by Rodrigo Rego

By Rodrigo Rego and Danilo Valente

Hello, folks! This is the diary of how Abroad came to be. It was a long and ambitious journey, so there is much to talk about. We decided to split it into sections so that it's easier to read and each of us could write about the topics we cherish the most. Hope you enjoy the read!

1. The Why

Rodrigo: I love card-driven, tableau-building games like Ark Nova, Wingspan, and Terraforming Mars.

Many of those have taken the board game world by storm when they were released, and I think it's because they offer a ton of variability with a relatively small set of rules.

Since each card has a unique effect, you can keep the game structure concise and load all the complexity that makes Euros so tasty into those cards. With the 200+ cards these games usually have, you can guarantee that you will always have a very different challenge.

Hold that thought for a moment now.

If you are a BGG worm, you might have heard of this new wave of Brazilian games hitting the market over the last year or so. Games like World Wonders, Comic Hunters, Brazil, and Video Game Champion. Well, I'm Brazilian, so I knew many of them as prototypes even.

I wondered why these games specifically were successful — besides the fact that they are excellent, of course. I think it comes down to them all having aspirational themes.

By that, I mean those games are not only deeply thematic, but they also resonate with the players on another level; you feel like you're doing something that you would love to be doing.

▪️ Comic Hunters and Video Game Champion both grab players by nostalgia. They allow us to revive that time when we searched for comics in second-hand bookstores or when we spent all day taking down enemies in the 8-bit video games of the 1990s.

▪️ Brazil (the game) allowed us to be proud of our country. It's a game that celebrates Brazilian history as a whole and tells the world that it is as relevant and eventful as any other country. Maybe it didn't make a big splash abroad, but it was a HUGE hit in Brazil.

▪️ And finally, World Wonders let us visit all the great monuments mankind has created...and rebuild them with amazing wooden minis.

So I decided to make a card-driven tableau building game with an aspirational theme. I just had no ideas for how to combine those two.

2. The Idea

Rodrigo: In March 2023, my wife and I took a three-week trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. It was a very complex trip to plan: which destinations we prioritize and which we have to give up, how do we reconcile destinations we want to visit but are far from each other, how to reach them, where to stay, how to save money, how to save time and energy.

It's an optimization game; I just didn't realize it at the time — but during the trip itself, when my mind was clear from work and all daily chores, the idea came during a sleepless night, while still fighting jet lag:

Your trip has four weeks — 28 days! — and each destination needs you to spend a specific number of days, which are discs you place in the region where the destination is located. At the end of each week, we score majorities in each region.

Cards also give you a lot of meaty stuff: tags, resources like money, energy and friends, and ways to score victory points.

One of the first boards — and though the map didn't change much, everything else around it did
3. The Proposal

Rodrigo: I'm mostly a designer of small games. I felt extremely unsure starting a game of such magnitude alone. (Designing two hundred different cards? I design trivia games, for Christ's sake. That's way out of my comfort zone.)

As soon as I got home, I messaged Danilo Valente about this idea. We had just finished designing our first game together — Landmarks, a word-association game from Floodgate Games — and I enjoyed working with him a lot. He was also more used to designing big games than me. His game "MiscellaneOS" (still unreleased), designed with Pedro Latro, is an excellent, Yokohama-style heavy Euro.

Danilo turned me down. He said he didn't feel ready to tackle a game this big. It was a letdown — and also a wake up call: If the guy that likes big games isn't ready, am I going out of my league?

Well, I'm kind of stubborn when it comes to game design, with all that is good and bad that follows. I have a game I started eleven years ago. Still working on it. Should I? Of course not, and yet...

I decided to try working on it alone. I learned how to use nanDeck, software that makes iterating cards much easier. Printed the first batch of around fifty cards to play the first game. Played it with my wife, found many flagrant problems, changed it, played it again — you know the deal. For a few months, the game evolved very slowly.

Then around September, Danilo reached out to me. He asked me whether I was still interested, and yes, of course I was.

4. The Internal Pitch

Danilo: If there's one thing that sets my projects apart from other games released, it's theming. I'm weirdly more into artificial, industrial, space themes; I like things that are saturated and full of gears and moving parts.

Forgive me for not agreeing to work with Rodrigo on a game about traveling, but the idea of being a backpacker and visiting other countries hadn't captivated me enough at first. In addition, I had seen the giant spreadsheet of cards that he had already prepared and thought, "Do I even have room in this project? Can I even co-lab with anything?" It felt like the design was already well-established.

After a few months working on other stuff, I thought about it again, then reevaluated Rodrigo's proposal for two reasons:

1. First, our partnership on Landmarks was amazing, and the creative process was fluid and disciplined enough to make me believe that, in a few months, we would have (again) a really cool game.

2. In addition, it was an exercise in "thinking outside the box": I would work on a game that was denser than most of my projects, at a more advanced stage of development, with an appeal that wouldn't captivate me as much but that was certainly on the rise in the hobby.

So I contacted him, and he pitched me the game.

5. The (Familiar But Different) Partnership

Danilo: The game Rodrigo showed me was already functional and had all the elements you would expect from a tableau-building game. The main different things were:

▪️ The traveling system: You had a pawn that could stand still, spend energy to cross borders by train, or spend money to go anywhere by plane.

▪️ The 7x4 day system: You placed day tokens according to the card into your current region for area-majority scoring. After each player placed seven days, we'd score majorities in the regions. Do that four times, and the game is over.

▪️ Festivals: This was a simple but intriguing mechanism in which if you were in a specific region by the end of the week, you scored a few more points.

▪️ Friends: These are tokens you could additionally spend to earn a bonus according to the played card.

To be fair, the first few playtests felt like I was more of a playtester than a co-author: We adjusted basic balancing, improved the game flow by raising "how might we" questions, such as "how might we reduce randomness in card draws?", and tested a few new concepts.

I was already responsible for updating components as well, but aside from that, things were happening as if I were contributing to an almost finished game. I even felt like a developer, improving someone else's game, and not a co-author. One of my fears about working on this project was coming true...

6. The (Knock-It-All-Down) Development

Danilo: ...then something started happening, namely we took a few steps back. After each playtest, we would take turns pointing to one mechanism, saying "No, this isn't good enough", discussing that thing A LOT, and reworking it.

And this happened many, many times.

Festivals went from granting a bunch of VPs at the end of the week to providing a claimable passive effect during weekends.

Bucket lists went from weird scoring bonuses you could claim anywhere to real experiences (such as watching the Tour de France) you could acquire by visiting a region and having the needed requirements.

Postcards replaced the unstable "endgame scoring" cards from the main deck, allowing players to choose one postcard of three after performing an action, thus providing more control and varied strategies.

The thing is, Rodrigo had laid out a great foundation for a Eurogame. It had all the classic stuff: resources, game tracks, side actions, tag collection, objective cards. Adding known mechanisms to each part of the game and testing quickly, instead of trying to innovate in everything at the same time, is a great way to tackle such a complex project.

But we couldn't just stick with it. The game was already working, but it didn't offer anything new, game elements were quite disconnected, and you still had that generic Euro feeling of getting, converting, and spending resources into engines or VPs.

All of that was a real exercise in believing that "Okay is not good enough" for us. Things even heated up sometimes because it was hard to believe that something could be improved or that some weird solution could work out.

It was hammer time! We started fearlessly breaking down (then reconstructing) stuff, one mechanism per turn. Sometimes we tried 4-5 different alternatives, sometimes it became painful or frustrating for one (or both) of us, but it was always worth it by the end.

This process made me feel like a true collaborator and co-author of the game, and I was really enjoying designing and developing it.

Among the most abrupt changes we have made (and learned from!), we:

▪️ Placed stuff in the grid. Elements such as festivals and bucket lists were previously disconnected from the game, almost like a mini-expansion, so we placed them on the map itself. By the end, we had that beautiful map on the table center and less stuff adjacent to it.

▪️ Cleaned the board. To highlight even more the previous items, we moved as much stuff as possible from the board to somewhere else, while also streamlining them. Income tracks were inserted on player boards; alternative actions, such as not playing cards and instead earning money, were drastically simplified and removed from the board as well.

Final board as it will be published: only the map remains, with bucket lists, festivals, and other game elements now placed atop it instead of adjacent
▪️ Placed the cards somewhere. Cards were boringly splayed on the table after being played. We felt that they should also be part of the puzzle, so we decided players should place them on their calendar boards (which had been used only to store unused day discs). This added another puzzle to the game, while also helping you create a timeline of your trip: the sequence of places you visited over the four weeks.

The player board when Danilo joined: The calendar only stored unused day tokens, and each player had personal bucket lists and ways to get extra experience, a concept abandoned during development. Players could also pay to extend their trip a few more days.
The player board at the end of the project: Cards played now go on the calendar itself, allowing players to visualize their trip and adding one more dimension to puzzle with. Bucket lists are now actual things you can do on the main board, and the main board's income tracks were simplified and migrated to the player board.
▪️ End of the card market. If there's one thing I hate in card-driven games, it's the downtime needed for players to evaluate a parade of cards they can draft from the board. The first thing I suggested to Rodrigo was to get rid of them: all cards should be drawn from the top of the deck. How do you mitigate the luck factor? By making draws abundant enough. That's why we created plenty of opportunities to draw and discard in the game.

▪️ Simplified the cards. In our first games, location cards could have any kind of effect. Some had goals for endgame scoring, and they became the postcards; some had continuous effects, and they became the festivals; some allowed you to take a job and get money — yes, super dumb to attach an emergency action to cards that might not show up in your hand — and they became alternate actions. Now all cards have instant effects.

At left is a location card at the start of the project. Some things are similar: All cards belong to a region, and you must be there to play it. You must spend in your calendar the number of days indicated. All cards provide tags. But at the time, cards could have costs (the green horizontal bar, which we abolished) and each card had a friend effect (which also went to the main board). Cards with endgame and ongoing effects and cards that gave you money all became different things.
At right is a final location card. On top of stripping the cards of everything but instant effects, we added day effects — an extra effect you get only if you place that card on that day.
▪️ Played more with the game variables. Excitement (a resource that reduces the number of days a card requires) seemed quite weird at first (just allowing more turns during a week), but we added strategic layers to it after implementing weekday effects, calendar puzzle and festivals / bucket lists / friends requiring you to be somewhere specific.

▪️ Twisted the area-majority mechanism. One of the main challenges of this game was how to break the area-majority symmetry. Unlike most majority games, in Abroad the area-majority scoring triggers when all players have placed exactly seven days on the board, so the only variability is where these discs are located, not also how many have been placed.

We first tried to break this symmetry by introducing "knowledge" discs, a resource you could add to any region you "studied", adding to your presence there, but the area majority was still too predictable, no matter how much we changed how they worked.

After a while, we discarded that and went with insider tips that let you flip a day token anywhere to trump all other tokens there. Players loved the trumping twist, and you didn't have to fuss with stacking or counting tokens. This was a harsh suggestion by Rodrigo, and to be fair, it took me a while to embrace it.

Endgame state of a four-player game. Players have placed most of their 28 days on the map, but some were flipped to insider tips. On ZEN, blue is winning, even though they did not spend the most days there.
7. The External Pitch

Rodrigo: After six months of diligently working on the game, Abroad was ready in March 2024. We just needed to do the pitch material: PnP, video, rulebook, sell sheet. It was at that exact time that Julian and Roman from 1 More Time Games contacted me asking whether I had any new games to pitch.

I can claim to know 1 More Time Games well before they became famous with the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning Challengers! We met online in 2020 at the digital version of the SPIEL fair. I took advantage of the fact that I didn't need to travel to set up meetings with almost any publisher foolish enough to want to meet a rookie designer like me.

I showed them the game I've now been working on for eleven years — at that point it was only seven — and though there was no follow through, I think we clicked. They were transparent, light, honest, and serious — everything I hoped a publisher would be, so we kept in touch. I think I've pitched every game I have created since (except for trivia games), and boy are they picky. They found issues with every single one of them, but they did it through honest and clear feedback, so I persevered. I made it my mission to have a game published by 1 More Time at some point.

Funnily enough, when they contacted me, I was not thinking about showing them Abroad. I saw them as publishers of light games, like most of mine are, so it didn't feel like a good match.

The pitch was kind of hopeless — we didn't have any pitch material, remember — and was made with just a few phrases sent by Whatsapp and some screenshots...yet they asked to play online with us.

After that, they asked for a PnP. Then they asked for exclusivity on testing the game for one month. And finally, they wanted to publish it. The spell was broken. It must mean this game has something truly special.

8. What We Learned

Danilo: We were proud of what we had. Playtest feedback was phenomenal. A lifetime event had just happened: The game was signed by the first publisher who looked at it.

Condensing the main insights and learnings from this journey:

▪️ We designed and developed the game in six months because we had clear goals, iterated twice a week, and divided roles and responsibilities without overloading ourselves, but also without closing room for innovation.

▪️ We reviewed mechanisms even when they were working. During most of development, Abroad had an inventory system because we thought players could break the game by amassing resources — then we "risked it", playtested with this approach, and discovered that it is not a good strategy. There is almost no risk in testing an unknown concept in a board game. In a digital environment, changing something takes just a few minutes. Each unusual test could become one of our game's unique twists.

▪️ We had clear purposes for all mechanisms. Postcards allow outside-the-box thinking and secret scoring. Weekday effects reward timing and prioritization. Insider tips twist area-majority dynamics. We kept reflecting on why each mechanism existed and how it was created. This does not mean "keep iterating forever", but instead not letting the finished game be a measly proof of concept. You may even have two or more purposes per element, as long as you keep them crystal clear.

9. The End

So this is the story of Abroad, our most ambitious project to date, but due to collaboration and discipline, felt like our greatest achievement as game designers, even before it was signed by our dream publisher.

Hope you enjoyed the story! If you're interested, don't forget to check Abroad's BGG page and wishlist it. We are looking forward to hearing all of your travel stories about Europe and to which cities — aside from Essen, of course — you have been to or want to go next.