An amazing trio of print-and-play board games.

Status: LIVE! Back now:

Three games. One bundle.

By Alec Hoptroff

In this 18-card game, you are trapped inside a never-ending nightmare where your regrets from the past, worries about the future, and insecurities about the present have taken the form of mythical creatures.

To escape, you must gather enough strength and courage to defeat them. But whenever you fail, the nightmare leaves behind a memory that makes you stronger for the nights ahead.

By Florian Fiedler

This game combines two of Florian’s favorite things: a deck of cards and polyominoes!

You draft cards from a shared market and use them to build five-card poker hands. At the same time, every drafted card gives you a polyomino shape to draw onto your bonus sheet. Fill its different sections, and you begin unlocking multipliers and other useful abilities.

The first player to reach 100 points wins, so it becomes a race between building stronger hands and unlocking the right bonuses.

By Chris Backe

In this game, you live in a 75-story skyscraper with a communal rose garden way up on the roof. A peaceful little place where everyone can plant flowers, water them, and enjoy the view.

But, of course, everyone wants the best part of the garden. Roll three dice, use two to decide where your rose will be planted, and use the final one to water a row or column. Every flower helps you fight for control of its row and column, so this cozy rooftop garden can get competitive rather quickly.

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And the winner is…

Echoes of Tomorrow by Alec Hoptroff

The game, in his own words…

In this solo game, you are using the multi-purpose cards to defeat 6 randomly chosen enemy monsters/mythological creatures, who get stronger the closer you are to winning, whereas you get stronger the closer you are to losing. The game involves escaping a recurring nightmare in which you are stuck in a loop fighting enemies that are preventing you from forgetting your past, confronting your future, and accepting the present. Defeating an enemy forces you to replace a card with the new enemy, but losing to an enemy allows you to add a card to your ‘memory’ which gives you a permanent boost for the next time you face your recurring nightmare. Craft the perfect deck, get lucky in your nightmares, and plan for the future in this tricky solo challenge containing only 18 cards.

More about the designer:

I have been a psychology teacher in the UK since 2016, with one of my additional roles in the school being to organise the annual Olympiad competition, which involves the planning & supervision of nearly 50 different events where students compete for their houses in various quizzes, challenges, and games. Through this Olympiad organising role, I have been developing & refining my ability to come up with engaging but varied games that have simplistic depth, where the rules can be taught to the students within 5 minutes whilst also being suitably challenging. Many of these skills helped me when I first started writing down & designing my own tabletop games a couple of years ago, where I particularly enjoy creating small games that punch above their weight when it comes to decision spaces and replayability.

It goes without saying that the game will change as we develop it. We’ll keep everyone updated about the game’s progress both here and on the Gamefound campaign.

About the contest

Who’s running this thing?

Florian Fiedler, the designer behind Paper Tactics, specializes in crafting thinky solo Print & Play experiences like the community driven format Roll4Rum. Operating under the mantra “Print. Think. Win.”, he combines accessible design with engaging mechanics. As co-organizer of the PnP Bundle, Florian leverages his experience in successful PnP crowdfunding and graphic design to help fellow indie creators bring their best concepts to market.

Chris Backe is the designer of print-and-play games like Around the World in 15 Minutes, Starfront Scouting Academy, and Packing Party. He’s published traditional games with Galen’s Games, Keep Exploring Games, and other publishers. He’s the co-founder of Virtual Playtesting, wrote the book about playtesting, and founded Tabletop Publishers to help designers pitch their games better.

How it works

The PnP Bundle contest is part of our plans to release a bundle of print-and-play games: one from Chris, one from Florian, and one potentially from you!

We’re looking for print and play games that:

Can have any theme or mechanics you like
Are party, casual, or gateway weight
Have no or little assembly required (e.g. cutting, gluing, taping of what’s printed to get the game ready to play)
Have any number of sheets
Have not been published in its final form before (sharing prototype or playtest versions is fine
Ideally can be played solo (we can help to develop the solo mode of the winning game)
Use common components found in people’s houses, such as markers, dice, playing cards, pawns, cubes, etc.

Other rules

Limit of 3 entries designed or co-designed by the same person.

Dates and deadlines

Important: this is a living project we’re running for the first time. We’ll update the dates as we go =)

January: contest announced
February 7th: deadline to enter
February: Chris and Florian will review the submitted games, select 3-5 finalists, and create a public vote
February: the public vote will be open for a week
Mid-to-late February: we announce the winner based on the public vote
Rest of February and March: development, make art, playtest
April: prep campaign, share previews, get the games into hands of previewers
May: artwork
–> July: the Gamefound crowdfunding campaign
August: we release the game to backers and put it on sale
August: we send the winning designer some money!

The winner receives…

We will publish the winning game as part of a print-and-play bundle that will include a game from Florian and a game from Chris. Your game will be professionally developed and graphic designed by Chris and Florian.

We’ll work together with the designer to refine the game and rules, and we’ll lead the marketing and crowdfunding campaign.

Most importantly, you’ll make real money from your game (projecting about 20% of the received proceeds).