Our bespoke prototype

When we ran our public playtest, it was hard not to feel a little bit self-conscious about the low-fidelity, cardboard nature of the game at that point. Don't get me wrong, that was the whole point. But the production process takes a long time, and we started getting itchy to see the game come to life. We'd also signed ourselves up for a few events before we'd have a finished game, so we needed something proper to play!

We wanted to engage the local community as much as possible, so hunted for any makers in Queenstown and came across Marijn (aka Delta V). Marijn runs a laser cutting business as a side project and was super enthusiastic about helping us create our board and pieces in a more polished format that still represented how the final game would look.

Our finished board will look like this, printed as folding cardboard:

Marijn helped us transpose the same design into something that would work for a wooden, highly premium edition:

We're really in love with how it came out, and the pieces are actually pretty close to how the final version will look. In the finished game, instead of being engraved into the wood, they'll be UV printed on in colour over a larch wood base. But they'll be the same size and thickness.

A lot of the people who have seen or played with the new board said they'd love if it were a real version they could get, so we're strongly hoping we'll be able to look at a premium collector's edition in the future. The main barrier is that a wooden board would be very expensive as the default version, but as a special edition, it might just work.

There's something special about holding a real, tactile version of something you've only ever seen as cardboard and optimism. We're really excited to share the finished thing with you soon.