by Gilles Turbide

Hey there! I'm Gilles Turbide, and this is the story of my game Tolleno, published by Sit Down!

I've always been creating games, but for the longest time I didn't even know getting published was an option for me. Over the last few years, though, I started taking game design more seriously. Since I'm a UX designer in real life (and not too bad with illustrations either), game design felt like the perfect way to mix a couple of my passions. In 2024, I even illustrated the cover of my friend Geneviève's game Quadrata Canada.

Still, I see myself more as a designer than an illustrator. Maybe one day I'll do both for one of my own games. Who knows...

The Early Days

I don't know about you, but when I'm looking for ideas, I often just start fiddling with components I've got lying around. In November 2020, I was messing with bits from an early prototype of my other game Kalypso (coming from Inside Up Games in 2026 — maybe you've heard of it!) and some building pieces from my kids' Monopoly: CityVille. That's when the idea of a tile-placement city game really clicked.

The first test
At first, the theme was all about the arrival of the first settlers in North America. The starting tile was a port, and each turn players would place one city tile, then three building floors: one on the city tile, one on a connected street, and one on a perpendicular street.

Brainstorming for tiles
Sketch of the port
A little city
Pretty quickly, I added an area-majority mechanism so that each tile became its own little battle. The tile's point value was tied to the number of road connections it had. A tile with four roads was worth 4 points, with three roads 3 points, and so on.

After a few playtests, I dropped the one-road tiles. They just created dead ends and stalled the city growth, which wasn't fun.

Tiles with majority value — ready to cut

Shifting to a Modern City

Because the goal was to stack the most floors on each tile, buildings often went taller than two levels...which looked pretty weird for a colonial town. (Hello, 17th-century skyscrapers!) Thus, I switched the setting to a modern city since skyscrapers made way more sense at that time.

The modern era prototypes
However, tiles with fewer road connections felt underpowered. To balance this, I introduced star points, which rewarded adjacent tiles and added another layer of strategy. The rule was simple: Every star gives 1 point for each floor it points at, so a three-road tile comes with one star, a two-road tile comes with two stars, and so on.

Suddenly, the game wasn't just about winning majorities; you also had to connect stars to your existing buildings and stack where they already pointed. The design still had simple rules, but with much deeper decisions.

Example of tiles with majority value at 2, 3 and 4
I also added endgame scoring based on city zones: residential (green), commercial (gray), industrial (orange), and municipal (blue).

Board Date

Fast forward to January 2021: I joined Board Date (Second Edition), an online event connecting designers with publishers. With the Covid pandemic still around, it was one of the few chances to pitch games remotely.

I submitted two games, and both were selected! One, "Prohibition", is still on my shelf, but the other — then called "Urbanz" and now Tolleno — caught the eye of several publishers. In the end, I signed with Sit Down!, a publisher from Belgium. Being based in Québec City, the online nature of the event was huge for me as it bridged the gap to European publishers.

Extract from my rules at that time

Development Kicks Off

Development officially kicked off in May 2023, two years after signing. Most of my collaboration with Sit Down! was with Didier Delhez and Michaël Derobertmasure, and it happened remotely through our Discord channel.

A prototype with objectives on the tiles
Our first focus on Tolleno was to change how the objectives worked. At first, we tried moving them from cards directly onto the tiles, but that gave players way too many choices. (Hello, analysis paralysis!) We scaled it back and limited objectives to specific tiles, then objectives morphed into tokens that players could drop anywhere on the board.

To keep them from covering up tile values, Michaël came up with a brilliant idea: Place objectives on the same locations as building floors, which also had the side effect of blocking opponents from building there. Genius!

To streamline things (and keep production costs down), we trimmed the turn down to one of just two actions: either place two floors, or place one floor plus one of the three available objectives — clean, simple, and faster to play.

At one point, the board had gotten super colorful, making it hard to tell player pieces apart. To fix that, I removed district color variations and added more objective types instead. That made the board way clearer and, funny enough, it started looking more like my first prototype again.

A more refined prototype
A few weeks later, Michaël suggested adding vehicles that move each turn and giving each player a personal board. That board tracked your floors and the type of movement your vehicle allowed.

The player board

The Big Twist: Boats and Canals

To give Tolleno its own vibe, we replaced roads with canals. Instead of cars, players now moved boats — giving the game kind of an old Venice vibe. Boats could carry building floors from one tile to another and even upgrade the tile they landed on. Honestly, I love adding water into my games, so this was right up my alley.

When Sit Down! finally showed me their first visuals, I was blown away. Anthony Moulins nailed the tile and component art, and Paolo Puggioni's cover was just stunning.

That's the story of Tolleno. Thanks so much for reading!

Example of a three-player game