I have created my own board game, called Innsmouth Mystery.

It is based on the HP Lovecraft short story, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which is one of my favourite short stories, and is a solo game for one player. The story is set in 1927, and you are visiting the coastal town of Innsmouth and must uncover the mystery of what is going on there.

You can see it for sale here: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/innsmouth-mystery

The whole thing is essentially an art project for me, to see if I could do it. It is being sold at cost, not to make any money, and I am working on my next game.

Innsmouth Mystery is a ‘mint tin game’, which means a game that fits in a small tin. It has cards, dice, counters and meeples (the little figures).

A long time ago in 2011 I was bored at an IT conference, so I filled in the time by making up a simple dice game. I called it ‘Innsmouth’. There were no cards or counters, just some tables and dice rolling. I kept track of the gameplay with paper and pen. Figuring out the probabilities was fun. I then immediately forgot about it and it has sat quietly as a text file in an obscure folder on my laptop ever since.

A year or two ago, Gab bought me proper game which came in a small mint tin. I loved the idea of this, especially how you had to keep the game small so it would fit.

I remembered Innsmouth, and wondered if I could create my own mint tin game based on that. The game and rules already existed. I could expand it by adding cards, maybe some counters, and make sure it fitted in the tin. It would be a cool challenge.

It turned out to be a massive project for such a small thing.

First of all, I had to have a means of actually producing it. Obviously, making a deal with a games manufacturer in China was out of the question.

There is a great website called TheGameCrafter.com, where you can make, publish, and sell your own game. You upload all the images for the cards, etc, and select which components you want included, such as dice and counters. You can create your own storefront on the site to sell your game. There are loads of self-published games of all kinds on there. The tin game that Gab had bought me came from there. The whole thing seemed really achievable.

Next was to design the new version of the game. This involved converting my tables into sets of cards, expanding the game with some new ideas, and modifying the dice rolling probabilities to incorporate these new aspects. I drew mock-ups of the cards with pencil and paper, so I could try it out.

With the game-play sorted, I moved on to actually making the game. I used design software to do the layout of the cards. I had to write all the wording, choose fonts, text sizes, and position the elements to fit on the cards. The cards are small so this was fiddly.

Next I had to write the rules and have them fit on the accordion foldable sheet I had chosen. This took a fair bit of editing.

All the while I was setting up the project on TheGameCrafter site. You choose how many cards you want, and how many other bits and pieces, and the site tells you how much it will cost to make a copy.

The other thing the site tells you is whether the bits that you have chosen will actually fit in the tin. It turned out that they did not.

So I had to redesign part of the game. I had been using little green cubes as counters and to track the status of things as ‘done’. I changed these to a single green cube, and flipping cards over. This needed a redesign of the cards on both sides, and creating a new tracker card to put the single cube on. Now it all fits.

Now everything was done and the game was all ready to go, except for…

The illustrations.

I had to draw an illustration for each card. Not something I had a lot of confidence in. The whole project stalled for months while I fiddled around with drawings. Eventually I settled on using Procreate on the iPad with an Apple Pencil and knuckled down to it. I’m pretty happy with the results.

When you think you are finally done with your game design, the site only lets you order one copy, and wont let you order another for two weeks. This is to force you to review it properly, which I think is kind of great.

My first copy had some rules text that needed updating, and the back side of the rules sheet was upside down. I changed the wording an a couple of the cards to make them clearer, and then ordered a second copy. This one was fine, and so I clicked publish. The game is live on the site.