Death Sands — A 1v1 miniatures game
Growing up in North Macedonia, Warhammer 40k was something only a select few had access to, and only in cases where their parents traveled abroad. My father traveled for work often to Berlin and Munich, but at the early age of six, I was only interested in LEGO and didn’t know of the miniature painting hobby. It was many years later at a local Magic the Gathering event in Skopje, where I saw Macedonian people playing Warhammer 40k. I talked with one of them and he went very deep into the lore of his army of mini-plastic warriors. I was fascinated by how much there is to know and how excited he got when sharing what he knew. I had an opportunity a few months later to try the game and besides the wonderfully made miniatures and the masterful paint jobs of the two guys that owned them, I did not like how the game flowed and even though I liked looking at how everything was designed, it was immediately clear that it was not a game for me. Too many units, and too many combinations. Suitable for another type of layer. I was a kid raised on the first-ever PCs and I came from a Prince of Persia and Shinobi background. These influences kept me away from board games even though I enjoyed sitting at the table and playing TTRPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk 2020, and Star Wars. But as the years went by I started playing board games more and more and I was very surprised that after so many PC games, the first thing we did with my buddy Martin when we were 16, was modify the rules of D&D.
But what was more interesting was the way we did it. We did not just invent new rules in the form of a homebrew RPG, we made new mechanics involving other physical objects like dice counters and cards that we called Vaults which enabled us to create and preserve resources and then spend that resource on something. Similar to how Planeswalkers in MTG were made to function. This was the first game-design-related thing that we did even before making any of our PC games in the next 15 years.
Remembering the Vault system and those days made me think about the wonderful times we had with Martin so I wanted to bring back that same type of joy we had as teenage-mutant-game-designers :)
So I thought about a product that would involve player-created physical objects that are needed to play the main game to stimulate further customization and the freedom to create community-created content in the future. Besides creating a TTRPG brand called PrintN’Play within the local gaming community Galactic Omnivore where we published a few one-page RPGs, I thought a lot about the last book I borrowed to Martin before he went on holiday. It was Dune by Frank Herbert. Due to the coincidence of it being exactly that book, I made a Dune-inspired Sci-fi Worm/Centipede miniatures game in my head.
Then I thought about the lack of consistency I had with all previous games making me go deep into all of the production steps I would love and hate and tried to prepare the pipeline only into chunks that I love to kinda force myself to finish a type of game I never done before.
This is how I did it:
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Making the cover art on my iPad in Procreate — Check
(Drawing makes me wanna write, so I always draw first)
Writing a Ruleset booklet in complete silence in my bedroom — Check.
(Writing in a simple Google Doc, makes it easy afterward to just copy-paste content into the final design and can help you with its creation because you can adjust space for the text.)
Making my own clay miniatures and painting them with Citadel colors that I can actually buy now. ( Not that they are available in MK, I went to Serbia to get them :P ) — Check
I bothered my father to make me a CNC cut alu-bond 60cm x 60cm board that I filled with sand to emulate a desert — Check
Putting the text into the template I designed in Figma and Adobe Illustrator — Check
Going to the printing company to make some copies. — Check
Seeing that I’ve made some mistakes in the design, going home to fix them and going back to print again — Check
Doing marketing materials for the game — Check
Publishing the final PDF to DriveThruRPG — Check
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This is how the booklet turned out in the end:
And these are some gameplay pics I took directly from my living room:
Overall I am very happy with the result and I hope it will further inspire me to continue making printable TTRPGs, miniature games, and continue with small One-Page RPGs that could turn out into something bigger
( Custom RPG Books?! ).
Death Sands is available for purchase here.
If you want to check out all other available games from PrintN’Play you can do so here.
