I don’t know about you, but I find ideas can come from anywhere.
I was on a train not so long ago, travelling from Glasgow and just approaching Dalmally. I got up to be ready for my stop and noticed the passengers near me had a book on their table, black with a bright yellow graphic and the title, “Dungeon Crawlers.” Next to it was a standard deck of playing cards.
So I said hello and asked, “Are you into board games?”
They said yes.
I asked, “Do you design board games?”
They said no, but then asked me, “Do you?”
I explained that I was working on my first game,
and they asked, “How does that happen? How did you end up designing a game in the first place?”
And that’s really what this first blog is about, how I began designing a game, and why.
It began decades ago, playing games around a table with family and friends, especially my family. From a young age I was taught to play cards, and I still play the same games today that I learned over 30 years ago with my Mum and Dad. I’ve even started teaching them to my nieces and nephews. At its heart, this has always been about being together around a table and having fun, with plenty of shared joy and laughter. I also enjoy the strategy and challenge of winning (or attempting to) which I think is a healthy part of playing board games, but for me it’s always been the shared experience that matters most, and how those moments make you feel and connect with others.
Out of that love of games, family, and shared experiences came the beginning of an idea. I wanted to create something inspired by a family favourite card game, 301, but shaped as a modern card game, one with a theme, and mechanics or a gameplay loop that connected to that theme, while still sharing its DNA with a standard deck of playing cards. I wanted to capture the same joy I’ve felt around the table playing 301, but also shape a new experience, something familiar, yet fresh in how it felt to play. I liked the idea of designing a game that could act as a bridge between generations, perhaps rekindling a love of traditional card games, or introducing them to people who had never really explored what a simple deck of cards can do. That idea slept in the back of my mind. Laying dormant, until a visit to Ireland brought it back to life.
This really happened thanks to my nephew James.
At the time, my brother-in-law Pat had a new coffee machine, and James, who was nine, loved using it. He would ask if I wanted a coffee, make one for me, and then one day said,
“Would you like to see my coffee cards?”
I did, and he showed me these collectible cards he’d made that you could earn with each coffee. Then he showed me the trading cards he’d made. They were amazing. James had drawn his own characters and even made booster packs out of paper and tape, along with a display box for them. I asked if he’d ever thought about designing a game, and he said yes. When I asked more about the cards, he told me they were about different kinds of animals, land, sea, air, and mythical creatures. This turned out to be just what I was looking for, the missing piece I needed to begin shaping a theme around the long-held 301 idea in my mind.
We knew the game would focus on four suits or categories, land, air, sea, and mythical creatures. My first thought was that maybe the players would be collectors, trying to gather creatures. A bit like “Pokémon.” But we wanted something that felt distinct from that, so I suggested that instead of collecting the creatures themselves, maybe the game could be about collecting data from them. That led us to ask: who are the players, and what are they doing? What if the players weren’t humans at all, but aliens studying these animals? I remembered there was a word for something like that, similar to a zoologist. I confess I had to look it up and we found xenology, the study of alien life, biology, and cultures, which felt perfect for what we were creating. We started playing with the idea of the game being called something like Xeno, and imagined these beings coming from a distant planet. But we discovered there were already games called Xeno. That sparked another thought, what if their planet existed in a kind of mirrored relationship to Earth, from the opposite side of the universe? If Earth saw them as “xeno,” then from their perspective, Earth might be something like Onex. That’s how the mysterious planet began to take shape.
This encounter felt like something that had been a long time coming. I can remember myself being around nine years old, trying to create my own games and ideas, but never quite being able to get what was in my head onto paper. I’d lose myself in adventure books, drawing maps and inventing worlds, stories, and games, but nothing ever really stuck. More than thirty years later, with all the creativity, ideas, and experience I’ve gathered through playing board games, I met my nephew at the same age I was when I first started dreaming about making something. I loved the sense of that circle, creativity building from one generation to the next. And so there it is, that’s how I became a game designer.
It’s something that’s been a part of me since I was about nine years old, something that’s been with me all my life. I don’t regret that it’s taken this long for the desire to design a game and an idea to come together strongly enough that I’m now designing my first game. If anything, my experience and knowledge, the time I’ve spent around tables playing games with family and friends, has quietly been part of the design process all along. It comforts me to think, wherever any of us are on our journey with games, we are not alone.
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