After finishing my first table top game (Planetary Profiteers), I felt compelled to roll on into a second. I really wanted a cooperative game and I wanted to do something with a board that players move pawns through.

The experience with Profiteers has taught me that you really have to monitor costs on low production games using a service like The Game Crafter. The box alone for that one is $12.  The high costs are, of course, a matter of tiny print-on-demand production runs.

The new game, named LockSwap, aims to get the most out of a limited set of materials in a board-based cooperative game. It will be available on The Game Crafter after some final play testing.

I feel like it has accomplished my goal of a playable cooperative board game. It also plays extremely well with a single player, although there is a lot to keep track of!

Of course it didn’t spring into existence looking like the above. This game required a huge number of trial runs to set up a well functioning set of instruction cards, creating a pair of challenging mazes, and, mostly, setting the challenge (via a par system) for each variation. I’m still sorting out that last one and play testing finishes up.