Shrink Projects (Free to Download!)

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For each of these variants I received permission from the game’s publisher to use the assets from the print-and-play file to design my version, as well as permission to post to boardgamegeek.com.

Pocket Watch: Micro Version of Set a Watch

Set a Watch is a wonderful optimization puzzle of defeating monsters with limited resources. It has a tense tower defense feel, wrapped in an amazing fantasy theme of defending your camp against round after round of enemy creature attacks. Pocket Watch condenses Set a Watch into 18 cards. You’ll need to provide your own dice and a few cubes.

Pocket Watch was recently included as a stretch goal in the publisher’s latest Set a Watch Kickstarter!

Download Pocket Watch here.

Mistsmall: Mistfall in 18 Cards

For me, Mistfall was love at first play. I fell hard for this game.

Mistfall is set in a high fantasy universe with shockingly thorough and relatively interesting lore. I won’t do it justice trying to summarize the worldbuilding, so I’ll just skip to the mechanics. The sweet, sweet mechanics. It’s a combat-heavy adventure game (with extra combat, and combat sprinkles, please). It is an unmitigated Euro puzzle of playing cards, pulling off combos, and making tough decisions (sorry, Ally, I need you to take this one on the chin for me). In other words, it’s everything I want out of a game.

So, naturally, I shrunk it. I wanted a version I could play on a coffee table after the kids were in bed. Or during my lunch break, playing one or two encounters and packing up to pick up where I left off next time. Mistsmall consists of 18 cards and a few tokens. Players must provide a few cubes.

Just like Mistfall, Mistsmall is fairly complex and will take a time investment to learn. But for me at least, it was well worth the effort.

Download Mistsmall here.

Gloomholdin’: A No-Table-Needed Micro Version of Gloomhaven

Yep, I’m a crazy person. This was an enormous undertaking. I spent about 12 months working on shrinking one of the industry’s biggest boxes into an 18-card, handheld experience. The project took way more effort than I had originally banked on, but I’m really happy I stuck with it.

The game includes 22 scenarios, 24 items, and 24 monsters. It also has a full scenario book, a rulebook, and a 2-player expansion.

Gloomholdin’ got a lot more attention than I was expecting, which was really exciting. It spent over a week at #1 on Board Game Geek’s Hotness list. It caught some buzz from content creators like Dicebreaker, Bell of Lost Souls, and TechRaptor. At the time I’m writing this, Gloomholdin’ is enjoying an 8.6 rating on Board Game Geek, with over 136,000 page views after just a few weeks.

You can download the files off of Board Game Geek to print and play it for free.

Check out the Work In Progress page on Board Game Geek if you are interested in the design process.

Mage Lite: Mage Knight in 18 Cards

As of a few months ago, Mage Knight is my favorite board game. A brain-burning adventure with exploration, killing monsters, deckbuilding, gaining skills, casting spells, recruiting units, and taking on entire cities by yourself. What’s not to love?

The problem, like many of the big-game versions of my shrinks, is it’s a massive game. It requires 3+ hours and an entire dinner table if you want to do it right. So I set out to shrink it. The biggest challenge was…all of it. I cut out a few systems (tactics cards), streamlined or altered some others (wounds, mana), and preserved everything else that I could. The result, I think, is a Mage Knight experience in 18 cards, with virtually no other components. In the base game, you need to provide a penny. So I guess instead of free you could say this game costs 1 cent.

I also created two expansions right away. The Main Expansion just offers a bunch more stuff, including map tiles and additional monsters. The Crystal Expansion adds mana crystals back into the game, a system I had to remove from the base game to make it work. Personally, I actually like the 18-card base game the best of all the possible configurations.

You can download Mage Lite here.

And you can check out the Work In Progress page for a peek under the hood.

Ark Minima: Ark Nova in 18 cards

Ark Minima is an 18-card version of Ark Nova, posted as a free print-and-play game with permission from Capstone Games.

In Ark Minima, 1 to 2 players compete to build the zoo with the most appeal and the greatest conservation value. Build enclosures, play animals into your zoo, use sponsor actions and get points from conservation efforts. All using just 18 cards and in under 40 minutes!

Download it for free here!

Pax Pamini: Pax Pamir 2e in 18 Cards

Pax Pamini is a 1- to 2-player, 18-card version of Pax Pamir 2e. It does away with the map. Instead, player tableaus have four columns, one for each of the four locations in the game. So every card is in a player’s tableau (their court), and the impact icons on those columns (such as tribes, roads and armies) are in an abstracted location that corresponds with that column. Players share space in an abstracted map, and can compete on it in that sense.

The game is complex. I think it plays even heavier than big Pamir. There are a lot of fiddly rules. But (in my biased opinion) it is REALLY good. Which I think is more a testament to the resilience of Pax Pamir’s design more than anything else. I’m unbelievably pleased with how this one turned out.

For solitaire gamers, there is a solo mode available in which you play against an AI opponent (Mikhran, the mini equivalent of Wakhan).

Download Pax Pamini here.