by Renato Luís Simões Silva

FlipToons was one of Thunderworks Games' releases for Gen Con 2025. It is a small-box, fast-paced, deck-building game, with a lot of thrilling moments for 1-4 players, created in Brazil by Jordy Adan (the author of Cartographers) and me, Renato Simões. Although you probably haven't heard of my games, I've been designing and publishing board games in Brazil for over ten years.

Although Jordy and I once lived in the same building for a while, these days we live over 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) apart, so the majority of our work together is done through Tabletop Simulator, but about six times a year, we get together for gatherings and conventions such as SPIEL Essen or Brazil's Diversão Offline — and it was during a car ride, after one day of Diversão Offline 2024, that we started discussing the game that came to be FlipToons.

First Sparks

Jordy and I have been friends for a long time now, and we have worked together before, mainly on Ozob: A Cyberpunk Board Game. During that work on Ozob, we even created a board game studio called UaiPiá to hold our creations.

When we design games together, we usually lose focus several times a day and start creating new games from scratch — or just start talking about games, whether tabletop or digital, that are exciting to us. It was during one of those times that Jordy introduced me to this hidden gem mobile game called Luck Be a Landlord (LBaL), a solo roguelike slot-machine builder.


LBaL is simply brilliant. You start with a set of icons on your slot machine, and you get points depending on their interaction once the slot machine gets rolled. There are plenty of different builds and game scales, so you have to build a consistent, high-scoring set of icons, but the magical part is that once you add those icons to your pool, you don't actually know how they are going to be displayed, so your scoring can vary widely depending on how consistent your build is.

Other than LBaL, we were also very into Challengers! What a unique and courageous design — a perfect implementation of auto-battlers in board games.

Last but not least, we wanted to create a game using numbered animals like a well-known Brazilian illegal lottery game called Jogo do Bicho. This game features a table of numbered animals and is very influential in mass culture in Brazil. For example, whenever the underdog wins a soccer game, we usually say "Zebra!" because there is no zebra in Jogo do Bicho, so the outcome wasn't expected.

Here is the infamous table of numbered animals made popular by Jogo do Bicho:


With these influences in mind, we set off to create a slot machine-like deck-building game, using animals and red numbers to create a central deck from which you can buy cards for your own deck. Why use this theme? Well, limiting ourselves to 25 animals seemed like a good way to keep the scope of the game within reason, and using animals was a good way to focus our creativity. We were able to use each animal's strength and power to sort them by rank, so each card could easily be compared to one another.

The Cards

The first two effects we created were for the ostrich, which can be ridden, and the monkey, which views the forest from the treetops. We translated the ostrich's ability to be ridden as "Worth 1 Gold and reveal a card and place it on top of the ostrich", scoring both and leaving the next slot still empty. The monkey's effect was "Worth 3 Gold, and if revealed on the top row, goes to an extra slot one row above". This effect leaves the original slot of the monkey empty and could bring even more variety of synergistic effects from other animals.

Creating effects like these is one of the most fun elements of designing games. Creating simple systems that generate interesting interactions among the different cards is really rewarding.

Early version of the lion: 3 gold + 4 gold if it is the highest ranked animal in your grid
Early version of the cow: Gain the sum of gold from all adjacent cards
We also had to design the starting decks. There was no equivalent to these in Jogo do Bicho, so Jordy, being the unique guy he is, thought it was a good idea to create the decks using our own faces and names. The starting decks were made of 3x Jordys, 2x Leos (for Leo Almeida, a game designer friend of ours, who you might know for Masters of the Universe and other CMON games, such as God of War: The Board Game), and 1x Renato.


Imagine buying a butterfly to dismiss a Jordy for less gold! We had such a blast playtesting and designing FlipToons. Even with starting cards without our faces, we were able to create the experience we were aiming for.

The Phases of the Game and the Market

Even in its first playtests, FlipToons had a strong structure. We already had a simultaneous flip phase, the following market phase, then the clean-up. The objective was defined early as well: Whoever gets first to 30 gold wins!

The market phase was a challenge. We were aiming to see rapid gold growth during the flip phase, so the market should be an important part of the game, but not simply reward the player who had an insanely good flip sooner than others. The solution? Each player may perform up to two market actions, choosing between buying an animal in the market or trashing a card from their grid for 5 gold. It is not always a simple choice whether to buy two new animals in the market or to keep your deck thin enough to make sure you know which animals are going to be in your grid in later rounds.

Prices in the market were finalized in the first playtest. At the time, we didn't bother to create actual cards showing prices. Instead, we used the pen tool on Tabletop Simulator to write the prices on the table. We use that tool a lot in our design process as it allows us to make changes quickly when iterating on the design.

We spent a couple of days testing the game and making it better. Some of the things we tried did not make it into the final version of the game, and I think that's for the best. Many of our experiments added more rules, without necessarily adding more fun. One of the main things we tried was including 4-5 alternative market actions that changed every game.


In the image above, you can see, from left to right:

• Costs 9: Discard all cards in the market and refill it.
• Costs 5: Trash a card. (This is the standard market action for trashing cards, but at this point, we needed a reminder since there were so many other possible market actions.)
• Costs 12: Trash 2 cards from your grid.
• Costs 8: Hire the top card from the deck.
• Costs 6: Discard 2 cards from the market and refill it.
• Costs 16: Look at the top 3 cards from the deck and keep one.

In every game, the "Trash a card" was available, as well as one of the others. This set-up added some fun but not much, so these were cut.

The Art Style and Brazil

We were so excited about FlipToons that we sent sell sheets to potential publishers within ten days of when we started the game's design. At that time, we understood that the name we were using for the game, "Jogo do Bixo", was relevant only to Brazilians, and we should choose another one. Somehow, we got to "Unlucky Animals" and went with that one.

But changing the game's name wouldn't prevent us from putting more Brazilian pop culture influence into it. When we started planning the art style and setting of the game, it was clear to us that we should aim for a 1950s animation style, or perhaps even earlier, as Jogo do Bicho became popular in the early twentieth century. We based our mood board on a popular TV character in Brazil, the lovable rascal Agostinho Carrara (right). The mood board looked like this:


It was only natural that the video game Cuphead would come to mind as well, so we also used it as inspiration.


After that, we made a temporary example of how we envisioned the cards to show publishers, and we delivered the PNP files to them to try it out.


We were so excited about the gameplay that the entire design process described above was completed in 3~4 weeks as we couldn't stop thinking about the game.

Thunder Comes In, and Works It Out

Although we made the mood board and art-style suggestions for the game, we were in such a rush that this was the sell sheet we sent out:


As soon as we presented the game to publishers, we started receiving feedback, and it was mainly positive — but Keith Matejka, Thunderworks' founder and future FlipToons' game developer, believed in the game right away, and we thought it was a good chance to work with Thunderworks. For me, it was my first opportunity to work with them, but Jordy has been working with Thunderworks for many years with both Cartographers and Stonespine Architects.

Once Keith started developing the game, it was clear that his contributions and Thunderworks' expertise as a whole were indispensable. They introduced the idea of a "final flip" — one last round after a player had reached 30 gold — as the game could end too suddenly. The final flip brought even more excitement and tension to the game. Nowadays, I can't imagine the game without it. They also wanted to add a mini-expansion, showing how much they believed in the project, so the Big Button came to life. This was an early version we tried out:


This went on for a few weeks, and at the same time, the Thunderworks team was also working on the game's art. They are really good at this. Even when we were creating the mood board, we couldn't imagine how great the artwork would become.

The first thing they did was hire Diego Sá, an experienced and talented Brazilian artist. Couldn't ask for more! After all, FlipToons came into existence because of our Brazilian background, so nothing better than a talented Brazilian artist to understand and deliver on that. Diego illustrated the game with artwork that is appealing to a wide range of people, not only Brazilians, while keeping our initial concept of wacky, mischievous, and cute animals.


During development, Thunderworks added the cartoon casting theme. This combines the mechanisms, the animals, and the phases of the gameplay with a nostalgic and heart-warming theme. I loved it.

The Waiting Part

Creating games is creative work, but it is also a matter of patience and calm. Sometimes, the initial creative design process and the game's actual publication are years apart — but sometimes the right game and the right publisher create a perfect storm, and it simply happens fast. From the first spark of design inspiration to FlipToons' release at Gen Con 2025, approximately fourteen months has passed. This is not a long time, but the heart wants what the heart wants, right?

We were excited about everything happening with FlipToons, so not spreading the word was a real challenge. Thunderworks wanted to keep the game a secret until right before release, so we had to keep many of the details about the game a secret. We tried to focus on other game designs and other things we were doing, so the waiting wouldn't be so bad...

Finally, on July 1, 2025, the wait was over, and we could finally talk about FlipToons, our most anticipated game, and the one we keep playing ourselves, even several months after working so hard on its design. The game debuted at Gen Con 2025 and should be available at stores in mid-September 2025.

Fortunately, I had the chance to attend Gen Con 2025 and got to work demoing the game, as well as explaining the rules to several attendees. It was a blast! One remarkable moment during the convention was when I was grabbing a bite at the Steak 'n Shake near the convention center, and some people were playing FlipToons right there on the table behind me. I asked them if I could take a picture, and they kindly allowed it. Thank you, guys! Sorry for the lack of ability to take good photos though...


If you got to this point, thank you so much for taking the time to read this designer diary. Thanks to those who bought, tried, or even just stopped by Thunderworks' booth during Gen Con 2025, and also to those who pre-ordered the game. Hope you guys are having flipping fun!

Renato Simões