Artifish
Welcome, Arti-Fisher, to the most important mission of all of your nine lives: you need to catch fish from a variety of biomes to save your local museum from closing down. You’ve been tasked by your mentor, Guichen, to retrieve and bring back six fish to each section of the museum, as well as trash to help clean up the environment. A challenge is unavoidable, however— some of the places you must fish will be dangerous— and will test your abilities of using items to aid your adventure wisely. From icy terrains to volcanic lakes, it’s your responsibility to be smart about the choices you make and where you gather items.
Will you save your museum, or will you be too afraid to brave the unknown?
When the museum’s every collection is completed, whoever has the most points wins, and you save the museum!
Artifish was the first board game I worked in. We created a group solely from our love for cats and we wanted to create a game based off of cats and a PvP game with co-op elements, hence Artifish was born.
I worked as the Systems Designer and created the rulebook instead of leading the project, which helped me understand gameplay metrics a lot in depth.
I created a movement system that was affected by tile biomes, items and player rolls to make the players think about the direction they choose to go.
Other than the movement system, I created a museum points system that worked with a contribution mechanic; depending on how hard a fish is to catch and how much a player contributed to a specific collection of fish. This allowed for a high risk high reward factor while also letting casual players have a chance to win with the amount of contribution they made.
Artifish Ideation/First Draft Rulebook
Artifish Final Rulebook
We had multiple changes during play-test days as early biome, item types and collection mechanic were not fun to play with and relied heavily on RNG.
In the end, we got the simple-to-understand, casual game that encourages players cooperating and also racing against each other to fill the museum and also have the most valuable fish and collections.