by Karl Lange

The Idea

In April 2017 at Incubator Melbourne, Australia – my local board game playtest event – I was testing a card game that had a "folding" mechanism in which you would flip a square card or stack of cards face to face onto an adjacent card, growing the size of the deck.

A good friend and fellow designer, Aaron Lim, mused that the action felt reminiscent of the video game Katamari Damacy. That got me thinking: How could I make a board game in which you roll a 3D object around, picking up items?

Magnets

As an engineer by trade, my mind immediately jumped to magnets. I went to work, raiding the fridge for old magnets and starting experiments with magnet and cardboard thickness to see how this could translate into a multi-player experience.

Leaning into the card game that spawned the idea, I decided to stick with square tiles stacked on top of each other and cubes with metal faces for the player pieces. Having the tiles stacked meant that the magnets needed to be strong enough to stick to the metal cube, but weak enough to not stick to each other.

Some of the first magnet samples I made
Magnetic sheet — the stuff fridge magnets are made from — has a very short magnetic field. The solution came from creating a tile with a thick enough cardboard back on the magnetic sheet to create enough separation that only one tile would be held on the metal cube — but with a thick enough magnet that the tile would hold onto the cube as it rolled around the table.

August 2017: first prototype mid production, with a roll of magnetic sheet attached to cardboard and with full-size sticker sheets for graphics
Gameplay

Most of my games start as a spreadsheet, and Octocube was no exception. I started with five items of increasing rarity in four background colors, giving me two axes to play with the scoring, in addition to coins creating a different path with which players could score.

The actions players could take — roll, pivot, score — never changed throughout the design, although the scoring went through multiple iterations.

To ensure there was an arc as the game progressed, I came up with multiple layers of scoring both mid- and endgame.

In the first prototype, midgame scoring had two parts: scoring points for each item you had collected (with rarer items being worth more points), and progressing along a track for each item if you collected sets of the same items (and the more items in the set, the further you moved).

August 2017: First public test at Incubator Melbourne, with an item track for the five items
The endgame scoring had three parts: the item tracks would give points to the player furthest along each track; the player with the majority of coins scored points; and each player scored points based on how many colors they had collected.

I quickly determined that having to take point tokens for every item and move along multiple tracks for sets was too much downtime during the scoring action, with lots of player pieces to track everything, taking players' attention away from the "fun" of manipulating their cube around the board.

The next iteration tightened the screws, removing the item track and changing the midgame scoring to points for sets of items each time you score (as in the now-published version) but with coins counting as wilds toward the sets. Endgame scoring had points for each item you had collected (that is, part of the previous midgame scoring), with players scoring points if they had the majority of each color (something that remained until the final version).

September 2017: Playtest of the second version
This was starting to work well. The coins being wild worked, yet added complexity to the scoring actions and was not well balanced across the items. Having all items score points at the end of the game didn't really change the overall scores as you were already scoring the sets, so this was on the chopping block for the next version.

One interesting thing I observed was a player placing all of their collected tiles in a grid, with colors on one axis and items on the other. This led to the creation of the player board and scoring majorities on both axes.

The third iteration of the game, mechanically, was close to the final version you can see today. With the introduction of the player boards after the previous test, it was easy to have scoring of majority colors and majority items without players having to sort through their tiles at the end of the game. The player board was also a great visual indication of how everyone was doing as you could glance around and see "Oh, the player to my left has lots of footballs, but not many red", etc.

During the game, players scored points for sets of matching items picked up on their cube, and coins transitioned to straight points at the end of the game.

October 2017: Test of the third version at Incubator Melbourne
Countless playtests took place over the next two years, with an intricate balancing of points for sets, majorities, and the coins to get the scoring in the mid- and endgame feeling right. Ideally, players would be invested in both phases of play, with a pivot point from focusing on sets to focusing on majorities, somewhere just past the middle of the game.

The layout and number of the tiles on the table went through multiple changes, too, moving the higher stacks of tiles toward the middle of the board to create the feeling of a "sinking island" as the game progressed and players were forced together, increasing their interaction.

Under the Sea

As you might have noticed from the photos above, the game originally had an abstract theme, with players collecting trees, footballs, bicycles, game consoles, and gems. (Shout out to Game-icons.net.) After trying the prototype, a publisher suggested that the game needed a more compelling theme to be a viable product. This led to a number of possible re-theme options, from a robot in a factory collecting items, to a slime rolling around a dungeon collecting races and classes of adventures, and (of course) to an octopus collecting items under the ocean.

Ultimately, the octopus theme was chosen as it was the most family friendly and felt fresh. "Octopus Scramble" was born, and with the help of fellow designer Giles Pritchard, I had the new and improved octopus cubes ready to roll around under the sea.

Octopus cubes, with art courtesy of Giles Pritchard
The player boards became a view of the ocean from sand, to the shallows, to kelp/coral, and to the deep, with the items becoming more sea appropriate.

October 2019: Octopus version midgame at SPIEL '19
Cardboard Edison Award

In January 2021, after shopping the game around to publishers at a number of events and with many unanswered email submissions, I decided to enter "Octopus Scramble" into the Cardboard Edison Award, a yearly contest recognizing great unpublished board games.

To my surprise, "Octopus Scramble" was not only nominated as a finalist but tied for first place. This was an incredible honor and (I think) ultimately the recognition that got the game signed.

Youtube Video
Sit Down!

Shortly after co-winning the Cardboard Edison Award in May 2021, I had a friend suggest the game would fit well with Sit Down! and kindly gave me a contact email. After I sent them the pitch video used for Cardboard Edison, they promptly requested a physical prototype. After some short back and forth, the game was signed by the end of the year, with a planned release for 2025.

Jump forward to the start of 2024 and development of the newly named Octocube kicked off. I worked with Michaël Derobertmasure from Sit Down! to develop the game further, and with his lead, we tightened the tile layout in the starting set-up, added abyss tiles to maintain player movement all the way through to the final turn, created the abyss powers and promo tiles to add extra spice and variety to the game, and (my favorite thing) added the kids version to the game.

The kids version of the rules condenses the game to its simplest tactile form, while maintaining the core fun of the game: rolling around and collecting items under the ocean. In this version of the rules, players use the back of their player board and race to fill it by collecting one of each of the items shown with simplified movement rules (that remove rotate and allow placement on any face of your octopus). The first player to fill their board wins. This makes the game accessible to much younger players and is still really fun for more experienced gamers, too.

The prototype and final version of the kids player board
I can't end this diary without touching on the spectacular art by Clément Masson.

Clément did an amazing job capturing the feel of the game, from the player boards to the tiles and the cubes themselves. I especially love the box art with the cube of water and octopuses surrounding it, and the stylization of the "U" in Octocube as a magnet is incredibly clever.


To see something that I worked on for so long, with so many people's input, as a finished product is incredibly rewarding and what really makes designing games something that I love doing. My hope now is that the game can be enjoyed by people the world over.

Thanks for reading,
Karl Lange