by Danijel Pošta

During the 2020 pandemic, the idea of designing my own game developed more and more in my mind. After all, I've been a part of the hobby since 2014 — thank you, Ticket to Ride: Europe and Qwirkle — and have been playing board games since I was a child in the 1990s.

So how hard could it be, right?

The first ideas of themes and mechanisms started popping into my head, and pretty soon I had a couple of games in development.

The idea of using speculaas cookies as a theme came to me while...eating the cookies: "What if players collected the different spices used in making the speculaas cookies and had to fulfill orders to score them?" A quick search on BGG didn't bring up any games with that name, so off to the races we went.

Speculaas was my fourth game design, and as most games do, it started as a completely different game compared to the final product.

The first design was a sliding puzzle with different types of spices, and the players would try to sort them in a way that they would match the different orders at the end of each row and column. The design sort of worked, but it was too long, too fiddly, and not very fun, so I went back to the drawing board.

Delicious speculaas cookies
The second design was a worker-placement, set-collection game with players visiting the local Christmas market, collecting spices, and scoring them as they went along. That was more in line with what I had envisioned for the game, but it wasn't there yet.

Third time's the charm.

How about a card-drafting, tableau-building game? I made a quick prototype with spice cards and recipe (scoring) cards and had the idea of double drafting: on odd turns, players would draft scoring cards, and on even turns they would draft spice cards, playing them into their tableau as they went along.

That worked, but I wasn't happy with the spice cards. At that time, each spice card had only one spice on it, so I made a set of cards with two spices on them and decided that players would draft two spice icons, whether two cards with one spice icon or one card with two spice icons. That created an interesting dynamic in which players would end up with different amounts of spice icons at the end of the game, and I really liked that.

Speculaas prototype
I also added honey as sort of a "wild" spice that players don't place directly into their tableau; instead they exchange the honey card for a token that they place on one of their recipe cards.

After further development and playtests with my group, I was happy with the game, finished the rulebook, and in the summer of 2022 started pitching the game to publishers with no success.

In January 2024, I visited my friends in Petrinja for their annual "3 Kings" board game convention. The convention was a lot of fun (as always), and it was the first time I met Marin [user=Sgt_Pomelo][/user] who (without either of us knowing it at the time) would become the publisher of Speculaas.

The next month there was another board game convention, "All A-Board" in Nedelišće, about an hour driving distance from where I lived. Marin and some other friends I had met in Petrinja (Edin [user=edvinus][/user] and Andrej [user=koandrej][/user]) announced their arrival, so I decided to go and bring some of my prototypes with me.

Playtesting Speculaas at All A-Board in Nedelišće
Marin, Andrej, Edo, and Robert [user=boros][/user] were kind enough to try some of the games, and Marin mentioned that he was thinking about getting into the board game publishing business and that Speculaas would be the game that he would like to work on. He also suggested that the cards should be square, so a few days later I started working on a new prototype with square cards.

Speculaas prototype with square cards
Playtesting of the Speculaas new prototype
About a month later, Marin sent me the initial artwork for the spice and recipe cards. and I was blown away. It was so beautiful, better than anything I had expected.

In April 2024, there was another board game convention in Petrinja, and Marin brought the first official prototypes of Speculaas with him. A lot of people were willing to test the game — thank you all for that! — and we received great feedback.


Speculaas playtesting in Petrinja
What followed were more playtests during the SferaKon convention in Zagreb and the Olympos convention in Osijek.


Speculaas playtesting in Zagreb and Osijek
We made sure to treat our wonderful playtesters with actual speculaas cookies during each playtest.

A few of the playtesters independently gave the idea of including a recipe for speculaas cookies in the box, so we added a card with the recipe. Of course, we had to test the recipe ourselves — no card can go in the game without testing. The cookies were delicious!

Our homemade speculaas cookies
During all of this, we started working on the production, and we discovered that we had extra room on the printing sheet, so naturally ideas for an expansion started brewing.

Immediately my mind went to hot drinks you would typically enjoy while eating speculaas cookies: tea, coffee, and hot chocolate. The idea was that we would have seven cards of each drink, and each game we would use only one of each for variety.

• Tea cards give points at the end of the game to the player who collects the most or least of the depicted spice.
• Coffee cards are a race, and they give points to the player who is the quickest to create the depicted pattern.
• Hot chocolate cards give points at the end of the game to all players depending on how successfully they built their tableaus (longest column, biggest square, longest diagonal etc.)

And so, Speculaas: Café was created.

After that, Edin worked on the solo rules and development, Andrej handled the production, and Marin and his team at Ummaramma worked on the artwork and rulebook.

Thank you, guys, for all your hard work and dedication to the project. I couldn't have asked for a better team. I'm really proud of the game we created together!

Danijel Pošta