Back in mid-January, I parted ways with my employer and the game design team at Ravensburger’s Disney Lorcana. It’s a long story I won’t get into here, but in many ways, it’s turned out to be a change I needed. For one, it’s given me time to get back to something I realized I wasn’t doing while working on a pre-established trading card game: designing original board games.

I missed board game design. More than I think I was really aware.

One of the first things I thought about when the gears got turning again was a job I had years ago, where it was my role to just invent and explore tons of new game concepts. It was like having dozens of Lego sets, dumping them on the floor, and seeing what happened when you selected parts from totally disparate sets to make something totally new. In many cases, I wasn’t so much creating and developing finished games, but rather exploring the kernels of ideas and seeing if there was a game there at all.

Some of those ideas were great, and became actual games (Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, for example). Others were awful and withered within a day or two. Most though were somewhere in between — worthy of some exploration, but ultimately relegated to a permanent, unfinished stasis on a shelf.

After I left that studio to go work for The Op Games (then USAopoly) the studio was sold to a larger company that wanted to get into the board game category. A few years later, that company sold the games division to another larger publisher. All of the middle-ground game ideas on my old shelf were lost in the shuffles, and in some cases I’ve heard they literally got shoveled into a dumpster, lost forever.

So now, at the beginning of 2025, those game ideas from 2013-2018 started creeping back into my head.

It would be one thing to simply reconstruct any of those concepts and prototypes from memory; any model that once existed is now long since lost, and only a handful of people would even remember that the idea had been explored. Those ideas though technically are owned, bought and paid for, by a publisher much larger than me, and even if they’ve been dismissed, disassembled, and discarded, they’re not mine to revive.

However.

Game design as a trade is one built predominantly on inspiration. We innovate on other ideas, often someone else’s. Hogwarts Battle could not have happened without Donald X. Vaccarino creating Dominion years earlier. It would not be unethical for me to think about what an old idea of mine might become if I had developed it further and in a different direction, turning it all northeast where the original idea was facing due north. Inspiration.

Another tenant of game design is mashing different ideas together. One game might be a hybrid of resource collection with roll-and-writes. Another could be worker placement, but filtered through a rondel model. (And no, I can’t think of examples of those specific games off the top of my head, but I’m sure they exist, or are being made by someone currently.) It would be equally not unethical for me to start with a game concept I’d had years earlier, and look at it all through the lenses of other popular board games and archetypes.

Disco Candybar is one of those “old idea of mine, reoriented, evolved, and hybridized” projects. It took something from off my old workshop shelves, re-explored it, shucked off old husks, streamlined it, and then let it be influenced by great games I’ve enjoyed from other designers.

Here’s a list of some of the games that inspired me in the crafting of the current Disco Candybar prototype. Maybe you’ll get some idea of what exactly I’ve got. Maybe you won’t, but it’ll let you imagine a totally different but cool model of the brainchild fruit of a family tree. Kind of like the way European biologists once saw elephant skulls for the first time and surmised that they belonged to cyclopean giants.

• “Prototype 228”

• Gloomhaven (as described in my first post in this series)

• Dungeons & Dragons

• Dice Throne and Dice Throne Adventures

• Quests of Yore (the version my friend Pat Marino made for The Op)

• Above and Below and Near and Far

• The Choose Your Own Adventure book series

• The Quacks of Quedlinburg

• Sagrada

• Others I’m sure I’ll recall tomorrow.

It’s a hefty list, for sure. But when you put them all into a blender and distill the mixture, one of the possible outcomes is Disco Candybar. I’m really excited about the results of the recipe. Like a cake made from everything in the fridge, but tastier and in need of frosting and decorations.

Okay, that sounds gross. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

For now.

Oh, and I thought of a worker placement/rondel game: Tzolk’in.

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