Designer Diary: High Tide | BoardGameGeek News

by Marceline Leiman

Oftentimes, the more personal a design is, the harder it is to turn it into a product.

In most cases I imagine a brilliant and earnest designer, working for years in isolation on a game idea that has become dense and thorny with their own niche tastes. In that kind of process, it’s rare that an individual person’s taste as a player matches what the majority market is looking for in a product. It’s a tough lesson I’ve had to learn for myself, that the creation of games must be minded towards the people who play them.

I was lucky. High Tide was a personal design to me.

It was never intended to be a game for more than one specific moment, for one specific group of people: attendees of Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged 2024. Knowing that I was delivering a game for such a specific demographic, my decisions were informed by my own experiences at craft book and zine fairs. I wanted to make whatever I brought special for that one specific moment.

Me (eighth from right) and the other creators at Indie Games Night Market 2024

Once I knew what niche I was signing up for, I went to my studio and jumped right into design mode.

My standard practice for some of my personal favorite ideas for games come from play. I knew I wanted to commit to a specific material limitation — but what would it be?

If you had walked in at any moment during this period, you’d see me in my workspace, scribbling and scrawling on bits of paper, grabbing bits of gems and dice. I turned back to materials from older prototypes that never quite made into proper games: a bunch of painted hexagon tiles.

I find this energy is the best way to come to a pure, fun, intuitive idea: to literally play with the pieces. Yes, like a child in a sandbox.

I enter the space with an unfocused mind, moving pieces around the table, picking them up, placing them, rotating them—all with the goal of finding some inherent meaning to it all.

The first iteration of High Tide had no theme and fewer pieces

This practice led to the rule that became the principal idea of High Tide:

A piece can move only if it is able to move to a higher position than it started.

The rest of the game cascaded outward from that rule, as if out of air.

Such a simple but fundamental idea. This couldn’t possibly be original, right?

Well, after a ton of research, I found the answer was “kind of”. There were games that had adjacency to the rules I discovered, but never one that was exactly as elegant as I wanted High Tide to be.

Abstract games have a lot of downsides as products. They’re usually limited to a low player count. They aren’t flashy with their themes. Because of their simple mechanisms and components, they’re easy to proxy. They’re skill-oriented, making them unstable if not played between even opponents.

At the same time, they have a bounty of positives. They’re simple to learn and get playing. Their focus on functionality often means they’re made with gorgeous components with high-contrast colors that make it easy to parse during play. You can grow a relationship with someone over an abstract game as you both grow and gain skill.

High Tide is inherently an abstract game, but something about my chosen theme does seem to resonate with others.

I have memories of walking along the beach as a kid, collecting shells, staring into little pools that appeared along the shore. Summers were spent with my family, playing games like Mancala, Backgammon, and UNO in any place we could — at restaurants, in the car, and (of course) on the beach.

Guided by these memories, I knew High Tide had to be playable on-the-go. I wanted it to fit easily into someone’s life, so they can carry it and take it out for a quick game with ease. It should be a game that begs to be played anywhere.

Knowing this game was going to be niche, I was excited at the possibility of diving into this as a pure abstract game. If you’re familiar with the games industry, you might have the impression (as I did) that a two-player abstract of any kind is pretty much unpublishable. Normally, that alone would discourage me from moving forward with a design — but with the opportunity of Indie Games Night Market ahead, I was able to lean into making an unpublishable game.

The production process included painting, stamping, and lacquering each of the 380+ pieces on both sides, then bagging, folding rules, boxing, and stickering them all into a neat package

Indie Games Night Market is an independent game designer’s market that took place for the first time in 2024 at PAX Unplugged. With my sights on making High Tide, I decided I would need to make a fast prototype with final-ish materials to show Daniel Newman, the runner of the event.

So I quickly got into ideating how best to represent this game.

If I was going to be making these games all by hand, I had to imagine a pipeline around how I would assemble them. I noted the number of components and how each of those components would need to be painted (with how many colors), stamped, and boxed along with printed rules. Looking at that pipeline and the meager budget I had, I knew at least some people could be interested in the game, so I agreed with myself to make twenty copies and no more.

The naturalistic feeling of the game deserved a naturalistic theme, so I did research into different symbiotic relationships in the wild that would remind me of the way the game pieces moved: covering, but not destroying one another. This led me to coral and algae, which have a fascinating mutualistic relationship.

I chose colors that reminded me of coral and algae, with the neutral tiles being representative of the sand — but color on its own would make the game feel too abstract. I thought hard about how I could add a feeling of life into the objects, leaning into the handcrafted feel I think is so important to this game.

Stamping was a cheap, accessible option for me to replicate on multiple pieces. This revealed that I would need to change the theme to a tide pool as I couldn’t find distinct enough shapes for coral and algae. The shell stamps I found pressed on a nostalgic button for me, so I was happy to move forward with that decision. The imperfections of the stamping process brought out what made this game a lovely object to hold and helped inform my attitude towards my work as an artist making bespoke games.

From there, I made a single copy, shared it with Daniel, then shared on social media.

And the response to it was far more explosive than I could have ever imagined.

The most popular image I posted. (Fun fact: It was taken on a trip to Rehoboth beach in Delaware.)

For months in advance of Indie Games Night Market, I saw an outpouring of interest and support for me and High Tide, garnering the most attention to my social media that I’d ever seen. Something about the art direction, the pieces, or the theme really attracted people to the game.

At the event, people told me they planned to be at PAX Unplugged because of High Tide — a huge level of hype for what I thought would be a small and unpublishable little game of mine. I had people scan my Venmo code and pay for the game before it was their turn in line. I had people try to cut the line and make extravagant offers.

I sold out of the game in less than seven minutes. From there, I received offers from publishers to sign for the game, but wound up going with my friends at Underdog Games who I trusted to make the game right, with access to the audience who I think will connect with the game.

Side-by-side comparison of Underdog’s edition of High Tide with my handmade edition sold at IGNM

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to make a game that’s “unpublishable” or small — because you can never be certain what is going to catch people’s interest.

I recommend that other designers try the “playful practice” I described for game creation. It has led me time and time again to simple and intuitive ideas for games. Think of it as a conversation with yourself as a child, as distant from your present as you can remember being.

Returning to this child-like, playful mind in my creation process has helped unlock an artistic joy that I haven’t experienced before in life.

If you have a willingness to give it a try, I recommend approaching your work with the following:

1. Don’t plan to make a specific game before starting this practice.

2. Surround yourself with your prototyping materials, ones that make you happy.

3. Grant yourself a span of 1-3 hours to play with your materials. Let their purpose come to you through this play.

4. If something isn’t clicking, work at a different table, work with different materials, sit or stand up. Repeat as needed.

Good luck, trust your gut, and follow your playful heart!

If you got this far, thank you so much for reading — and High Tide is now available for pre-order!

Marceline Leiman