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Hey friends, I'm doing something kind of wild: I made a board game. I think it's pretty fun, and I'm gonna order a few copies of it soon. I'll be placing this order no matter what. Anyone wanna go in on it with me?

I designed Octico a couple years ago. At the time I was messing around with 3x3 grid mechanics and wanted to design a 1v1 game that was simple to pick up but with a mastery curve. I ended up building something tic-tac-toe-esque with much more going on strategically.

I'm no illustrator, so I leaned on my experience with data viz and made a clean, high-contrast aesthetic that was easy to repeat. This isn't how I'd want all of my games to look, but I'm happy with it as an aesthetic for a low-key abstract strategy game.

Octico is the most successful game I've ever made. People really seem to like it! Friends and playtesters have described it as the kind of game you'd pick up in a Target checkout line, which I consider tremendously high praise.

I ended up shelving it at the time over some replayability concerns, but recently I revisited it and decided those concerns were unfounded. I'm proud of this game and I want it in paper, so I spent the past several days cleaning it up and preparing to get it printed.

If you want to play the game for free or just gauge your interest, you can get the print & play version here: drive.google.com/file/d/17utj...

This looks neat! I think I would amend manual to state explicitly that the center piece is immovable, and clarify the wording for scoring; I initially thought that the placement of the card had to match one of its own black spots to score, not you had to have a piece for all of its black spots.