The latest game from Pangea Games is launching on Kickstarter. Tasty Humans is a 30-60 minute, tile-laying, pattern-building game for 1-4 players.
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Needless to say, all of us at Pangea HQ are pretty amped about this campaign. To celebrate the launch, I’ll be releasing a five-part case study on the development of the game every week for the next five weeks.
I didn’t write these articles – Ryan Langewisch did. He is the designer of Tasty Humans. His writing provides an excellent analysis of all the important decisions he made when designing the game. These articles will provide you with tremendous insight into what it’s like to make board games from the designer’s perspective.
Another reason I wanted to share these articles is to push Ryan’s work. This guy is a freaking legend. He won Panjam, a 48-hour board game design contest that Pangea ran in 2018. That is how we found out about him. In his retrospective on the contest, he said that he basically made the game in 24 hours. He scrapped a bad idea mid-contest and started fresh!
I didn’t intend to publish another game at the time that I ran the contest. In fact, it was only when I noticed that his game ranked head and shoulders over the rest that I paid attention. Tyson Mertlich, game developer and member of the GameSmiths, insisted that we publish the game. After playing, I agreed. It would have been a crime to leave this game unpublished.