by Ananda Guneratne

Hi, I'm Ananda Guneratne, the designer of Sprocketforge, which challenges players to build and run magical factories of rotating gears. The lack of easy mana storage makes careful alignment of gears essential to ensure you gain the mana you need at the right time. Despite the engine-building focus of the game, the original idea sprang from solving an upkeep problem in a different type of game.

In November 2021, I was working on "Weavers", a combat-focused card game about wizards casting spells very slowly. Each spell card required the player to complete multiple steps one by one over several turns. The same action could simultaneously satisfy the requirements of more than one spell, and the byproducts of one spell could fuel another, encouraging players to align their spells efficiently. Missing a step would cause a spell to fizzle, discarding it from play.

In "Weavers", you tracked spell progress by adding cubes to the casting track of each spell, so if you had six spells out, you would have to place six tiny cubes each round. Unfortunately, the game was supposed to be fast-paced with short rounds, so this upkeep task was a nontrivial percentage of playtime.


While brainstorming solutions, I considered putting the tracks around the outside of the cards and rotating them instead of adding cubes. Then, a stroke of inspiration hit me: What if the spells were on interlocking gears instead of cards? I could rotate one, and the rest would follow. I would replace seconds of rote token manipulation with a single finger motion of only a centimeter or two.

I quickly realized that gears would not do what I wanted for "Weavers". Spells in "Weavers" frequently leave the board, which would require a tedious reordering of the gears. However, I found myself obsessed with the idea that multiple tracks could all be updated simultaneously without moving or placing tokens. Since this concept didn't fit "Weavers", I started a new game with an industrial theme — and because it had an industrial theme and used gears, I called it "Gears of Industry".


My early versions of "Gears of Industry" asked players to solve mostly the same puzzles as in "Weavers". Each gear sometimes produced resources and at other times consumed them, and the challenge was lining them up so that the outputs of one gear would satisfy the requirements of the next. Players then used the resources they gained to complete "contract" cards to score points.

One of my early insights was to use the empty sectors on the gears as storage. If you ended your turn with unspent resources, you couldn't keep them; instead, you had to store them on your gears and would get them back when their sector rotated around again.


The storage mechanism was a significant breakthrough, allowing players to engage better with the gear alignment puzzle. If you know that you will need two bars of steel in three turns, you can store the steel you will need on the gear sectors corresponding to the turn you will need them. This creates an "a-ha" moment when players realize that having less production on a gear means there is more storage space, creating a reason to go after low-production gears.

Of course, being able to store resources on a gear led to the question: What would happen if you had to discard a gear with stored resources? The dull, punitive answer was that you lost those resources. The exciting, exploitable answer was that you immediately gained those resources, allowing you to complete contracts or pay for other gears.

I chose the latter option as this design choice created another opportunity for players to be clever: storing resources and strategically trashing gears to get them back.


The final significant change in gear mechanisms from my initial vision was their maintenance costs. After numerous playtests, they felt less and less worthwhile. Initially, the costs were needed to drive the gear alignment puzzle, but the fact that you could now store resources only on gears meant that even without the maintenance costs, aligning gears properly was still crucial because you had to produce all the resources you needed simultaneously. After a brief experiment allowing players to pay maintenance to rotate gears multiple times, I removed the maintenance costs from the gears altogether.

After Sophisticated Cerberus Games signed "Gears of Industry" and rethemed it as Sprocketforge, some physical limitations of my design that I had taken for granted became apparent. The gears originally had a hole in the middle through which a narrow axle poked, allowing the gear to spin. However, attaching an axle to a board is quite expensive. I solved this problem by building the axle directly into the gear and putting the hole in the board instead; adding something to the gear model didn't change the injection mold cost, and putting a hole in a board is much cheaper than attaching something to it.


Another physical challenge came from the expense of printing directly on plastic. After discussing the pros and cons with Sophisticated Cerberus Games, we decided to make the gears hollow and have all the symbology on separate "enchantment" tiles that players can insert and remove from the gears. These tiles are double-sided, allowing for them to be "reforged" by flipping them over, improving the gear production. This system also makes it much easier to add more types of enchantments in the future.

I've learned a lot working on Sprocketforge and discovered a lot of broadly applicable mechanisms in the process. Some of my other favorite mechanisms in the game are waste recycling as a passive trade system and using petitions to get rid of low-value victory point cards.

However, my number one takeaway from the design process has been the importance of paying attention to upkeep problems. Inspiration for the next project can often come from solving routine annoyances in the last one.