Designer Diary: Dollars to Donuts, or Pulling Back the Curtain (of Icing)

Hi, everyone! Patrick Kapera from Crafty Games here. We have a special behind-the-scenes look at Dollars to Donuts to share with you today. This collection of articles was originally presented in four updates for our Kickstarter campaign. Minor edits have been made to collect everything in one place.

The Origins of Dollars to Donuts
By Shawn Stankewich, Flatout Games

The story of Dollars to Donuts starts at the same place as the story of Flatout Games. In early 2017, a group of friends got together to start a board game design collaborative. At the time, we didn't really know what that meant or how far it would go, but the first order of business was to design a board game.

In the beginning, Dollars to Donuts was an idea for a spatial puzzle game. Plenty of spatial puzzle games were using polyominoes at the time, and games like Patchwork were becoming massive hits. They were certainly some of our favorite games! The genesis of the design idea was that lots of polyomino games are about filling space efficiently, but the adjacencies of the tiles aren't as important as they were in other tile-laying games like, say, Carcassonne. That gave us an idea: What if there was a pattern-matching game that had relatively uniform tile shapes, but was about creating matches by lining up tiles? The basic idea for Dollars to Donuts was born.

The first prototype of the game took a very simple concept: colored half-circles that you would try to match up to gain tiddly winks of the same color. After the first playtest, we asked what should happen when you mismatch the tiles. What happens then?

At the time, it wasn't clear how players would get tiles. We initially had a simple market of 4-5 tiles from which to choose — but when mismatching provided another "vector" for the game, the "dollars" economy came to be. Match to earn points, and mismatch to earn money.

But why would you need money? Well, maybe that's how you obtain the tiles!

After a few more playtests, the core gameplay started to solidify. It was a fun little puzzle game, trying to match up these crudely drawn circles and earn as many points as possible. By then it was time to take the game to the next level, and part of that was finding a theme to match the mechanisms. Why are we matching these half-circles? Who are we, and what are we doing?

What are the half-circles matching to create? Beach balls? Rings? Pizzas? What about donuts? We played with some early graphic concepts with donuts, and we really liked how it fit. Then we thought: You could be baking a beautiful donut display! This theme and the economy led to the game's title: Dollars to Donuts. That's what you're doing in the game as well — turning your earned dollars into delicious donuts. It's alliterative, it's an expression, it's short, and it's sweet. It checked all the boxes. Dollars to Donuts it was!

Over the course of about a year, Dollars to Donuts saw countless playtests with hundreds of different people, from our local Seattle playtest groups to folks in Manitoba and all the way to Gen Con in Indianapolis. The size of the board changed, the endgame triggers changed, we added customers to the mix, we added bag-drawing and bonuses on the dollar tokens... It all evolved and came together through design iteration, and we were really happy with the result.

What started off as an abstract and mechanical piece completely transformed once we had the right theme. That's what brought the rest of the design together and gave us the focus needed to develop the simple, yet challenging puzzle you see today!

Dollars to Donuts: Tiles & Odds
By Shawn Stankewich, Flatout Games

In Dollars to Donuts, players purchase donut tiles from the specials board to construct their donut display. In some tile-laying games, all tiles might be created equal, with similar overall value. In Dollars to Donuts, because of the way that players gain their tiles, we thought it would be important to incorporate some differential value to the tiles themselves.

We did this with really simple math: We assigned a "value" to each tile based on the type of donut halves it contains. We assigned 1 pt per plain, 2 pts per chocolate, and 3 pts per sprinkle, which aligns with the values of victory points in the game. For the jelly-filled donuts, we revisited the tiles once we had all of our permutations completed and added them in, being careful not to inflate the value of each tile. We avoided this by taking out a valuable donut half in order to add the jelly.

We played around with different ideas, but landed on six donut halves per tile because it meant that out of the ten possible orientations, over half of them would have some sort of donut on them. This also gave us plenty of permutations we could use to construct different tiles.

Then we looked at the range of values we wanted the tiles to have. We landed on a range of 9 to 12, then used this range to determine which donut halves would be present on each tile. You can count out the values when you're playing to test this formula yourself. The value of all tiles should be in that range.

Because the spatial puzzle is complex, we knew we could add a value range to give us lots of options for unique tiles while still making each tile valuable depending on the states of the player mats. This is something we usually refer to as "differential valuation". A tile that is really good for me because of my spatial circumstances might actually have less overall value.

Spatial puzzles very rapidly lead to differential valuation, which is why they're great in market/drafting games. It creates interesting tension between players.

We also had to consider probability and EV metrics for the contents of the bag. Sixty dollar tokens are in the bag at any time, each displaying a dollar bill on one side. This indicates each dollar tile is worth $1 toward the purchase of donut tiles from the specials board.

Midway through design of the game, we added donut halves and donut holes to the back side of some dollar tiles so that they could be used to fill gaps on your player mat. This added another layer of strategy to the game, making it an even crunchier puzzle!

How did we find the best proportions for these tokens? It was a little bit of intuition, a little bit of math, and a little bit of testing. We knew that players needed to start out a game with a certain number of these tiles, but we didn't want set-up to vary between player counts, so the number of tiles in the bag had to be fixed.

When you earn money with mismatches, you draw tiles from the bag. The odds of you getting certain types of bonuses change throughout the game, while also being based on the player count. The bag contains 20 plain donut holes, 12 chocolate donut holes, 8 sprinkle donut holes, 7 plain donut halves, 3 double plain donut halves, 5 chocolate donut halves, 1 double chocolate donut half, 3 sprinkle donut halves, and 1 jelly filled donut half for a total of 60 tiles.

At the start of a four-player game, 16 of the plain donut holes and 4 of the chocolate donut holes are removed from the bag and given to the players. This means that your odds of pulling one of these tiles at the start of the game are quite low — only 4 in 40, or 10%.

As the game progresses, it is likely players will spend their tokens with plain donut holes because those are the least valuable. Other tokens will usually be kept to fill gaps on player mats. This means that there is an ever-shifting probability of getting any bonus token throughout the course of the game.

In general, you are more likely to pull dollars early in the game. However, as you play there will be fewer overall tiles in the bag, making it easier to calculate the odds of seeing a particular bonus tile that has not been drawn.

This variable probability for bag draws is another design decision we made near the midway point of the design process. The added variety of tiles in the bag added a degree of randomness to the game, but it also brought players great joy and let players master another part of the rules through experience.

The Development of Dollars to Donuts
By Patrick Kapera, Crafty Games

Dollars to Donuts came to us as a fully formed game. Even the initial prototype was polished, with customer cards that were pretty close to what we wound up with in the final draft.

These were originally poker-sized; we'll swing back around to this below

In terms of structure, theme, and content, there wasn't much development to be done. We did look into ways the game could be expanded in the early days, which led to the three mini-expansions offered in the Deluxe Upgrade. Mostly though, our development cycle was about character, style, and illustration.

The High Concept

We started as we always do, with a moodboard. For those unfamiliar, a moodboard is a collection of web links, images, graphic samples, and other bits and pieces collected together on a single page and used for inspiration. The Dollars to Donuts moodboard focused primarily on unusual donuts, minimalist art styles, and links to shops we felt had a unique identity.

When Dylan Mangini came on, this was one of his first points of contact. We gave him access to our moodboard and asked him to contribute. We jammed for a while with no particular aesthetic in mind.

Eventually we landed on a vibe we liked and felt was under-represented in donut games — the quirky hipster scene in the Pacific Northwest, and especially the "food cart to brick-and-mortar specialty shops" that have become so common in the area. This was a primary influence for the customer art that's in the game now, and it directly led to the original cover for the game.

The Cover & the Logo

These two were developed side by side and went through a ton of iteration, more than any other part of the game. The cover is actually the only element that wound up getting a full visual reboot, which is why we have two entirely different pieces of cover art, one of which is featured on the inside of the box lid.

The original cover was conceived as a snapshot of our high-concept donut shop, with a line of customers waiting to order some tasty treats. We considered a bunch of variations, which you can see here.

Check out the upper left image. At one time, the logo was like a crossword puzzle!

This version of the cover didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons, most importantly because it was too busy and didn't speak directly about the game. These two realizations led to the cover we have now, which is bolder and simpler and which visually illustrates the game's core mechanism: matching and mismatching donuts! We also think it will pop out much more easily on game and store shelves, which is a huge plus.

The logo also went through a number of early drafts before we landed on the price tag version. Here are some of the early standouts:

Note the green in many of these logos. That was a persistent effort to incorporate the color of dollars into the actual word. It never quite stuck, but there was this very late version of the base game cover...

The Specials Board

This is one of the components that changed the most from the initial prototype. Here's what it looked like when we first received the game, before the high concept was even a consideration:

Fortunately, the specials board came together quickly and easily once we applied our theme. In fact, it was close to final with Dylan's very first iteration! This comes down to a strong, clear vision. Chalkboard menus are ubiquitous in the scene we're emulating, and the idea that tiles would be presented as "fresh" donuts at the $5 side and "less fresh" as they slid to the right was perfect.

There were still a couple versions, each focused on the chalkboard headers:

There was also a very different version of the solo mode reference on the specials board back side. It was quickly nixed for the one we have now because we couldn't bring ourselves to cover up all those lovely donuts in the cases. Plus, Dylan came up with a way to present the effects of the AI bag draws with a simple visual language that didn't intrude over any other graphics. It's always great when you can improve clarity and appeal at the same time!

The Customer Deck

I mentioned above that the customer cards were originally poker-sized. This was true all the way through illustration:

Can you spot the problem? It became evident to us as we started playing with the illustrated cards that everything was just too crowded. There was technically enough room for the victory tokens, but they had to nudge right up against each other. The names and neighborhood logos were bunched into a tiny area and hard to read, and the quotes couldn't go beyond a few words in length.

This is what led to us choosing tarot-sized cards. This addressed all the issues at once and still made sure the cards fit in a common sleeve size.

The rest of the visual development for the customer cards focused on a few small changes that had a huge impact. Shawn pressed for the white borders and strips behind the victory token spaces, and he recommended the faded treatment to help identify that tokens are meant to lay there.

We went through quite a few different background colors, but once we settled on the neighborhood names and logos, the backgrounds were finalized to match:

The customer card backs were one of the last things we worked on, and the development cycle for them was very short. You can see the first try to the left above. It was too loud, drawing a lot of attention for a component that should almost fade into the background during play. We dabbled with the green version in the middle before deciding on the blue patterned back on the right.

The Tiles & Tokens

This was the second heaviest lift during development due to the high number of variables we were juggling at once. We needed to make sure the tiles and tokens not only looked good on their own, but that they looked good against a common background pattern and that they looked good when laying on all four player mat colors.

This led to a dizzying array of combinations:

You can see in the last few of these that by the end we had settled on pale green as the background color, but there were still many versions ahead of us at this point. We debated whether to have an underlying pattern and how busy it should be, and when we settled on having a pattern, we debated whether it should be more like green static or multi-color "confetti". In the end, we fell somewhere in the middle, with a pale green background not unlike some common kitchen counters.

We also had to get the donuts right! The three lowest-value donuts were always plain, chocolate, and deluxe sprinkle in that order, but the highest-value donut was originally a cruller. However, that was too close to plain, even with the twists, so we had to come up with something else.

We initially felt this would be our best chance to go with a truly original donut creation, something we sometimes find after wandering into quirky shops in the Pacific Northwest. We talked about donuts with bacon on them (the visual wasn't obvious enough), whipped cream on top (an idea we saved for the milkshakes mini-expansion), candy or cereal fried into a white-glazed donut, and more.

The rainbow phase! Oy...

You can see some of the evolution of our other donuts in these images as well

In time, we settled on blue as the best color for our special donut, primarily because we knew it would stand out well. We also decided our special donut wouldn't have a hole. These two elements ensured the special donut would stand out on tiles, tokens, and player mats — but we now had another problem...

Jelly-filled donuts typically have only one color across the whole top, a decoration of some kind, or a pattern made of icing. We decided on icing, but we needed the design to work on half and full donut illustrations. Enter our symmetrical piping period! (It was a little like Picasso's Blue Period, but with deep-fried delicacies.)

With #6 Reflected, we finally had our special jelly-filled donut. There was still one more hair-raising moment in the development of the donuts, and it came when we started taking bites out of our treats for the victory tokens:

That blue jelly tongue still haunts us some nights... The horror... The horror...

Alongside all of this, we were cooking up the graphics for the donut holes. These started out as coffee cups in the original prototype:

We liked the idea of coffee well enough, but felt it didn't sync terribly well with the rest of the tiles and tokens, so we shifted gears and looked for an alternative. Someone suggested donut holes, and we were immediately sold. Not only did they fit with the rest of the things you were playing with — they were literally filling holes on your player mat!

This presented us with an opportunity to diversify the contents of the dollar bag and offer a more interesting path to scoring these filler tokens. We went from one token type to three, so the donut holes could correspond to each of the three lowest-value donuts (plain, chocolate, and deluxe sprinkle). Now the donut holes were progressively rarer and more valuable!

Dylan placed the holes on plates and grouped them in sets of three. Here are some of the other variations he presented:

The Player Mats

The prototype player mats had darker colors and frames. We lightened the colors and eventually removed the frames to reinforce the idea that you can play tiles off the edges:

The Mini-Expansions

The donut holes weren't the only mechanical design after we acquired the game. The mini-expansions also arrived during this period. At first, we had only the milkshakes expansion, and all shakes were vanilla. Development of the donut holes led to chocolate and strawberry and gave us parallel rarity and value in our first mini-expansion.

Some of the milkshakes were originally topped with whipped cream, a holdover from development of the special donut. This didn't last long because whipped cream disappears on a vanilla shake, especially on a single 1x1 tile. From there, it was just about finding the right glass type:

VIPs and merch each came about because we had interesting mechanisms to use.

With the VIPs, we knew we could make certain customers a little more valuable when counting neighborhood bonuses. This quickly evolved into the thought that players were identifying these customers as special members of their communities. We toyed with all sorts of titles here: Mayor, Councillor, Food Critic, Star Athlete, Philanthropist, and more.

The biggest visual hurdle with these was fitting both the VIP type and the neighborhood on a single 1x1 token, while also making the tokens color-blind friendly. Dylan moved through a few versions that didn't pass muster along the way:

Merch started its life as something entirely different. We originally conceived it as customer pets, but switched gears to better support how the tokens are used. Merch supports the idea that you're promoting or reinvesting in your shop's brand, which aligns well to the two ways you can spend these tokens in the game.

No intermediary graphics exist for the merch expansion because Dylan wisely held off until we'd settled the debate over the mini-expansion's theme — then he aced the visuals in one go because he's awesome.

]Bonus! The Starting Player Marker

We (briefly) considered a number of designs for this bonus item:

Thanks for joining us on this foray into game design and development. We hope you enjoyed the read! Stay Crafty!