Designer Diary: Brew, or Designing the Whimsical Wilds

I enjoy prototyping with circular colored stickers — the cheap kind you would use for a garage sale. The process is somewhat meditative and feels intuitive, creating a nice starting place for quickly testing out an idea. While placing each sticker by hand, ideas can flow, imagining how interactions might take place. Brew began its journey with this approach.

At the beginning, the game was a simple push-your-luck game for children. Players would need to roll their dice and match the symbols along a path, trying to reach the end. Each time a die was placed, you would collect a gem and have one fewer die to roll for the next space. The goal was to get to the end and gain the biggest treasure. If you had a bad roll, you could use your collected gems to re-roll as long as they matched the space you were attempting to re-roll.

While this game was fun for kiddos, it didn't scratch the itch for the types of games I personally enjoyed. At the time, I didn't realize that this would be the core of Brew, but I continued iterating and experimenting with the ideas of area majority and set collection. In subsequent versions, players still raced to complete the tiles, but now each card completed would act as a space on a map that could be claimed. Mechanically, this worked fine, but players felt very disconnected, with little to no player interaction whatsoever.

The next version was where Brew began to take shape, and it's the base for what you see today. I remember this moment vividly because it felt like I had broken through. The game no longer felt like an exercise and began offering players meaningful decisions and interactions.

Keeping the dice-rolling and placement core, I scrapped the push-your-luck element and moved the area majority from a separate board to the cards themselves. I changed the gems from victory points to resources that could be spent on cards and provide "take-that" actions, dice manipulation, and additional scoring opportunities.

It was also at this stage of prototyping that the theme of "brewing potions" took shape. The goal in this version was to collect sets of the different types of forest cards (orange, teal, purple, maroon) by fighting for the majority of each card. The more of a specific type won, the more points you would earn at game's end. Collecting one of each would also score points. This scoring method stayed intact for several versions before ultimately being replaced with a simplified option. Players also had small objectives worth points once achieved.

While this was a major improvement from the previous version, something was still missing. Three- and four-player games played out fine, but two-player games lacked the same tension. To address this problem, I added a new die type that both simulated a third player and served as a "wild" die. This change also allowed me to incorporate a series of worker placement spaces in the form of tiles. These were separate from the cards players were fighting to claim and acted as additional, more powerful actions.

With the additional dice and new worker placement spaces, gameplay really opened up. It was a pleasant surprise when these dice improved the three- and four-player experience as well. Allowing players more options, they would choose between using their wild dice to cause havoc in the forest, or use special actions on the worker placement spaces.

After about eight months of iterations and playtesting locally at Unpub, PAX, and BGG.CON, I felt comfortable with the idea of pitching Brew to publishers. A few months after I submitted my sell sheet, Jon Gilmour from Pandasaurus Games responded to my submission. In November 2018, we met at PAX Unplugged and played Brew. I was pleasantly surprised when he asked to keep the prototype for further review. The following January at PAX South, I played once again with Pandasaurus owners Nathan and Molly. Soon after, Brew was signed!

Brew went into development later in 2019, at which point Jon Gilmour and I began working together. It was during this time that the creatures were introduced into the game, serving as an alternate route within the core loop. Major adjustments during development with Jon included balancing of forest cards, player abilities, potion powers, creature powers, endgame scoring, and a handful of other tweaks.

While development continued on with Jeff Fraser, I began focusing more heavily on the graphic design and art direction alongside Nathan and Molly. I ran across Jake Morrison's art on Instagram and immediately fell in love with his work. His style and imagination brought this game to life and provided a whimsical look that really stands out. I worked directly with Jake to establish the world, and we took a "sprite sheet" approach to the illustrations, similar to what one might do when creating an isometric video game.

With this method, I was able to make unique scenes for each forest card. The creatures and potions took on a similar approach. Jake created a set of base illustrations, then added additional features to make each creature feel unique and match the actions of the cards. This also allowed us to make additional content as needed. Andrew Thompson was later brought on to help finish out some creatures and details with the world.

Brew has been on a long journey, and it wouldn't have been possible without the support and hard work of my family, friends, playtesters, and coworkers. I cannot be more pleased with how the game has turned out, and I'm excited for folks to get their hands on Brew!

Stevo Torres