On the other hand, all I cared about was getting the core game mechanics right.

Add in the fact that my sister-in-law and her boyfriend work in real estate, and that we had some exposure to the industry, plus a few stories about good tenants and bad tenants, and somehow all of these ideas started mixing together.

The result was pretty exciting.

We had a game where players were magical architects. They would acquire resources in different ways, create buildings in a fantasy world, attract mythical creatures as tenants, and then use those tenants to maximize their influence across the world through the little empire they were building.

The game played a little like Magic: The Gathering.

Players needed to create a building from a valid set of Material cards. Each set had to include at least one roof, one wall, and one base. But the building also had to satisfy a colour rule: it could either be built from only one colour, or from one colour plus a full set of red, blue, and green.

Once built, a building could generate rent. It also created rooms for tenants to live in.

Regular tenants could be recruited by players. They generated additional rent and provided extra benefits, helping players do more things on their turns.

Some tenants, however, operated by their own rules.

They decided when to move to a different building and when to exert their effects on a house. Some were so wild that they could destroy building materials one at a time.

Crazy.

At the time, the game sounded great to me.

Building a house meant aligning the right parts and matching the colour rules. That felt challenging, tense, and exciting. Each room could potentially house multiple tenants, and each tenant had a special ability that helped the player get more cards, earn more money, or punish other players more easily.

The different parts of the game felt like they were connected in a satisfying way: materials created buildings, buildings created rooms, rooms attracted tenants, and tenants changed what players could do next. It made the game feel more layered and more complex, like each decision could ripple into the next part of the system.

And then there were the special tenants.

They felt like force multipliers. In my head, they would balance the game while adding tension, so the board would never feel static or boring.

It all sounded very nice.

Until the playtests.

I’m sure many game designers have had the same experience.

The game runs flawlessly in your brain. You run through countless simulations of what might happen. You imagine the players’ facial expressions. You imagine all the different combinations of cards in hand. You’re confident that the game is going to work.

Maybe it will even be the next hit.

And then the playtest feedback arrives.

“Hmm, what do I do with cards that can’t be played? I had a whole bunch at the end of the game.”

“That effect is too OP!”

“I can’t get the thing I need.”

I heard comments like that a lot over several months of playtesting.

The biggest frustration came from the imbalance of the tenant effects. Some effects, like “build one more building on your turn,” made the player with that card so much more efficient at getting points that it became almost impossible for other players to catch up.

Other tenant effects were on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Something like “draw two cards when the player on your right builds a building” sounded nice on paper. But in reality, that player might not build much at all.

So I went through the feedback from the playtesters and tried to simulate new versions of the game in my mind. I kept hoping I could find a better set of effects and rules that would definitely make the game more fun.

But I just couldn’t think of one.

I could create another powerful effect to counter the first powerful effect, but then the whole thing would start spiraling into something unmanageable.

So I started asking myself: what if I removed some features from the game?

What if there were no tenants?

What if building was easier?

What if there were no special effects, and players simply tried to build houses and increase rent?

None of those versions sounded fun to me anymore.

XD

At that point, I knew I needed a break from the project.

And so I took one.

A three-month break.

Then, eventually, I came back with a different idea.

Potentially, a better one.

Board games, video games, tabletop games, physical activity games. Maybe even more than I wanted to play them, which is kind of funny.

I was first introduced to the wider world of board games in university. A group of us would play basketball together, and when we were done, we’d head to someone’s house and continue the weekend with board games.

A lot of the games we played were hidden identity or deception games, like Legends of the Three Kingdoms, The Resistance, and Avalon. Sometimes we’d play Tractor with two or more decks of playing cards.

Outside of those larger group games, I also played classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Pandemic, and Dominion with my roommates.

Fun times.

Why am I mentioning all of this? I’m not entirely sure. I guess I just wanted to say that I’ve played some board games, though definitely not a huge amount. But even with the small set of games I experienced, I had a lot of fun.

Well, to be honest, sometimes I was frustrated too.

Sometimes I didn’t draw the card I was hoping for. Sometimes everyone else seemed to understand exactly what they were supposed to do before I did. Sometimes the action I wanted to take was taken right before my turn.

Oops. I digress.

I started imagining a new board game after getting my first tech job. I think it was because, for the first time in a while, my mind wasn’t filled with job applications and certificate exams.

But I didn’t have a concrete idea yet. Most of my brainstorms were just single mechanics or loose themes, never a complete game loop.

Over the years, I kept having little thoughts here and there. I also had a few conversations with my wife about it. At one point, we almost seriously considered making a board game about plants, but once again, we didn’t get very far because we couldn’t find the core game loop.

Fast forward to November 2025.

My wife, Emma, asked me again if I wanted to make a board game.

I said sure, and told her about an idea I had: a game about building a house with a roof, walls, and a base, maybe with colours playing some role in the game too.

I asked her, “Does this sound like it could be fun?”

She said yes.

“Let’s do it.”

And that is how Havenborn began.