Award-winning game designer with a focus on systems design, innovative game mechanisms and making games that bring people together
Cortiça was officially released in April 2024 through the Board Game of the Month Club, Button Shy’s subscription service where backers receive a new game every month. This meant that the physical game was not sold on Button Shy’s store except for a brief moment when 30 or so spare copies were available and
In the following year Gil d’Orey from Mebo Games contacted me about another of my prototypes and since they ve published several games with Portuguese themes I brought up Cortiça. He tried it out, liked what he saw and for the next months we iterated on the game, both in terms of gameplay but also production.
The deadline for Button Shy’s design challenge was fast approaching so it was time to prepare the materials to submit. The cards and rulebook were in a good state but there was one thing left to do: the pitch video. These videos are an important part of the process. Button Shy gets so many submissions
I ve been working on a new prototype which I m calling The Machine . It started about a month ago. I wanted to make a game to play with my family, so it had to be accessible and easy to learn. It should fit into a small box. And I wanted the players to be able to
Now that I had a playable prototype (with a theme and everything!) it was time to show it to more players. This time however, I didn t have a playtest group. Not only that, it was July 2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone was at home in quarantine, and it would have been irresponsible
At the end of Part 1 I had a high level idea of how the game could work, but it hadn t been tested and I had yet to define what it would be about. At this point I could either look for a theme to design the game around, or try to get the game s
At long last, let s talk about Cortiça! What is it, and where did it come from? After Blight Chronicles: Agent Decker wrapped up, I was done. It was such a negative experience that it left me incapable of working on my own projects for a while. It taught me what a panic attack was, even
Hey everyone! Remember this blog? It s been a while since I posted regularly about what I ve been working on. Sure, there was the odd update and catch-up here and there, but there was so much that wasn t mentioned here, from new game prototypes, to a new design being picked up by two publishers and even
Every so often I look for talks about the process of designing games and only found a few. Maybe I m spoiled by all the postmortems that happen in the videogame medium but I d love to see something similar from boardgame designers, especially about working with IP or adapting games from one medium to another. So
I was interviewed by Alice Vilaça for the radio show Portugueses no Mundo , which is about the experiences Portuguese people have when they re living abroad. If you speak Portuguese you can listen to it on their website or on the subtitled video below. In addition, here is the transcript in English: Alice Vilaça: Manuel Correia