Here Be Monsters didn’t come out of nowhere. Phil and I have been working tirelessly on it for almost four years now. And a lot has happened and changed with the game in that time. With this article I’d like to walk you through a little bit of what has gone into the game and some of the highlights of the last four years!
THE BEGINNING
Phil and I began working on HBM in February of 2021. I had casually mentioned to him that as a kid I always dreamed of making a TCG and he had the wonderful suggestion that maybe we should try! Very quickly we latched onto the theme of Pirates (I mean, how could we not, they’re awesome) and we started designing the game and cards.
Our horrendous first few play-tests took place on Google Slides. Yes, you read that right… Google Slides. We made a bunch of sample cards and threw them in there and in order to shuffle we had to go card by card and ‘move it back’ one at a time in an effort to create 'randomization'. It was a painful process and I’m surprised we didn’t give up then.
Luckily Phil suggested Tabletop Simulator and we moved our play-testing over there with much success. Back then the game was much different than it is now. Ships had defense points, the treasure each had their own effects that changed the game and there were a lot of additional rules that overcomplicated things.
Neither of us were trained in game design, so our approach was very simple: we thought of fun things, we tried them and then we talked after each game to see what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to get rid of. Then the next week we did the same thing. Once a week for four years, like clockwork. It was a slow process, but we molded the game in a direction we were really happy with and that was fun to play. It did (and still does) give us so much joy when we finish a game and start lamenting that we won’t be playing again until the following week. And yet this was a necessary component to make sure we didn’t ever burn out. As development went on we started building spreadsheets to track what decks/cards we were playing and who was winning. Then we expanded it further to see what cards were winning the most. And then we pushed it even further, introducing comments and notes into our review to track how each player was feeling each game as well.
FIRST PLAY-TESTER
Phil and I were both quite protective of the game for that first year. We’d never made anything like it and we were petrified that others might not enjoy it the way that we did. It took us a whole year before we brought in an outsider to try out the game. In February 2022 one of our friends, Patrick, hopped on and tried playing Here Be Monsters for the first time.
I’ll be honest, folks, I definitely thought I was relaxed and calm and wasn’t worried at all about what he thought of the game… but in the moment when we finished playing and asked ‘so what did you think?’… that pause before he spoke… I feel like I saw my life flash before my eyes. And thank goodness his next words were, ‘guys, this feels really, really polished’.
From there we did more and more play-testing and learned more and more about how people played the game, but it all started with that first time we opened ourselves up to criticism.
THE GREAT PLAY-TEST DAY!
The thing we discovered about play-testing was that it was exhausting!!! Putting yourself out there emotionally like that is tough, for anyone. And we found that after each play-test game we would spend another three or four weeks not play-testing just to recover. It wasn’t intentional… it just kind of happened that way. And so we had the great idea of doing one massive play-test day in a single weekend! We’d get a bunch of people together and play one game after another. That way we’d get the most data we could in a short period of time.
We got a dozen of our friends together and played back to back games on Tabletop Simulator from noon till 8pm, often with multiple games happening at the same time!! It was a whirlwind event and Phil and I were so happy that we managed to pull it off. Overall the responses from the players were incredibly helpful and overwhelmingly positive. However, it wasn ’t all good news.
While the players, across the board, enjoyed the experience… Phil and I recognized a problem. The games simply took way too long! We had one game run two and half hours! This was starkly different from the games that Phil and I had been playing with each other that ran forty minutes max! And we realized that because Phil and I understood the overarching strategy, we didn’t fall into the pitfalls of ‘stall tactics’ that some players did when they first started. This was a huge problem if we wanted new players to enjoy the game. And the problem was… it felt like this issue was built into the core of the gameplay, not individual cards.
Remember how I said there were a lot of mechanics in the beginning that never made it to the final game? This was one of them. Previously there was a fourth thing you had to keep track of to Search for the Treasure: all of your Ships had to be 'Full Sail'. This mechanic led to a lot of instances where you could keep your opponent from winning by simply shifting their Ship out of 'Full Sail'. Perhaps one of these days we'll do an article on this mechanic and why it had to be removed.
We spent a month exploring how we could remove the mechanic and still keep the game feeling like Here Be Monsters. Overall the solution was actually pretty straightforward, but all the unique ideas we tried really helped us solidify what the game was and how it played (and most importantly, how it did not play). This month-long experience will probably be the subject of an article in the future as well.
We replaced 'Full Sail' with our ‘exhausted’ mechanic and it became smooth sailing after that. While we’ve done a ton of balancing to individual cards, there really haven’t been any large gameplay changes since then.
FIRST TEST PRINT
Almost in tandem with our Super Mega Ultra Play-Test Weekend event, we decided that it was time to do our first test print of cards. Up until then the card layout design had been incredibly minimal, only for play-testing purposes, but with this new print we decided it was time to finally design the card layouts themselves. And... it was… a lot. While I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to pick up a pencil, graphic design has never been my strong suit and so there was a lot of trial and error with that first printing batch. We’ve changed the design of the card layouts since then, but the core vibe of them has remained the same.
The unfortunate thing is that since we made some sweeping gameplay changes after our play-test weekend… the majority of the cards that we’d printed were no longer playable… Perhaps it wasn’t the smartest idea to print them out before the weekend. Whoops.
So Phil and I played a few games with the cards, but before long it was almost impossible to keep track of what the updated effects and wordings were. Not to mention that by then Phil had moved away from LA and was living in Boston, so playing with physical cards was hard to do.
It was still a huge milestone for the game though and a huge milestone for us as the creators. This was no longer something that only existed in a few computer files. It was a tangible thing. I put a copy of Sword Beast in my wallet and it has remained there ever since. Just to remind me how far we’ve come.
FIRST ALTERNATE ARTIST
A lot of life events happened after that for both Phil and I. I left LA and he left Boston and somehow we both ended up in NYC. Crazy. I continued to work on the art. We continued to play-test. And the game slowly came together. Our focus largely shifted from making sure the game was fun, which we’d locked in, and instead focused on the best ways to introduce new players to the game.
I forget when we first started thinking about Alternate Art cards, but it had to be sometime in the first year or two. One of our core guiding principles for the game was to make sure that cards were easily accessible to players. We didn’t want certain cards to be harder to find than others. Especially if they’re powerful cards. We know that works well for a lot of games, but for us it just didn’t sit right. So if all of the cards were available to a player, then what was the collectible part? And that’s where we realized we could bring in other artists to do additional pieces for the cards. Now there would be two or three versions of Sword Beast to chase after if you were a collector. But if you weren't, you could settle with the original Sword Beast and leave it at that!
In high school I wanted to be a comic book artist and I dove headfirst into that world, learning from all kinds of different artists. But when I went off to college I switched paths to become a filmmaker and a lot of my drawing fell by the wayside. So when I returned to drawing to start work on HBM, I suddenly found myself catching up on the work of these same artists nearly a decade later! It felt like coming home.
Really early on I knew that the first artist I wanted to reach out to was Meredith McClaren! I had loved her work when I was in high school but had lost track of her over the years. By happenstance, one of the internet algorithms showed me her work again and I dove back in with such glee!
Meredith was an absolute pleasure to work with and I’m so happy with how her first piece turned out. From there we brought on two additional artists, Ragonia and Jerel Dye and even got Meredith to do a second piece for us (there’s a story there that I’ll share another time). I have loved all of the pieces our alternate artists have done and I can't wait to officially reveal them soon!
I’m someone who’s always done these kinds of projects as a side thing. It was never my goal to create a whole world of strange pirate monsters. So let me tell you… when I saw an artist I admire take something I created and infuse her own magic into it… I’m still reeling about it. I have a printed copy of all of the current Alternate Art cards in sleeves sitting on my shelf so that I can see them every time I walk into my room, and it brings me so much joy!
Thank you to all of our current and future alternate artists. You’re all wonderful!
PAX EAST 2024
The above Alternate Art printing of cards was part of a much larger second test print that we did in early 2024. Why you might ask? Because we had decided in 2023 that we would take HBM to PAX East and show it to the world for the first time. We weren’t ready to get a booth, so we connected with Unpub (a wonderful organization - go check them out) and let complete strangers play-test the game.
It was an incredible success (but of course we were exhausted afterwards). For more information on that, check out Phil’s article on the subject!
PREPPING FOR RELEASE
So that brings us to now.
We have nearly 180 pieces of regular art done, nearly a dozen Alternate Art pieces finished (with more on the way) and a couple of pieces of promotional art ready. We still play-test every week and have plenty more to do. We're also exploring printers and distribution... but overall we’re getting quite close to being ready for release.
Which is an incredibly scary thing to say.
This has been our little project for almost four years and it’s hard to think about letting it out into the world, but we know that it’s time. Our tentative plan is to launch the Kickstarter in February of 2025 (subject to change), which gives us six whole months to get out into the world and let people know about our game! This started with our Instagram, then with the building of our website and now with some exciting outreach plans that we have going forward.
We’re incredibly excited about where the game is going from here and that you all will be a part of it. Please reach out with any thoughts, join our email list and tell all your friends! After all, what’s it like being a pirate, if you don’t have your crew along for the ride?
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