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11 more days until Ducosim rolls around! It’s been a while since I’ve managed to slot in a playtest session, but yesterday I finally found an opportunity! Today I compiled the three playtests for version 22 and took another step forward, giving me the version I will be playtesting at the convention.

Want to try it out? Check out Upcoming Events to find more details about Ducosim and other events I will be at later.

If you’re interested in the changes I made ahead of time, you can read about them below. Spoiler warning!

Read more: Version 23

I was pretty happy about the introduction of Activity, so I can force players to keep up the pace or get overwhelmed with Activity. I am pleased to say that the playtests proved this system worked as intended.

As happens when you tackle a major issue, fixing this problem brought a bunch of other problems to light.

The biggest problem was that though you now feel the pressure of the game rolling towards a loss, there is not much you can do to push for a win. Finding clues and equipment is random, and twice I’ve had that the game played out until the final Search Token gave either the last clue or the last piece of equipment.

That’s why this next version updates all pieces of equipment, giving them game effects outside of collecting and identifying clues. This means that no equipment is useless and opens the door for more choices being made once most of the clues and equipment have already been found. This will also allow the players to scale as the game scales, reducing the overall difficulty. In theory.

Next to that, there were some unresolved points of feedback from the last Ducosim I attended. Since Ducosim is the best proving ground for changes, I have chucked those into this version. This means that the doors system gets dropped in favor of giving each room a predefined entrance. To prevent deadlocks, rooms that block off part of the basement will be replaced by generic 4-way tiles. And dead ends are removed entirely to counterbalance the lack of doors.

And I’ve introduced the ability to trade items with one other player in your current room, which is an alternative to picking up and dropping items. I doubt this will have a big impact on balance, but it should provide a clean way to exchange equipment with other players.

All that’s left is to create a large batch of new components, since both the tiles and equipments need to be updated, and the player boards and marketing banner are due for a refresher too. So I’m far from being ready, but it should make for some pretty new pieces!

I’ve messed up my dates and unfortunately missed the anniversary of the first game dev log for Creature in the Basement, which was on August 25th of 2025. Nevertheless, I can still take a look back at a year of game development.

Who could have imagined that this simple idea of a ghost hunting board game would have taken such a shape? Looking back at the very first version, it seems almost incomparable to where the game is standing right now. There were no meaningful decisions whatsoever. It supported only a single player and the only thing they could do was move and search in hopes of getting 3 clues before running out of actions.

Now, we’re 1 year, 2 events, 48 playtests, and 21 versions further. The game has seen many evolutions in that time, with the introduction of unique items, stress dice, sanity checks, multiplayer, a procedurally-generated map, the stressed condition, and activity tokens. Some of these I actually foresee being removed again, the same way call actions, group actions, and hiding have come and gone. And perhaps they may even return after that, like the search action has done. Not to mention the many component upgrades I’ve done, like player boards, search tokens, equipment cards, and a prettier game board.

Although I’ve made much progress this past year, I’m far from being done. With the latest updates, I feel like I’m getting close to completing the first part of the game. I’ll need to work out the final kinks and validate the game with the general public at the next Ducosim event, but after that I can hopefully begin on the second part. I’ve already done a lot of thinking about what this should look like, but only once the first part is done can I commit to testing the various options for the second part. And I don’t doubt that that will also take a long time to finalize, if only due to the many different creatures that will be in the game. But I’m excited to transition to part 2, to see how that will be received.

And perhaps, hopefully, one year from now, I can look back at the journey to the game’s completion.