by Pedro Ometto

Hi, everyone, my name is Pedro, and I'm the designer of Tricky Treats, published by Cranio Creations.

In Tricky Treats, players represent a group of kids visiting nice neighbors for sweets and mean neighbors for tricks. They do that by collecting transparent cards with costume pieces of different themes and colors, as well as "tricking" items. The player with the most victory points (that is, pumpkins) wins.

The game has had a good start so far, receiving one of the Jury Prizes for family games for ages 10 and up in the Speelgoed van het Jaar in the Netherlands!

1. The Spark

The idea for Tricky Treats started with...non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs! I know, weird start for a board game. To be fair, I still don't know 100% how NFTs work, nor am I planning to find out.

In 2022, my friend Lucas Pereira had a contact in a company that was developing a digital game with NFTs, and they asked whether we'd be interested in making an analog version of the game. At that time our studio, Tamanduá Jogos, had already published a few games in Brazil, although that doesn't necessarily mean we knew what we were doing...

After Lucas explained (or tried to) what the digital game was about, we started brainstorming, and one of the first things that occurred to me to make unique characters with changeable characteristics was the use of transparent cards. I had just played Canvas, and I was fascinated with the possibilities. I got my sturdiest transparent bag, cut it into rectangles and started drawing on them — and it would have worked just fine if I had let the pen ink dry before stacking them on top of one another.

Anyway, the transparent cards would be accessories to be placed on top of character cards: hats, moustaches, earrings, lipstick, and so on, so that every combination would make the characters unique. Each card would have a cost to be "bought" and an effect that was activated by dice, a bit like Machi Koro.

But before we even started making a playable prototype, the company backed out, and the analog version of the game was no longer on the table.

LESSON LEARNED: If you're informally asked to work on a project, don't waste too much time on it until you have a contract — but if you do "waste that time", you can always recycle the idea.

The idea still seemed usable to me, so I started thinking of how to re-theme it. At that time my wife and I were obsessed with RuPaul's Drag Race, so my first idea was drag performers wearing different dresses, make-up, and shoes to please the judges, then I realized the whole IP thing would restrict the possibilities of publishing the design, so...sashay away.

2. The First Prototypes

I started considering all situations that could have characters with interchangeable accessories doing different things. There was still no ChatGPT at the time, so I had to stick to my own ideas, God forbid.

I first thought of a generic costume party, but in the end I found it too...generic. That's when the Halloween idea popped out — not something a Brazilian is hugely familiar with, but it had enough elements to play with: costumes, candies, tricks, houses, neighbors. At the time, I was still stuck with the idea of the cards being activated by dice:


This is the first prototype I made on Tabletop Simulator after struggling to make a whole deck of transparent cards. The result was satisfactory, though. The prototype, I mean, because the game was...not good.

Players would roll three dice, then pick two to activate one or more kids, using the third die to visit a house. That made the game frustrating as most times you could activate the kids, but the remaining die didn't allow you to go to the house you wanted. That bothered me thematically as well: Why shouldn't I visit whichever house I want to?

LESSON LEARNED: If you're aiming to design a family game, try to avoid frustration as much as possible.

The dice were clearly a problem, so I gave them up — great decision! — and added player pawns — which was a terrible decision! I came up with a 4x4 grid of houses, with their costume "preferences". Players should be able to visit any house they wanted as long as their pawn was adjacent to it:


One addition at this stage were the trick tokens. As players moved their pawns, they collected tokens that could be used to "trick" the houses instead of getting sweets from them — but these tokens were making the game slower, and they would surely make production more expensive.

Then I decided to add overlapping "trick" icons on the transparent cards, which turned out to be a pivotal change.

LESSON LEARNED: Good ideas usually solve more than one problem at once. The "trick icons" on the transparent cards made the cards more interesting and got rid of the physical tokens.

I also removed the player pawns, and the playtesting sessions started to run much smoother, at least with the people I played with, so I thought it was time to get the game out of the family and friends circle!

3. Reaching Out

First, I needed a working name so that I wouldn't pitch "That Halloween Game with Transparent Cards and Stuff". Brainstorming with my wonderful wife Emily, she came out with Tricky Treats, and that turned out to be the perfect name.

Then I finally made a physical prototype. A printing shop produced the transparent cards, and I was quite pleased with the result:


Then, armed with the courage that only the lack of experience provides, I decided it was time to send the game to competitions. I sent it to Chris Anderson's The Board Game Workshop Design Contest, and Tricky Treats was a finalist, getting third place, which made me think 1) there's something there and 2) what do I do with the feedback?

The valuable feedback we got at the final came from publishers, and they were basically all saying the same thing: The idea is fun, but there's a mismatch between mechanisms and target audience. The theme made it unquestionably a family game, but it was far too complex.

LESSON LEARNED: Send games to competitions! You will most likely get precious feedback from unbiased, more experienced people!

Unfortunately (or maybe not?) I didn't have time to streamline the game before SPIEL Essen 23, where I already had a few meetings arranged to show Tricky Treats, so this was my sell sheet:


Too much text, I know. I'd do it differently now, and I dare say the game was published in spite of the sell sheet instead of because of it.

Anyway, I had about ten meetings at SPIEL to pitch Tricky Treats. Six publishers kept a sell sheet, and one kept a physical prototype. Overall a good result, I would say. I thought my biggest chances of signing the game were with the publisher that kept the physical prototype, but I never heard from them again.

Most of the feedback I had in the fair was exactly the same as in the competition: The theme didn't match the complexity.

LESSON LEARNED: Know your audience and design for them. A family game can't afford to be overwhelming, especially during set-up — or if you're making a two-hour-long Eurogame, maybe don't make it about kids collecting sweets.

But about a week after the fair, I sent an email to one publisher that said he would like to play the game on TTS: Simone Luciani from Cranio Creations, author of one of my favorite games, Tzolk'in. You can imagine how excited I was when he replied arranging a call!

We played the game, and we kept in touch for the next couple of months. He said the Cranio team enjoyed the game, but would like to reduce the complexity without making it a game exclusively for kids. They wanted a "crunchy" family game, like Calico or Cascadia. A couple of months later, we signed the contract and started developing the game to find the sweet spot — pun intended.

4. The Development

Most of our brainstorming sessions were in the direction of streamlining the game:

▪️ The 4x4 house grid became 3x3.
▪️ Houses would no longer have tricking icons, but there would be three "mean neighbor" houses you could exclusively trick to gain access to more points.
▪️ Each house would have only one icon for costume preference.

Each transparent costume card had two basic features, apart from the overlapping "trick icons": the theme (horror/profession/animals/films and TV) and their placement (on the head/on the torso/on the feet) — but if each house would have only one preference icon, we needed something else to diversify the costumes so that we had at least nine houses.

Then Simone suggested having three different colors, and that changed the "puzzliness" of the game completely. Also, that made the transparent cards shine even more.

LESSON LEARNED: If your game has one element that is really interesting – in this case, the transparent cards – make the most of it! If possible, make the game about it!

This is what the final prototype looked like on TTS:


5. Art and Production

I always envisaged the game as having "Tim Burton-y" art: playful, but not kiddish, so I was incredibly pleased when Simone showed me the first drafts by the brilliant Ekaterina Savic:


And I'm sorry, but how cute is this red panda hat?

Image: Mateusz Zajda
When it comes to stacking the transparent cards, I was wondering what solution they would find to keep the game less fiddly. I mean, for my physical prototypes, I would simply place the cards one on top of another and pray that they wouldn't slip away — and one thing I always thought spoiled the joy of games with transparent cards was having to remove them from plastic sleeves after every single game.

Thus, the double-layer board was an incredibly smart solution. I'm thankful to the Cranio team for all the care that has been put into the game!

6. Final Thoughts

I'm not very experienced in game design, so many of these lessons may sound obvious, but I thought it would be interesting to share them to illustrate what my journey was like. Hopefully I won't need to learn them again for my next games.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy Tricky Treats!

Pedro Ometto

Image: Mateusz Zajda