The Story of Weirdwood Manor: Designer Diary

How It All Started

How I ever came to be the designer of a board game set in the Weirdwood Manor universe is almost as interesting as the journey to make the actual game. Weirdwood Manor’s creation began with my dream to design board games and a chance meeting at a work meetup for creative professionals in the digital world.

You see, I’ve long been a designer; as an architect, and then a digital product designer. I was a product designer when I first discovered “modern” board games around 2009 and then some years after that I started to design board games as a hobby. Heck, one of those games, Amazon Peril, is here on BGG (though only friends and some playtesters here and there have ever played it).

I loved designing games as a hobby and in 2020 I was considering shutting down my design agency to devote myself to bringing a game to market. That’s when I met a fellow by the name of Paul Pattison at a digital meetup. We introduced ourselves, and he asked me what I did for a living, and I replied, “I’m a product designer but what I really want to do is design board games!”. He chuckled, and proceeded to tell me about his company, Wasabi Entertainment, and an original IP (intellectual property) called Weirdwood Manor that they were thinking of designing a board game for. I proceeded to tell him that not only could I design and develop such a game, but I could oversee all the marketing, the Kickstarter, the manufacturing, logistics, and, well, everything!

I put together a detailed plan and budget for the project and pitched it to him and his team in Vancouver, BC, and they were on board! By July of 2020, I shut down my company of 20 years and prepared to roll the dice, so to speak, on this crazy adventure! We even filmed a YouTube series about my journey and making the game!

What Kind of Game Will I Design?

So, how was I to begin this project that I just committee myself to? The answer was to rely on the design practice and project management skills I’d honed in my previous 30 years of running companies and designing and producing products.

That meant I’d start with doing research. In this case, I needed to get very familiar with the Weirdwood Manor world. When we began the project, Wasabi had published a hit iOS game in that universe and had just released the first book in a trilogy. So I devoured the app and book, playing and reading them multiple times.

After that, it was apparent to me that the world offered a lot of amazing environments, characters, stories, and ideas on which to forge a game—and my initial thought was, “What direction do I go in?!”.

At this point, there were really only a few things that I was certain of:

1. That the game I designed had to really mesh with the world and not just take inspiration from it. It had to include some of the characters, locations, and translate some of the underpinnings of the universe into actual gameplay mechanics.
2. I knew we would come to Kickstarter as that was part of my original pitch to Paul. As such, I felt we needed a game of a certain weight; something meaty enough in its mechanics and components that it would appeal to that core Kickstarter audience.
3. And I needed a “hook”; something that would help a new game from a new publisher to stand out. I dislike that word “hook” as that often can mean something that feels gimmicky, and I knew any such hook had to be something that really belonged in the game; something at the core of the gameplay experience that reflected the world.

Everything else was wide open. The fact that I had access to this entire IP with little or no restrictions meant that I didn’t want to close off any possibilities so early in the process or put any preconceived notions into the kind of game I wanted to design.

Still, my research was not nearly done, and I needed to talk to, and understand even further, how Paul and his team saw the world and what things mattered to them—and look for interesting ideas and concepts only their greater knowledge of the world might unlock.

So I set up an ideation day, where myself, Paul, and other members of Wasabi gathered to work through a bunch of exercises I set up for them. These included looking at and playing some other games for inspiration and discussion, as well as working through exercises to come up with ideas around gameplay, format, location, mechanics, and characters. No idea was too crazy, and the point in these sessions was to make everyone feel comfortable enough to share anything that came to mind, discuss and riff on those ideas, and hopefully find some consensus (or not!).

Those sessions were extremely fruitful, and I now felt like I knew the world very well and had a lot of material to work with. There were still lots of directions the game could head so I began to explore a ton of different ideas for the game’s design. Lots of sketches, notes, thinking, revisiting ideas… I was soon filling many pages in my sketchbook.

Eventually, through this process, I began to hone in on some concepts that I felt quite good about. I took the 6 best ones and created one-page pitches for each idea that I then presented to the Wasabi team and some other groups of board game players.

After considerable discussion, 3 of those ideas were very compelling to us, but there were (not unsurprisingly) many unanswered questions and even some fresh ideas about how these designs might work in their final form. Those 3 designs that caught our collective eye were:

1. Attack on the Manor. A game where players are defending Lady Weirdwood and the Manor from an invading Fae Monster and his Clockwork Scarab minions. The players would be chasing down these enemies, trying to defeat them before they ran out of time (more on that later).
2. Lords of the Manor. A game where the Manor has already been ransacked by the monster and Lady Weirdwood defeated, and the players are trying to rebuild the Manor, each competing to become the next Lady or Lord of the manor. I liked this idea of a board game where the players start in the aftermath of defeat.
3. The Shifting Bookcropolis. This design shared some similarities with the Attack on the Manor but was set in a different region of the world and was going to focus a bit more on adventure and narrative elements. While we loved this idea, the scope of the design was very significant—and I was leery of biting off too much for our first game.

I decided to flesh out each of those 3 pitches into a full game design document (GDD) and we would evaluate those designs against each other. This document summarized the gameplay in much more detail, and even included a basic ruleset to further define how things might work.

With these 3 GDDs done, I did more presentations to people at Wasabi and also a number of my board gamer groups, and eventually the Attack on the Manor won out for a variety of reasons, including these central ones:

• The Manor being under threat was a recurring theme in our IP, with the characters there working together to fend off evil—and so it made sense to bring that to a game format.
• As such, it lent itself very well to a cooperative game. Cooperation was often at the heart of previous Weirdwood stories and in the end I felt because of that, this should be a cooperative game.
• As well, this basic premise of working together to defend the Manor made for an easily understandable challenge to hang the entire game off of. Even if you had no past familiarity with the universe, most people could easily grasp the idea of working together to defend the Manor.
• Lastly, it had that “hook” I was looking for! I had come up with the idea of a rotating board moving as time passed in the game. This idea was just plain cool—and really did reflect some story elements in the original IP that had characters ending up in different rooms in the Manor depending when, and how long, they spent traveling through the connecting corridors. I knew this could open up some very interesting gameplay mechanics, including the idea of a loss mechanic based on too much time passing and the Fae Monster growing too strong in the Manor.

The Rotating Board

When people first see the game now, they almost always remark on that “hook”; the rotating board, and they often ask where that came from. When I first became aware of these time shifting corridors being present in the game lore, I latched onto it immediately as something really unique. The question was how to translate that into a board game. One of the first things that popped into my mind was the idea of a clock and passing time, which suggested a round board, though how that all might work was fuzzy at first.

And then one day, I was looking at my board game collection, thinking about this when my eyes strayed to the old Ravensburger game “Labyrinth” (well, I have the Master Labyrinth edition). It has corridor tiles that shift during gameplay, which affects how players can move around the board. That was an “Ah! Ha!” moment! I came up with the idea of having two corridors for tracking time like a clock; one corridor for minutes and one for hours—and those corridor rings would rotate to advance and track time! And maybe the rooms would shift too, and together those would affect where players could go based on the passage of time. Little did I know how challenging this design idea would be to pull off in an elegant way!

Designing The Game

Concurrently, I also had been thinking much more about the kind of game I wanted to design. Not from a mechanics or rules standpoint—but from an experiential standpoint. Now that I knew it was going to be a cooperative game, I looked more closely at the kind of experience I wanted that to be. In the Weirdwood apps and books, the stories have a very tense “Is everything going to work out ok?” kind of vibe. Like in any good story, things feel uncertain at times; will the good guys prevail?

I wanted to bring that into the game; a feeling that maybe you can’t win but do; or that you’ve got the game won but then things can still go off the rails. This meant I needed a design with a bit of “swinginess” to it (yeah, that’s not a real word, but I’m using it). A couple real-world inspirations here were Mage Knight and Defenders of the Realm. Two games I’ve always liked because I always felt the arc in them changed from game to game and the path to victory never felt assured.

This also meant that I was looking at a design that would ideally have high variability from play to play. I wanted that game arc to be able to shift and feel different from game to game. I felt that would not only keep games fresh but could actually assist in the “swinginess” of the game in that you might run into different problems to solve from game to game.

I also wanted a game that could lessen the typical quarterbacking one sees in co-op games. I looked at that primarily through the lens of adding some asymmetry to the game so it would be a bit harder for one player to always be telling other players what they should do. An inspiration here was Spirit Island and Root. I think Spirit Island is a hard game to quarterback, and I’ve always admired the innovative asymmetry in Root. As well, that asymmetry would also help with variability in the game. I knew we’d offer different characters the players could choose, but also different monsters to battle, in order to keep things feeling fresh.

Lastly, I’ve never been a massive co-op fan. I like crunchy euros—and I wondered if I could bring some of that competitive crunch to a co-op game which was going to have a fairly strong sense of dice-chucking adventure to it. As in many euros, I like being able to do my own thing and feel a sense of personal progression in the game, and so I hoped to bring in some of that too.

So, I had these guiding design goals:

1. Build in some swing, though make certain to give players enough agency and tools to deal with problems as they come up in the game.
2. Build in high variability to keep the game fresh and even help support the “swinginess” in the game.
3. Try to lessen quarterbacking to some degree.
4. Blend in some more crunchy euro-feeling mechanics and progression that might appeal to gamers who like that sort of game as well.

With these overriding principles and a fairly detailed design (on paper), now all I had to do was figure out if the darn thing would work? I knew even as I laid out these designs that everything was at risk of changing, being removed, or possibly adding things I’d not yet thought of.

And to figure that out, I needed to start prototyping and play-testing my design. Given the complexity of the idea of a rotating game board changing over time, and needing to allow players and enemies to move around it, that’s where I thought I’d start. It was central to everything else in the game and if I couldn’t get that to work, well, then I’d probably move on to designing a very different game!

To begin, I ran some extremely simple tests on a printed version of my first board design. These were just to figure out how scarabs, players, and the monsters might move around the board.

These tests revealed some pros and cons with the current design. One of the big cons was that I’d envisioned letting things move between rooms on the same ring, but that would break the importance of the corridor connections. So I decided on having rooms with no direct connections between them, and now I felt I was ready to build and test a more complete version of the board where I could start rotating and moving things.

To do so, I needed to lay out the board, figure out dimensions and how all that might work. My previous experience as an architect and product designer made this relatively easy to figure out digitally.

Further, my experience as an architect has given me a lot of experience in building physical models and prototypes. Xacto-knives, cutting boards, glues, adhesives, a variety of materials; these were all very familiar to me. So I began by building a very simple, but functional version of the main board from foamcore.

With that built, I need to better understand how the movement would work, how often the rings would rotate, and by what kind of increments. I had already designed the board to feature 12 outer rooms, 12 middle ones, and 6 inner ones, as this combination allowed for a corridor division that dove-tailed well with my time concept of the game taking place over 12 hours (outer ring) and each hour broken into 5 minutes segments (inner ring).

One of the central pillars of my design involved the scarabs spawning in the Manor and then moving through it, gumming up the works for the players. Originally, each player was going to have their own tower at the corners of the board that they’d need to keep free of scarabs, and so the scarabs would generally spawn in the middle of the board and move outwards towards those towers. I needed to make certain that the scarabs generally dispersed across the whole board relatively evenly, and didn’t clump in the same areas all the time, while still feeling random and different from game to game.

It was at this point I questioned my sanity in designing a round, rotating board. But it would not be the last time.

I proceeded to run dozens of simulation tests and log these in a spreadsheet, where I would change the number and frequency of spawning scarabs against the frequency of players rotating the corridors, and against the amount of time they’d advance the corridors when rotating them. As this testing progressed, I was also able to start folding in the frequency and timing of monster actions in the game as well to see how they impacted the game.

As well, I had used a dry-erase version of foamcore to build the board so that I’d be able to draw (and redraw) the rooms and corridor connections on them to test how things changed based on the alignment of open and closed doors into the various rooms.

Thankfully, after only a few dozen simulated games I had the scarabs moving well and everything else running fairly smoothly.

With that done, I decided I was far enough along that I’d make the remaining components and jump into some full-fledged play tests to see what parts of the game were broken, or awful, or interesting, or maybe (hopefully) even fun!

Playtesting Begins

The initial playtesting was just myself. Thankfully, as a co-op game, it made it a bit easier to playtest solo and I ran many playtests in order to smooth out the roughest edges of the design. I found playtesting solo to be a very effective way to improve the design—though perhaps this was in part due to my design background. I had 30 years of learning how to be objective about the things I was doing and possible solutions I was exploring. Though of course, like any good designer knows, that can only take you so far and proper user testing with other people is the real key to helping bring out a great design.

So by December of 2020 I felt the game was in good enough shape to play with others and we began running playtests. We were masked up due to covid and did the test in the basement guest suite of our house so we could keep the windows open. It was often cold, so most of us wore toques and jackets!

Surprisingly, the game played pretty well in those first tests, and everyone generally enjoyed it. There were lots of things out of balance, and some things weren’t working great, but overall the game experience held up quite well.

The things that did pop out as needing a lot of work were:

The characters. I am a pretty big fan of Root and love the asymmetry but often wish I could get the feeling of asymmetry without having to learn so many new mechanics and rules with a new character. In Weirdwood, I wanted to design a character system where if you knew how to play one character, you knew how to play them all, and yet the other characters still felt different enough that a player really enjoyed those differences and thought of them as offering some different tactics and strategies. In the coming months, I would go through many variations on the characters and how they functioned until finally finding the right balance.

The Fae Monster(s). We started with just one monster, and I knew there would be many tests needed to start to refine how he functioned, before even moving onto other monsters. That first monster would go through many changes over the early playtesting as I searched for a set of mechanics that worked well. I was hunting for an overall system of running the monsters in the game that I could apply to future monsters, while still leaving myself with enough flexibility in that core design to be able to alter it much more substantially than the characters. While I was not as fond of a steeper learning curve from character to character due to asymmetry, I felt that was more palatable when it came to changing monsters, as players would hopefully play against one monster for a while before moving onto learning a new one. Like the characters, there were many iterations of the monsters, though early on I felt using a different deck of cards for each monster would be the key to building in mechanical variety.

The shifting time mechanics. The first game featured one corridor to track hours and one to track minutes, and the player’s Action Cards each had different minute counts on them (typically between 5 to 20 minutes). Players would play cards down in front of them in a row and when you played a card that had, for example, 5 minutes on it, you’d rotate the inner corridor ring 5 minutes. In the early tests it became clear that there was too much randomness in using minutes of varying amounts on different cards and it felt like players had too little control, hoping to have the right card with the right number of minutes to turn it to a specific spot. As well, dealing with minutes and all the different numbers felt a bit finicky. At the time I kept tweaking the cards, hoping to fix it but it became clear that was not the answer and I needed to rethink how that all worked.

An Unexpected Fork That Returns Us To The Original Road

While all this was going on, I had been toying with a different design for the game. I cannot even remember how or where I got this crazy idea from, but it was a completely different approach to movement and time in the game. It consisted of 19 interlocked gears (a bit like Tzolk’in), where each gear had a room on it that turned, opening and closing access to the room from a static corridor. Because I no longer had corridors that shifted, I had to change how time was measured. I did that using a system where each corner of the board represented a time of day: morning, afternoon, evening and night, and the one central gear would have a clock-like pointer that would point to one of those times of day.

The player cards no longer had minutes on them, and I came up with the idea of players playing an action card to a slot on their player board which corresponded to a time of day. When they did that, they’d then rotate the central gear so the clock pointer pointed to the correct time of day, and this would rotate all the rooms, because all the gears were connected.

As I detailed this all out and developed it more, I started to become pretty excited by it. I liked no longer having time on the cards; they were all equal in that regard and under this system I felt players would both have a bit more freedom about how they used their cards (they’d have multiple spots they could choose to stop at for the given time of day)—and all this created an interesting puzzle of planning out which time slots to use. Also, the concept of doing something at one of the four times of day seemed easier to grasp than trying to constantly add up varying minutes.

So we put the other design on pause while I figured out how to build a prototype for this crazy board. In fact, before I could even do that, I had to design the actual gearing and figure out the gear ratios and how the cogs laid out so that these 19 gears would all turn together in a sequence that rotated all the rooms the correct number of degrees so things always lined up! It was at this point I considered just bagging groceries for a living.

Still, I persisted, learned a lot about gear design and figured it all out. Now to build it. I knew this could not be built in foamcore or any soft material. It would need to be in plastic for the gears to actually work. I found a toy designer who lived nearby who had access to a laser cutting machine and could make my gears out of plexiglass. So we did that, and before you know it, I had a prototype ready to play (see the gears rotating here)!

After all my excitement, the playtests were rather underwhelming. Players thought the gears were very cool and fun, but the turning rooms felt a bit finicky, and it was more difficult to visually understand the ramifications on the gears turning and how things would line up. However, most of the players liked the new time concept and liked the mini-puzzle of deciding when and where to play cards to the slots on their player boards, so I decided to port the times of day and corresponding player board slots from this design into my original one.

Now players had four slots on their player board (morning, afternoon, evening or night) to play an action card to, and when doing so they’d increment the time on the inner corridor ring to match that time. When that ring came back around to the morning, they’d then move the outer ring to the next day, slowly ticking away the 12 days of game time they have to track down and defeat the invading monster.

The Real PlayTesting Begins

By Spring of 2021, with an updated prototype, and my time problem solved, it now came down to lots of playtesting for balancing and refinements.

Some of that playtesting was about completely jettisoning earlier mechanics to streamline parts of the game, and occasionally pulling in new minor ones.

I originally had a quest card system in the game that added a bit of narrative flavor. At first that was a fairly complex system involving working through a series of cards over the course of the game. And then that got simplified to a single quest card system where these quests sat taking up space in a slot in your player board. Players actually really liked that system, and it eventually came back as a small mini expansion we offered during the Kickstarter campaign.

But ultimately this process was primarily about simplifying, removing, and streamlining where possible, and working on the balance.

The balancing in particular was extremely challenging, in part because of the underlying design goals I’d earlier set for the design; namely that I wanted a game that presented high variability from play-thru to play-thru and enough unpredictability (swinginess) to not make games a foregone conclusion too early in the game.

That was a fairly lofty design goal, and when taking into account the 3 different monsters and 6 playable characters, it would require a lot of playtests. I ended up doing more than 100 tests where I tracked all kinds of data points on a series of spreadsheets. This was aimed primarily at measuring how all the systems performed (combat, dice, the resource economy, monster strength, health, damage, card usage, and scarab volumes) and looking for places where I could tighten things up.

And when that testing was done, there was still a lot more playtesting where I was no longer tracking those data points but looking to improve less measurable aspects of the game; how players used their powers and cards, the amount of cooperation and strategizing between players, how companions were used, how and when players used the various rooms, and rules questions. This involved dozens of more tests, and tons of notes and minor revisions.

In the end, all that work resulted in about another 14 or months of design, development, and playtesting. During this time, I also continued to refine the UX design on all the components and we began working on the graphic design and illustration in the late Fall of 2021.

How The Heck Are We Gonna Make This Game?!

Parallel to all the game design work, I was also concurrently working on improving the board prototype. I laid out a detailed CAD drawing of the board in order to get laser cut versions done using dense millboards. Those worked much better but still not as good as things needed to be in terms of everything rotating well.

Because of that, I reached out to our eventual manufacturer, Panda Games, as early as I thought it feasible in 2021, asking if they wanted to work with me on figuring out the best way to manufacture the board. I knew we’d need a dual-layer board design but manufacturing tolerances and materials were something we would need to experiment with.

And so while playtesting and game development continued we began to iterate on board prototypes with Panda, sometimes tweaking just the smallest measurements, sometimes discussing and experimenting with some very different ways of making the board.

Over the course of several prototypes from their factory spanning almost a year, we were able to get everything worked out with them so that we feel confident in the ability of the board to provide a good playing experience over many, many plays. In fact, we now have boards out in the wild that have been played dozens of times over many months, while also traveling the world and going through the bumps and dings that come with that.

How Do We Get This To Market?

As we entered 2022 things were coming together well on the game and I knew we needed to get the game out there and start building some knowledge of it in the board game community. I had always planned to bring the game to Kickstarter and knew we’d need some good lead time to build an audience for the game.

So we decided to start attending various conventions in 2022. We attended Breakout Con in Toronto (yep, we’re Canadian!), and then went to GenCon, Shux, and Essen.

I could not believe the reception we got at all the conventions, especially GenCon. Somehow, in the lead up to GenCon, we found ourselves popping up on quite a few preview videos! We thought that was pretty cool, and figured we’d see a few people checking us out at GenCon, only to be met with walls of people during the entire convention. We were overwhelmed, exhausted, and I even lost my voice! It was wonderful!

At each convention people were clearly really excited about the game; it was awesome! And all that time, we were continuing to refine the game and by the Summer of 2022, we had pegged a window for the Kickstarter; Spring of 2023.

Let The Kickstarter Begin! OMG, Please Let It End!

After getting back from Essen, we hunkered down to focus on getting everything ready for the Kickstarter. I began to design the campaign, and our graphic designer, Steve Palmer, and I began to work on the graphics for everything.

As someone who has been backing games for about a decade, I knew there were two fundamental principles I wanted to bring to our campaign:

1. Keep it simple. I’d seen too many publishers make promises they couldn’t keep or just overestimate the challenges of doing something, before it was, well, done. =) I knew we’d be going in with a game that was pretty much complete, and I did not want us to promise a bunch of extras that would only raise the risk of something going wrong.
2. Keep it real. This is often just a product of the point above; things start to go wrong and a publisher starts to communicate less, maybe dodges some questions. I wanted to make certain we maintained a high level of communication, which also meant being honest. We were prepared to say “no” to backer requests and give our reasons why, and if we didn’t know something, or something went wrong, we’d own up to it.

As we neared launch in April of 2023, things were shaping up well, though as someone with an extensive background in designing websites and digital platforms, I was still caught off guard with the amount of work required to lay out a well-designed campaign. For you aspiring publishers out there, don’t underestimate this. =)

And then came the launch. The most wonderful and horrific three weeks of my life. I remember hitting the big green launch button on Kickstarter. I turned to shout to my wife “We’re live!” and in the seconds it took to do that and turn back to my monitor, we had 30 backers already. I thought that must be wrong. I turned back to my wife again to yell “I think something’s wrong… It says we have 30 backers already!”. I turned back again and it said 100 backers. Huh?!

And so began the most frantic 48 hours of comments and questions. And while things slowed down a bit after 48 hours, the comments and questions continued. The discussions with our team, our manufacturer, our fulfillment partners… all those questions, comments and answers dominated every hour of my day. I was elated by the incredible response, and torn with anxiety at every question I’d forgotten to anticipate. The 3 weeks went by in a blur… I have vague recollections of eating sometimes, of still being married, of my daughter eye-rolling me when she poked her head in my office with a question and I was too comment-dazed to respond properly.

But in the end, it was tremendously rewarding! Over 5000 people backed us, raising almost $500,000!

After the Kickstarter, Good Things Continue

Our Kickstarter ended in May of 2023 and you’d be tempted to think that’s the end of things—or at least the end of feeling overwhelmed with too much to do, but that’s not really the case.

I still had a tiny bit of final playtesting, and a few manufacturing details to wrap up and then there was still a lot of work to do to get the game into people’s hands. Freighting, shipping, tax remitting, safety testing, preparing and checking backer data and addresses, figuring out the correct box labeling for importing and selling games in different countries… this was all on me to oversee and figure out; all the real fun stuff every aspiring designer dreams of. =)

In addition to all that logistical work, I’ve had lots of good “problems” to also work on since the Kickstarter ended. The success of the Kickstarter got us on the radar of a lot more people in the industry. I’m now working with a great licensing agent, MOB Vanguard, and we’ve started signing deals to bring the game to other language markets.

We partnered up with Flat River Group who reached out to us about distributing the English retail version of the game and they’ve since ordered thousands of games to bring to retail this year!

And finally, we’ve heard from lots of popular board game channels and reviewers who are eager to review the game when it comes out!

With all this great momentum behind us, I’m incredibly excited to see the game get into people’s hands!

Closing Thoughts

As I sit here, finishing this diary, I cannot believe that this journey which started with a dream and chance meeting has actually come this far. It is one thing to design a game, but to also be the developer, the marketer, and the logistics person… Well, safe to say this has dominated my life these last three years!

As the game nears release to backers and retail, I am very humbled and grateful for all the support along the way. I can still recall many of the faces of people who just stopped by our booth at a convention to offer a kind word, the advice I got from people already in the industry, the excited previews and reviews from different corners of the board game world, and the incredible comments we’ve seen from our backers on Kickstarter.

And after all this work, it feels like Greyridge Game’s journey is just beginning as I start work on expansion content for the game… but for now I’ll try to enjoy the moment and satisfaction of making something that hopefully will bring people together around a table to smile, laugh, and share a good time together.