Playfull Panda Game Development
About Playfull Panda
Playfull Panda is a small board game publisher that strives to develop games with a high playability rate. Contemporary board games in small editions and at a fair price, but above all: Games that won’t bore and stay challenging after playing them several times.
The best example of this is the game ‘Arthropods Ants & Bees’ which has been released at Spellenspektakel 2024. It’s a tile placement game where you’ll play either with the ants or with the bees. During play, you’ll want to score point by a.o. building a beehive or producing honey.
’Arthropods Ants & Bees’ actually consists of 4 different games: one quick and easy game suited for the whole family, for both the ants and the bees game. And for more advanced player there’s an extension for both variations as well which adds complexity and playtime.
My upcoming game (known for now as ‘Cocktail Master’), will also be more than ‘just one game’. I aim to include at least a solo game, short version and 6 player expansion. But I’m also experimenting with the mini expansion ‘X-mas Special’ and make sure to find all ‘easter eggs’ I include.
How Playfull Panda and its games were founded
Last year’s Spellenspektakel was a huge success so I’m back this year for my second participation as a board game publisher. But before I got there, I made a quite the journey and am still learning a lot.
Since I was young, I loved playing (strategic) board games. Every Friday afternoon me and my friends were found at the kitchen table playing games and trying to outsmart each. Very cozy, but at a certain point we got tired of playing the same games over and over. We therefore invented our own sets of rules to spice things up and to find new ways to trick each other. That was the first moment which let to working out some ideas and eventually create my own game. After refining this concept for many years, doing a lot of research and playing many test rounds, I finally printed a prototype of my very first game: ‘Rule of Trigon’.
I learned a lot from this experience, gained a lot of knowledge about the board game industry and therefore also got a clear picture of all the challenges that small publishers face. One of the conclusions was also that Rule of Trigon is a cool game, but that it was going to be very difficult to make this profitable in small quantities. I still have this one-of-a-kind prototype, so feel free to ask me about it when visiting my boot.
With all this new knowledge and insights, I started working on a new game. I got the inspiration for this from my private life, since I became the proud father of a son in 2021. From that point my life mainly consisted of sleepless nights, dirty diapers, bottles and all kinds of obstacles around parenthood that I had never thought about before. I soon got all kinds of parenting advice but realized that there was a lot of books on that topic, but no games. I therefore created a game to ease upcoming (grand)parents into raising kids and get familiar with all the challenges in a playful way: ‘Babymania’.
Whereas I released ‘Babymania’ under the wing of publisher Unique Board Game, I decided in January 2024 to take the plunge and start for myself under the name Playfull Panda Game Development. Not without reason, since I had been working on a brand-new game concept for a while that I wanted to publish in-house: ‘Arthropods Ants & Bees’. Like last year the ants will be working hard and the bees will be buzzing again.
So, will you pass by at the fair for a game with these industrious insects?
