice cream going to work? Let’s find out. I had never seen the ice cream flavor “Superman” before moving to the Midwest, so even I had to find out what the heck Superman-flavored ice cream was all about before making a firm commitment. (The verdict: not for me.) There’s a local chain in Chicagoland called Rainbow Cone, and the signature cone includes five flavors, one of which is “Palmer House.” What flavor does the term Palmer House evoke? No idea…so, yes, please give me a sample.

The kids and I need to know what we are signing up for before I hand over some crazy amount of cash for a single scoop of ice cream. Buying new board games is the exact same experience for me…I much prefer to try a game before plopping down the cash.

This is why I am so excited for Gen Con.



“The Best Four Days in Gaming” is the trademarked tagline for Gen Con, the long-running annual tabletop gaming extravaganza descending upon Indianapolis starting this Thursday.

There are many reasons why I love heading down to Indy for this show. It’s only about three hours’ drive from my house. I get to spend time with extended family who live in the greater Indianapolis area. I eat as badly as my body allows for four days, between the hotel breakfast buffet (yes, I DO need one more hot waffle), the visits to Steak ‘n Shake (not “and”, not ampersand…just ‘n, like pork ‘n beans), and “dinners” featuring bowls of pretzels and Cheez-Its at media events scattered throughout the weekend.

I love the cosplay, I love seeing so many familiar faces from the industry, I love the open gaming, I love watching the 10 AM “gold rush” on Thursday when people make their way into the expo hall (from above, of course, because I like to observe the fray from a safe space).

The main reason I love Gen Con is the games…specifically for the chances to demo games in order to make a buying decision. I use my time at conventions to chat with a lot of publishers and attend meetings and sit through presentations with other creators; that is certainly important, particularly to understand what’s coming to future shows. But in-between the business of the show, I carve out a couple hours each day and a few hours on the final day of Gen Con to demo as many games as possible, all in the hopes of discovering a new title that will bring me joy for years.

My favorite Gen Con demo experience took place at the Renegade Game Studios booth about ten years ago. That year, I made a beeline to the booth in the hopes of trying and/or buying a certain game, only to find that demo table completely full when I arrived.

There was an empty demo table off to the side of the main retail area in Renegade’s booth, and on a whim decided to sit down there as a consolation. That table featured the game Covert, designed by Kane Klenko. As it happened, the person leading the demo’s teach was Kane himself, and he and I played a round of Covert together. Date night with the game’s designer!

Kane wrapped up the teach then we played a round, and I found that I liked the game’s mechanics enough to be interested in a purchase. Covert is a dice placement game with a spy theme, with some recipe fulfillment tied to completing missions with things like guns, forged passports, binoculars, and recording machines.

I stood up after the demo and thanked Kane for the time. “You know,” he offered, “Covert works well at all player counts, but I actually like it most at exactly two players. If you think that fits for you and your wife, I would give this a look!” I was intrigued, because I did enjoy that single round and I thought my wife would like it as well, so I picked up a copy and paid that familiar slightly-over-retail convention price to ensure I left the show with the game.

And as it turned out, Kane was right. I brought Covert to a game weekend with some of my high school friends the week after returning from Gen Con, and we played Covert four times back-to-back; everyone loved it. To this day, Covert has been the game my wife and I have played at the two-player count more than any other game in our “hobby” collection. The wear and tear on our copy is significant, but the game still lands and always ends up being a blast…and most importantly, she never turns down a chance to play it, so game date night remains a thing at Casa de Bell.



I always take the same approach when I get to the expo hall at the Indiana Convention Center: walk every aisle, browse every booth (not just the big ones, but the small and medium-sized booths as well), and if there’s a demo table with open seats, I will try a few games I hadn’t heard about before. Sure, I will definitely try to grab a seat at demo tables for some of the “hot” releases at Gen Con 2026, and my hit list certainly includes a few of those big titles.

But from our Gen Con preview list of more than 600 titles, I’m excited to try a few that have many fewer thumbs than Entropy, the top vote-getter on the preview page so far.

Look, if you call your game Use Up All Your Sick Days, I’m gonna try it, so that’s certainly on the list, because I’m the weird American corporate soldier who really does use all of my paid time off. The publisher Playte creates the kind of intrigue that has me excited to get my hands on titles like Big Shot and Stereo Mind, especially with the latter title featuring a box that looks like my waterproof yellow Walkman from a thousand years ago (give or take). I’m doing a scheduled look at Horrible Guild’s new title The Amazing Journey, as well as a scheduled demo of Whisperwood and at least one other title that I am very keen to learn more about this weekend.

Happy Camper’s new game Bring Your Own Book had a blurb that was absolutely enough to hook me: “use any book to find funny out-of-context text to match the current prompt.” That blurb made me wonder if my kid book collection could turn Bring Your Own Book into comic gold. I don’t really know what Size Wise is about, but the cover art and the designer (Scott Brady) were enough to convince me that I need to find out how Size Wise plays.

The list goes on and on. dnup is a title I need to try. CGE always has massive amounts of demo table space so getting a shot at Drillers is high on my list. Allplay has so many titles on the “hot” list (seven of the top 10!) that I’m going to have to spend an hour or two during the show demoing the new-to-me games on display at their booth.

But it’s the empty demo tables that intrigue me most. Any chance to try a game for a round or two, spending 20 or 30 minutes hearing the pitch about a game that is not on my radar, is a chance worth taking. In an industry where new game releases are a sea of options that have become impossible to navigate, I’m always looking for the next Covert…and going hands-on is the only way to know for sure.

One year, a demo play turned into my ongoing love affair of City of the Big Shoulders. Another year, there was a discovery of the game Photograph. Some years, it’s the games that I think I will love, then do a demo and realize the game is not for me after all, which might be even more useful as I consider which games I want to buy and which games I need to skip.

I’m looking forward to the adventure once again. If you are going to Indy, enjoy the show!