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Comma Cube Games, Syracuse, NY (2025)

11/07/2023

Devlog #17

Hello everyone, Cam here! Due to unforeseen circumstances, things have slowed down a bit with the underworld project. But don’t worry, it’s still happening! Ben and I have been working on it regularly, mainly developing alternate characters and getting art specs ready, but with the slow down on the art front, Ben and I have shifted our focus to another one of our projects, that I’ll refer to very unofficially as “the robot game.”

The robot game is actually our second attempt/spin-off of a previous project I’ve mentioned before, “the pumpkin farming game.” It was the one with the “trade your trash” mechanic, where when you take an action (from the row of action cards) you get a corresponding trade card, which you can trade to another player to enable them to take that action during the trade phase. Long story short, as it progressed, Ben and I came to have very different visions for which direction the game should go, so we kinda just tabled it for a while, but we still did want to develop something that used the trade your trash mechanic. So after a while sitting on it, Ben started working on a new game, keeping the core of the trade your trash mechanic and adding even more interesting player interaction. Oh and of course, robots.

The game is a bit much to fully lay out here (and also constantly changing), but here’s the basics of its current state:

Essentially the goal is to build and power up as many robots as you can. Robots will give you points at the end of the game, and will give you special abilities during the game. By powering up a particular robot, it may give you the ability to salvage extra components from the scrapyard for instance, allowing you to build robots faster than your opponents - things like that.

Sell components to power your robots, strategically place your prospectors in the scrap yard to prepare for the salvage, get components, and build robots. That’s essentially it! (Except it’s more complicated(but in a good way!!))

The reworked trade your trash mechanic inspires crazy multifaceted deals between players, and along with a dynamic component selling market, outbidding your opponents for salvage priority in the scrap yards, and a few other elements, there ends being a lot of interesting player interaction, which we like! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 but also plenty of long term planning and strategizing to keep the brain juices flowing.

Very exciting! It’s a fun one, and I’m excited to work on it every time Ben and I get together! It’s also just in a fun stage of the process, so many things changing, solving problems after every play test. It’s satisfying to make some changes and have it work noticeably better the next time. The past few games, we’ve found ourselves saying, “that’s the best game we’ve had so far.” And man does that feel good 😎

See you in the next one!

10/16/2023

We’re back!

Cam here 👋🏼 After some soul-searching, and re-prioritizing Ben and I are very much back in the swing of things. Many projects happening, our underworld game being top of the list, but we’re also preparing a design for Cardboard Edison, as well as developing some early stage ideas here and there.

We’ve also been playtesting some prototypes that some of our friends are working on which has been really cool. Feels cool and special to be part of this little group of local designers. Shout out to Wesley M. Adams and Timothy Bumpus, you guys rock 🤘🏼♥️

Ps sorry Tim I forgot to get a picture of your game 🙈

09/25/2023

hey everyone, it's Cam 👋🏼

As some of you may know, I don't have much of a board game background. I come from a few creative mediums and some independent learning in a variety of academic fields, but the board game world with all of its culture and norms and all of that, is an area that I have fairly limited experience with. But this weekend I finally took the plunge to get some of that sweet sweet hands on experience at 2023 CuseCon

This was my first real board game convention, so there were a lot of firsts and things to learn, but one of the things I found most surprising was just how open and casual so many people were to playing games with strangers. It's a piece of culture that is so different from most interactions in the outside world - to commit an hour or more to a playful bout with someone you've never met. And the thing I was maybe most surprised by is that it was always fine. Nothing crazy or weird happened, people were generally friendly and light and just wanted to have a good time. In hindsight I suppose that does make sense, but the quality and extent of openness that I experienced, I don't think I would have predicted. It's a beautiful thing this board game world, thanks to everyone who let me in and shared their time talking, hanging out, and playing games. And big thanks to CuseCon for fostering a light and welcoming environment, y'all have a good thing going 😎

Thankful for all the new connections made, and reinvigorated to get out there and connect with some more people! 👏🏼

09/15/2023

Devlog #16

Hey everyone it's Cam. Sometimes making a game is hard. Sometimes progress is difficult and slow, this is one of those times. There have been many things happening recently that have slowed down our progress/ forced us to change priorities. This is part of starting/running a business and collaborating with other people. Missed deadlined can cause a cascading effect down the chain throwing things into chaos. It's not fun, its not rad, but I try to keep an eye on the larger goal that we're working towards, and when a problem comes our way, try to find a solution and keep moving toward that finish line. There's a larger goal ahead of us, and we will achieve it. As long as we keep moving forward, however incremental, it's just a matter of time 👏🏼👏🏼

09/12/2023

CubeCon = SUCCESS

We did it! Yesterday we hosted our biggest most awesome event yet, the first ever CubeCon 🙌🏼 so many new faces and good times had, it was a great thing to be a part of 🙏🏼

Thanks to everyone who came out to hang and for all the people who came to try our game! With the huge library of games available to play, I wasn't expecting many people to play ours but we somehow managed to get a total of 4 play tests throughout out the day! It was great to see people enjoying the game, getting into it with complete strangers, colluding and foiling each others plans 😈 and a bunch of great feedback as well! And all day throughout the whole room, people meeting, playing games, and having a good time - a very good day 😊

A huge thanks to Goonz and Salt City Meeples for making this happen, it was very awesome indeed🙏🏼😎🎆

09/11/2023

Devlog #15

Hey everybody, Cam here. It's been a while!

It's true, I have been slacking on devlogs lately, but its not for lack of things happening! Over the past few weeks, we've been spending a lot more time on logistical things, prepping for upcoming events (including CubeCon which was yesterday), and handling some more back end starting-a-board-game-company kind of things. Not exactly game development so it felt weird to include a bunch of that in the devlogs, but if people are really curious about that side of things, let me know in the comments, there's plenty to talk about!

As for actual game development, we've been working on a few things like component design, board layout, and alternate characters. We've got some real spicy special ability ideas for alternates being tested, so were excited for those, but still much testing to be done! Component designs and layout will still take some time but bit by bit we're making progress. Maybe in the next devlog we'll have some pics to show 😲 We've also (after a very long journey) narrowed down the final name options for the game:

Infernal Favors
Fables and Favors
Bribing the Underworld

Over the past few months we've created a massive list of different name options and created framework of criteria to narrow it down to a few that have the most ring and describe the game best. Our final step is making sure we pick the name that is the most punchy and sticky, and by getting feedback from a large group of people, I think we'll have the best chance of picking the right name 😎 so please, share your thoughts in the comments! It will help us immensely 🙏🏼

That's about it for now! I'll write up a separate post about CubeCon later today, but until then, enjoy a photo of some recent alternate play testing on our brand new artful prototype boards!! 🤩🤩 I'm realizing I think this is actually their fist showing on facebook in physical form, so... here they are! haha still subject to change, but nonetheless very cool to have something with art on it existing in real life 👏🏼👏🏼

More to come soon...!

08/21/2023

Devlog #14

Hey hey! It’s Cam, back with a recap of this past week 👏🏼

A bit of a shorter one this week, much time has been spent prepping for upcoming events and things like that, including a little event you may have heard of called CUBECON!!!! 😏😏 oh yes, this is the event we are putting on in collaboration with Salt City Meeples and Goonz on September 10th!! A huge library of games, food, drinks, friends, it will be a good time 😎 and you’re invited!!! Hope to see you there 😉 okay plug over haha

As for actual game development, Ben has been doing some more solo testing on the 5 player game, tweaking some numbers and mechanics.

For the 5 player game there is an additional 9th character on the board that players can compete for payouts from. We decided to include additional characters as the player count increases as a way of maintaining a similar ratio of players to available victory points. It’s not exactly perfect mathematically, but it’s fairly close, and has worked well in practice. Another thing we have to consider in 5 player games is the effect it has on punching. In the game, when a player lands on the same space as another player, they will draw a card from the “punch deck” which will give them some benefit. It’s one of my favorite mechanics in the game, however too much of a good thing is still too much of a good thing, and in the 5 player game, there is wayyyyyy more punching. So we got a little crafty 👏🏼 for the additional 9th character, we snuck in punch immunity ability awarded to the player with the most gold invested. In other words, when in effect, only 4 players can be punched. This brings the amount of punching in the game to a level which is much more consistent to other player counts, which I think is a good move from a design standpoint.

Ben and I played through a 5 player game together with some of the new adjustments, and man was it good. So dynamic, very back and forth and down to the wire. Please enjoy some photos of the final state of the board 🙏🏼 a few tweaks to be made still, but a very promising first few runs 👌🏼

And to round things off, for old times sake Ben and I finished off the day on Thursday with a play through a one if our old versions of the game from February. My how far we’ve come haha a good throwback and bit of perspective. Feels good to be where we are now, so much closer to finally getting this thing ready to be out into the world. Very awesome 👏🏼👏🏼

Alright that’s all for now!! (I was supposed to have this up like 3 days ago 😅😅) Thanks for tuning in!! We’ll see you all very soon 😁😁

08/15/2023

Comma Cube Games is hosting an all day board game event!

We will have a library of over 300 games, food, drinks, and friends.

Please RSVP so we have an idea of how many to expect. (315-720-5057)

We will be on the second floor of the Gear Factory. (200 S Geddes St.) Sunday September 10th, 11am-7pm.

08/13/2023

Devlog #13

Hey y’all, Cam here, coming to you live from a bean bag chair, to deliver this weeks devlog. Recently there’s been a lot to work on that isn’t really game development related, more company structure, contracts and legal kind of stuff, a lot of mumbo jumbo, but there has been some progress on the game, so here it is! 👏🏼

Probably our biggest development is in the art for the board (see photos) we’re still in the process of figuring out exactly what we want the board layout to look like, but even knowing that it will probably change, just to see something this legit looking is crazy and really exciting 👏🏼👏🏼

I mentioned in a devlog a few weeks ago that we’re starting to explore the 3 and 5 player versions of the underworld game, so on Tuesday, while I was doing some computer work, Ben took it upon himself to play through some changes with the 5 player game… alone… what a trooper lol a big brain task even with 2 people, but with 1 person playing 5 players, that’s mega brain 🙌🏼 might seem like a weird thing to do, but sometimes new ideas are really broken, so play testing internally first saves us from wasting players’ time with a broken game. Well done Ben 👏🏼 one step closer to having that 5 player game ready for the world!

We also did some brainstorming for alternate character abilities, which our friend Chris was very helpful in. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: having fresh eyes is really helpful in coming up with new and interesting ideas. Even if most of the ideas are no good (which is generally the case in any brainstorming session), having someone who is uninhibited by preconceived notions of what can and can’t happen in the game allows for a lot of really outside the box ideas, which are exactly the ones we’re looking for!!

We’ve also been prepping for some events we’ll be attending in the near future, and coming up with other ways of getting our word out into the board game world. We’re not marketing experts, but we’re learning more all the time, and I think we’re coming up with some pretty cool fun ideas to get some new eyes on the project.

And lastly, soft announcement, we’re planning our own board game event next month, September 10th (details to come) so for all you local board gamers out there, mark the date! There will be a massive library of games available thanks to the great and amazing board game librarian himself, Tim Bumpus 🙏🏼 (thank you Tim ♥️) If there’s a game you’ve been wanting to try out but haven’t been able to get your hands on, Tim somehow probably has it 😂 we’ll also have some of our prototypes available to play, so if you’ve been curious about any of the games we’ve been working on and wanna check them out, here’s your shot!

Anyway, that’s about it for now, event details to come, and digital play testing prototype soon as well! Thanks to everyone who follows and likes and comments and shares and all that, we’re just some kids who like making cool stuff, so your guys’ support is really really cool, and we do feel and appreciate it. We ♥️ u

Thanks again u cool people, see you in the next one 😎

08/05/2023

Devlog 12 #

Ohhhhhh snap… 👏🏼👏🏼 Big week for us!! As many of you may already know from previous devlogs, we’ve been working with an artist named Sean for some time now, but we’ve kinda kept the specifics under wraps. But yesterday we finally made the announcement official!! For our very first project, we’re fortunate enough to be collaborating with the amazing and totally rad (Twitter and Instagram). The Goonz are a tight knit community of enthusiasts and fellow creatives from around the globe, pulled together by Sean’s artwork. Sean has been making art in various mediums for his whole life essentially; painting, tattooing, digital art, etc. He and a small team founded the Goonz in 2021, and since then have building a brand and curating virtual and IRL experiences for their community. We’re super excited to have such a solid community join in the process of making the game, as well as to be partnering with a such a well established brand for our first project, it’s truly very cool and exciting.👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 it’s actually kinda insane to be honest lol so thank you to Goonz, we love ya ♥️

As for actual development stuff, we spent most of this week prepping for the announcement as well as working on a digital implementation of the game. Like I mentioned in the last devlog, having a digital implementation of the game allows us to get play tests at a much higher volume, and now with the Goonz community ready to jump in, it’s about time we get a digital version up and running haha Ben and I tested the digital build yesterday and made note of a few things to fix, but aside from those few things and a couple art related items, I think it’s pretty much there. We’re aiming to have it ready sometime mid next week, so stay tuned if you’re interested in play testing! We’ll make a post once we make accessible and also probably plan some discord hangouts to help people along, and some twitch livestreams as well for anyone who just wants to watch and get a feel for the game and/or just meet some cool new people 🤙🏼

Aside from those things, more emails with manufacturers, discussions of components and things of that nature. You know, the exciting stuff 😉

Kinda a short one this week, but hey, a very exciting announcement! Feels like a long time coming. It’s almost surreal to be on the other side of it now, but the work still continues!! Much more to do, but excited and optimistic as ever 😁😁

See you in the next one!!

07/31/2023

Devlog #11

Hey hey! Recap of last week, here it goes:

Tuesday was a pumpkin farming game day... Man sometimes game development is hard 😅 We tried some very different things with the game on Tuesday, and let’s just say it wasn’t the best lol

As a bit of a refresher, the game is a sort of a tableau builder where players are farmers competing to grow the best crop of giant carnivorous pumpkins. Originally, players would take an action during their turn by choosing an action from a shared row of action tiles. What ended up happening was that players who were later in the turn order were put at a pretty serious disadvantage due to their choices of actions to take being more limited. So instead we put action cards into each player’s hands, allowing for more certainty and independence. To add a bit more interest, each card was unique, combining multiple actions, and/or special augmentations, which in theory sounds pretty interesting, however, in practice we found that this really did not work.

At the start of the game each player received 10 action cards at random, 5 of which they would use (1 card per turn) and the other 5 would be discarded at the end of the “season”. Then the same would happen again for the next season. However we were only about midway through our first season when I started to realize that the cards I had left in my hand were really not very useful. Even though I should have had many choices in theory, the things that I actually wanted/needed to do, I just wasn’t able to. For instance, at a certain point, I wanted to buy tools to enhance my production, however I had no buy tools cards. And the action cards that I did have were either literally unusable because of their requirements, or just so circumstantial as to be effectively useless without a particular setup. Frustrating!

Talking a bit after, we’ve decided to strip things back a bit, less crazy combo and circumstantial cards, and just try to establish a functional core. I think it’s much easier to gradually add complexity to a solid structure than it is to tame wild complexity into a solid structure. With a decently complex game there might be 10 or 20 different levers to pull on, and in a truly complex system, every lever can also indirectly affect the expression of every other lever. So as you can imagine, finding a balance is very hard, because every change you make throws things off somewhere else. But if instead you start with 3 levers just to get the core of the game figured out, you’ll have a much easier time finding a good alignment, and then from there you have a base sketch to reference and build interesting complexity upon. But without that solid base sketch, it’s hard to even know which way is up.

My feeling right now is that we'll probably keep the cards in players hands, but probably just have the actions be pretty basic and universal and not so circumstantial, as well as try to somewhat balance the distribution of each action card based on the frequency of their usage. I think from there we should have some pretty solid ground to stand on, analyze and build upon 👏🏼

Onto Thursday, Ben and I messed around with some alternate characters for the underworld game, one of which is now possibly my favorite character in the game.🤯 With this new character, players are able to move gold from one investment to another during the payouts phase of each round, which almost creates an entire other game within the game, with players moving gold around during payouts, rather than during their turn in order to outbid each other. A lot of interesting decisions and really satisfying tricks, one in particular where you can take gold that has already gotten you a benefit and move it down the payout sheet to get a second benefit with the same gold. It’s like taking a whole other free turn! Man that is satisfying.

Along with that, Ben has been building out a playable version of the game on Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia, which will be hugely beneficial in getting more play tests. Also, Sean has been, working away at some preliminary board art, exploring a few different style options and ways of integrating function with aesthetics. Very exciting to see art progress, feels more real every day haha good things happening!

See you in the next one 😎

07/23/2023

Devlog #10

Double digits! Here’s a recap of this past week:

On Tuesday we spend most of the day working on the pumpkin farming game, we’ve been trying a lot of different things with that one. With it being so early in the development process, we’re kind of in the mode of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. I think there’s a solid core there so far, trading with other players, upgrading your farm, and growing massive, sheep-eating pumpkins.

However, at times it’s felt a bit simplistic, so we’ve been experimenting a lot with introducing other elements, trying to add complexity in the right places while still maintaining smooth gameplay. I think a big part of the latter half will be with how certain mechanics are implemented. For instance when it comes to players taking actions, we’re considering changing out our original Puerto Rico-like action tiles, to an in-hand, more Brass Birmingham like model. But we’ve also experimented on the more mechanical side of things, adding other crops like corn and squash which interact in complex ways, adding a dynamically variable marketplace for selling crops, and other things like that.

One thing we’ve realized we have to be careful about however, is adding complexity that lengthens player turns. With some additions we’ve made previously, a single player’s turn could take 5 or so minutes, during which time, the other players could really only sit and wait to see what they would do. Basically what was happening was players had to map out a very complex order of actions within their current and subsequent turns, which would sometimes have to completely change due to the actions of another player, and if they didn’t properly map out their route during their turn, or neglect to account for a future pitfall, it could threaten their whole strategy. So boiling it down we’ve tried to make things a bit less punishing, and a bit more granular. By adding more turns per round, players have more of an opportunity to correct their mistakes, relieving the pressure to make the absolutely perfect turn. And by bringing the action tiles into each players hands, (as opposed to the Puerto Rico model) players are able to map out their turns and overall strategy with much more certainty and much more independently of other players actions. Of course, we want there to be some uncertainty and interaction between players, but I think it was a bit much before, so this feels like a step in the right direction.

Much experimentation and variations, I could go on for many paragraphs haha some things work, many things didn’t, tis the way of game design lol but overall, with a bit of a zoomed out view, I think we’re making good progress 👏🏼

Then on Thursday we met with Sean again to work on some art stuff. The art process (like everything else) is something we’re kinda figuring out as we go. Art/aesthetics and user interface have a lot of overlap, so it’s a pretty high communication collaboration to make sure both sides are satisfying their goals without compromising the integrity of the other. One of the things we’re exploring is a more organic looking board (see photos below). Originally the board was designed in a grid like manner, which works well for the game, but has the slight downside of looking a bit… Monopoly? Trouble? Sorry? Which is not exactly the first impression we’re going for 😅 so we’re exploring some different designs to try to address that. Granted, introducing some organic feel with art will help a lot, but may not be enough on its own to hide that underlying grid feel. Feel free to share opinions if you have them in the comments! Feedback is very useful 🙏🏼

Other than that, more manufacturing and logistics talks here and there, but that’s about it for this week! Another week of good progress, can’t wait to show some more art and design stuff soon! We’ll also probably be planning a large scale play test in the near future so keep your eyes out for that. But in the mean time, we’re doing small scale play test pretty regularly so if you’re interested in playing, feel free to hit us up! We can always use some fresh perspectives, and it’s nice to meet some new peeps 😎

Anyway, that’s it for now. Have a great day! See you next time 👏🏼

07/16/2023

Devlog #9

Greetings all, once again, it is I, Cam, back with another devlog!

Let’s not burry the lead… we have some art in progress!! These are just some preliminary sketches, Sean (our amazing artist) is still exploring a few different art styles, but even this early it’s just exciting to finally have some real art on its way to the game! Pumped to show more in the coming weeks 😁😁

We’ve been doing a bit more play testing with a 3 player count, feeling that out a bit. For most of the project so far we’ve been playing almost exclusively 4 player games, mainly because it makes it much easier to assess the effects of any changes we make, without having the results convoluted by variance in the player count. But it’s time we dive into the 3 and 5 player counts.

Last Saturday Ben and I played in a 3 player game at a local convention, which gave us a bit of a surprise. We just felt that the game was way less dynamic and engaging than the 4 player games, which honestly kinda puzzled and shook us a bit, but in talking afterwards, I think we have a pretty good understanding of what went wrong. Basically, Ben and I have played the game probably 100+ times each, so whenever we play against new players (which we generally try not to), we try to take it a little easier, not thinking so much about every little thing and just kinda making the first move that seems reasonable. What we didn’t really consider was the effect that this would have on other players, and in turn the pace and feeling of the overall game. Without realizing it, we had implied a much faster pace than is really reasonable for players to actually make deep and interesting decisions, and so each turn ended up feeling sort of rushed, and flippant, leading to just a pretty shallow and a not very engaging gameplay experience.

With this in mind, we played a 3 player game on Thursday, playing it for real this time, really thinking and taking the necessary time to make good decisions, and it went great. Super dynamic and engaging, deep decisions, players making deals with each other, all the good stuff we like. 👏🏼👏🏼 Obviously we need more play tests, and with different players at different levels to be more certain, but Thursday’s game was much more in line with hopes and expectations, which is a sigh of relief at least for now. 🤞🏼

Other than that, much of the same this week as last; planning our some next steps for the near term, website in the works, and talks with manufacturers and logistics companies, trying to get a handle on costs and all the nitty gritty details of making physical objects appear in front of us. Not the most glamorous stuff, but it does get us closer to making this thing happen, and that’s pretty cool. 😎

More to come soon!!! See you in the next one 🙂

07/07/2023

Ben here: Its crazy how you can look at a bunch of technical jargon one day with 0 understanding of any of it and have a pretty good idea of what it all means just a couple days later. Turns out that most things are pretty straightforward and they are not trying to willfully deceive you.

I finished our first detailed spec sheet as we zero in on exactly what components we want. All the things in red are changes we are making from our last quote. We are looking to upgrade the cards from white core to black core, add a black matte finish to our cardboard insert and the backs of the boards, and add more height to the box to accommodate minis in the deluxe version. We're not committed to any of that but we would like to see the price difference for higher quality components.

07/06/2023

Devlog #8

Hey all! Cam here with this weeks devlog. Another week in the books! Here’s a short recap:

On Tuesday, sadly I was away, but Ben and Platon held down the fort, making some more progress on alternate characters. We now have a full roster of alternate characters to play with and tune, which aside from being a great development for the game, really breathes new life to our personal experience when play testing amongst ourselves.

It’s been really helpful to have a fresh set of eyes on the game, especially in developing alternate characters. Ben and I have been working on this game for nearly a year now, and so naturally we’ve kinda fallen into certain ways of thinking, while Platon’s concept of the game is still forming, so he’s been much better able to come up with a lot of really unique and out of the box interesting ideas that Ben and I are probably too rigid now to think of.

Today (Thursday) we did some more discussing and zeroing in on the game name, reaching out to some board game groups for feedback. We also went over some quotes and spec sheets from a few manufacturers, which has actually been very exciting, as some of the recent quotes we’ve gotten have come in at much lower price points than we were expecting. So yay for that!! Along with that we’ve been dialing in the specifications for the games components, comparing specs for games we have on hand to get a feel for the differences. Ben spent a good chunk of time today diving into those spec sheets, learning the lingo and all the different options, so we’re much better equipped to know and communicate what we’re looking for. And as an added bonus, we are now unable to play a board game without an intense examination and discussion of its component specs.

That’s all folks! Have a good one 🤙🏼