by Mike Petty

For over twenty years, I've taken a "small-batch" approach to publishing my games. When most self-publishers risked the cost of large professional print runs and others pitched to publishers* — and even when crowdfunding burst through as another option about ten years in — it's been my habit to push out my games in small numbers and see whether they catch on organically. The hope is they will do so and eventually catch the attention of a larger publisher.

It's a slow path, and most games never reach beyond my hand-assembled copies. What's It to Ya? did years ago. I still get a couple of royalty checks each year from the Korean version of that game, so I keep at it.

My latest production has been O-Zone and its various spin-offs, one being the subject of this design diary.

Building on Recent Success

Since even the original O-Zone is mostly unknown, and it is so closely related to Pirate O-Zone, please allow me a few paragraphs about that game and its recent history.

In August 2024, I redesigned the graphics for O-Zone, a dice dexterity game I made a decade prior. I hadn't changed the rules in years, but I still considered it a prototype. I printed one copy with the new look at The Game Crafter and tried it out at a local game group. The new graphics and fun gameplay sparked something special that night, and I've been keeping the fire going ever since.

O-Zone is a team game in which players toss their dice down the table toward the targets. They score for landing on targets or being closest to them. Scores are a combination of planting the die in the right place and the result rolled on the die. That extra luck factor makes for some high-fives or groans, but landing in a good place is more important than the value of the die.

O-Zone is a perfect fit for small-batch publishing as it consists of just ten six-sided dice in two colors and some round target cards.

My wife and I (sometimes with the help of the whole family) assemble each copy by hand. We piece together the cards printed at The Game Crafter and other components from any reasonably priced sources we can find. We print our box covers and bottoms at Office Depot, cut them out, and paste them on boxes.


Through the holidays and continuing through 2025, O-Zone became the best selling game I've produced this way. Granted, it's a small operation and "best-selling" isn't saying much. A good week for me is when I send out a couple dozen games (not hundreds) to a retailer — but having people buy my game, then come back to buy more for gifts was exciting!

Inevitably, I started thinking up new themed versions of O-Zone. I set a goal to make a new edition each month of 2025.

As you can guess, that was overly ambitious! Publishing small runs lets me try products quickly without investing a ton of money. Still, I found out by my second new edition that I couldn't keep up that pace. I certainly could tweak the rules and make a fun new variation every month, but I couldn't finish the art, lay out the assets, and write the rules — all while keeping up with sales of my other products.

So even with a lot of ideas already in my notes, and just building off a simple existing game, it still took about four months to take Pirate O-Zone from the first playtest to a final product.

Design Goals for New Editions of O-Zone

My goal with each O-Zone is to introduce the simple gameplay to a particular audience through the theme, but it has to be more than new graphics on the box and new targets. I want to provide a related twist on the basic scoring or other rules. Most importantly, every new edition still has to allow players to play the original O-Zone, which is now called Classic O-Zone. I always aim to make small box games with a low price. O-Zone sells for $10 or less, and it comes in a small 3.5" square box. To keep that up, the new editions have to have mostly the same components as Classic O-Zone.

The previous editions have been great for casual gamers. (As long as one player in the group knows how to score it, it takes about two seconds to learn how to play O-Zone: "Toss this die toward those targets".) For this latest edition, I wanted it to appeal to more serious gamers as well. I decided it would be the first of many in a popular genre. I already had notes for a possible fantasy version, the old west, and sci-fi, but pirates sounded most fun.

It is also a goal to work with other designers on some of the new editions. My friend and fellow game designer, Lee Keiser II, had been working on several pirate games over the past year, so I asked whether he'd come along on this project.

Setting Sail

In late January 2025, Lee and I met at the Games4Life game store in Lake Orion, Michigan. The store owner always encourages playtesting there, and in fact, that's where Lee and I first met, in 2019. (And Games4Life was the first shop to stock O-Zone.)

I had rough ideas of what a pirate edition of O-Zone could look like, but I kept them to myself. I wanted to hear Lee's thoughts. We played a round of Classic O-Zone, then we started brainstorming.

Almost immediately Lee suggested the teams should toss dice from opposite ends of the table, fighting for control of islands in the center. This was a simple change, and in time I realized it does little more than shorten the distance from player to target, but it was the kind of fresh twist I was looking for. It definitely gave the feel of a head-to-head battle at sea.

Two players face off from ends of the table during our first public playtest

In classic Lee fashion, he also constantly pressed for more meaningful choices. That led to a lot of discussion about how dice (which we decided should represent ships) gain control of the islands to score points (doubloons).

Landing a die on the island was best, of course, but we decided being "within range" should also provide some influence. We set the range at one league, which we defined as the width of the box. Again, we're limiting components so it all fits in that tiny box.

I eventually interjected one of my early ideas for a pirate edition. Players should have one twelve-sided die that represents a cannonball. After all ships have sailed for the round, teams would get a chance to fire their cannonball. Lee suggested the value of the roll, plus where it landed, could sink enemy ships before control of the islands was determined.

Deciding where to fire that cannonball appeased Lee's need for choices. We came up with some (in retrospect) convoluted rules that day about who fires first, how ships sink, and how it all affects scoring. Hammering that out would prove to take a lot more work, but the system was clearly fun and unique. I left convinced Pirate O-Zone would be the next edition.

Further Tests and Changes

Being an easy game to test solo, I zeroed in on the rules I liked by playing rounds against myself. Sometimes my wife joined in as well.

We tested the game in public at our Oxford, Michigan game group in March. Shout out to those many helpful friends there who have put up with a lot of my ideas over the past two years! (Truth be told, I started the Oxford gaming group so that I could playtest more often. I'm glad so many people enjoy the group beyond my original goal.)

Comments we heard and the fun we witnessed assured us we were on the right track. I left that day knowing it still needed more work, though.

Lee appears in the far left of this photo, in the background talking to another game designer. I'm the one apparently fascinated by the dice in my hand. At right is [user=BryPye]Brian Riston[/user], who ended up doing art for Pirate O-Zone. [user=CDRodeffer]Clark Rodeffer[/user] is at the left. Clark and I met in 2003 at a Protospiel event. He has tested or read through a ton of my game ideas over the years. I have often used his comments in early stages of a design to decide whether it's worth pursuing.
It was easy for players to get the general idea of scoring and to have fun tossing the dice — but it wasn't so easy if they had to work out special cases of sinking ships and breaking ties. I had to make the game simple and intuitive, and I've found for me there's nothing like writing the rule booklet to reveal what doesn't fit.

Sure, this game was not just for casual players, but I realized while writing one version of the rules for Lee that it was still more complicated than I wanted. This became clearer as I tried to squeeze the rules into a draft that would fit in the small box. I later watched someone patiently sift through a late-stage draft for a blind playtest. Clearly the phases of firing the cannons, resolving battle, and determining who has control of the islands were too cumbersome.

This is the double-sided rule sheet that comes with Pirate O-Zone. I've written rules for years, but it still surprises me how long it can take to write a clear, concise final document. This document alone convinced me I can't churn out a good product once a month.
Similar to Classic O-Zone, I wanted parts of the game to involve the position of the dice and the values of the dice, so I went back and forth between different mixes of counting dice and totaling up pips. If you've never worked on a simple game like this, you might be surprised by the size of the design space that emerges through repeated play and careful examination of all the elements (and maybe a bad habit of overthinking).

Through writing rules and watching playtests, I finally opted for the following:

▪️ I eliminated any rules about determining who fires their cannonball first. Teams just fire them in the same order they followed that round.

▪️ Since it's obviously better to be on the target rather than close to it, in all cases, being on the island target makes a die or its value count double.

▪️ Sinking ships uses the values of the dice involved. Specifically, enemy ships within one league of a cannonball might be sunk depending on their value compared to the value rolled on the cannonball. (Rolling a 12 and landing on an island is a devastating blow! I've seen that happen only once so far.)

▪️ Control for islands is determined only by counting dice (ships and cannonballs) that are on or within one league of the island, so the value on the dice doesn't matter (except in a fairly rare case of multiple levels of ties.) It was not easy to decide whether the cannonball should count toward control of the island. Theme led me to say no. A single cannonball makes that much of a difference in a battle? Only the number of ships should be considered! They would presumably be firing many cannonballs back and forth — but gameplay is king. Repeated plays left no doubt choices were more fun when the 12-sided dice counted for scoring, too.

Finishing It Up

With those rules hammered out, I had a couple of significant playtests around early April, one with a small group of aspiring designers that started meeting in Flint, Michigan.

In my earlier days of making games, I'd craft questions to ask playtesters. I've had my favorites, and I'd recommend them to other designers just starting out. Now I mostly just watch people play. I don't ask them much of anything. I don't take many of their suggestions for rule changes. I know what I'm looking for. and I try to be honest with myself about what I'm seeing.

I can usually tell whether players are just carrying out rules or they're immersed in play. I watch emotions, looking for joy and frustration. What I took from those playtests resulted in a couple of final changes that made the game so much better.

First, the one league measure was extended to be the diagonal length of the box lid. That extra 1.5" or so eliminated a lot of frustration.

The most important change reminds me of something Kevin Wilson told me at a Protospiel: "Find the fun part, and do more of that."

Firing the cannon was a central aspect of the theme and the new ruleset, but it was over too quickly each round, so I changed the rules to allow up to three tosses of the cannonball — as long as none of the tosses go off the table. This seems like an obvious choice, I'm sure, but that's how these things can go. The change infused a lot more fun and tough decisions in that phase. Low rolls can possibly be tossed again. Players can take an early shot just to knock the other dice around before trying to land it in just the right place.

You can see the final, expanded, version of the resulting rules on the game's page on the Mike Petty Games website.

After Brian Ritson helped with playtesting, I asked whether he'd do the art for the cover and the three island targets. I had been impressed with work he'd done on games he published through Chimera Illustration and Design. Building off the general look I created for the other editions, he produced four excellent images that make Pirate O-Zone the nicest looking version by far!


Pirate O-Zone became available in late May 2025. As with some other editions*, you can find it on Michigan-Made.com. I also sell directly to game stores. If you're interested in a copy, please have your FLGS reach out to me through my website.

*I have pitched many games to publishers over the past twenty years. It's fair to say that's always been Plan A. The small-batch approach is really just a way to convince a publisher the game has potential. Pitching without first doing my own print runs has led to long-term success only once.


**After the original O-Zone, the other two are Axecadia and Michigan. The Axecadia edition, which came out in January 2025, adds some excitement, and it is our official tournament version, but it's now considered a limited edition, available solely at its namesake: the axe-throwing venue and game lounge where O-Zone first took off in 2024. I made the Michigan edition in February 2025, and it has sold well so far to gift shops around the state.

Mike Petty