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 my latest game ‘Arthropods’ which has just been released. It’s a strategic game where you build the game board using hexagon tiles. During play, you’ll want to build either an ant colony or a beehive to score points. The game consists of 2 different themes: Ants and bees. To make efficient use of the game material, each tile has one side which displays part of a beehive or flower field, used for the bee themed game and one side containing below ground scenarios for the ant game. This was graphically a hell of a job to realize, but it offers the player maximum fun and the possibility to play different games with the same materials.
How Playfull Panda and its games were founded
This year I started my own board game business and will present my own game ‘Arthropods’ to the public for the first time. A festive event that was preceded by 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.
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 and that I will be at the fair with this autumn: ‘Arthropods’. This strategic game contains 4 different variants in which you play as either a colony of bees or as an ant colony. Meaning there are 4 different game rules in the box.
Will you pass by at the fair for a game with these industrious insects?
Information from BoardGameGeek.