The Story

Game designing has been a lifelong passion of mine. I've made plenty of games before Frodge, but I've never pushed them all the way to final production. Sometimes I wondered whether it was due to a lack of motivation, or skills, or resources... but having gone all in with Frodge, I realised I was designing in the wrong direction.

I want to make games that can be enjoyed by the widest range of people. Games with depth and complex strategy can be fun, but they can also alienate groups of potential players who just want to sit down with friends and have a good time, not read an encyclopedia of rules and barely have any time to actually play the game.

Frodge has been designed to be simple, easy access, but with just enough depth and strategy to keep players engaged. There's so much potential for expansions to the rules (hence the Game FAQ page with all the Extra Rules), but I want to keep the base game as accessible as possible.

Accessibility and inclusivity are crucial, especially for board games. Also a very hard balance to strike, so I used a few already successful games as the influence for Frodge.

7 Wonders is a game that has seen international success for its use of graphical cues and simplicity of translation. Pretty much every card has no words on it, just easy to recognise icons. I think that's pretty cool, and so I attempted to incorporate that graphical simplicity into the design for Frodge. Every card has basic mechanics, and handy instructional graphics to show exactly how to use it. Additionally, the instructional videos will be almost entirely visual - very little talking or voice-over. I want the game and the art within it to speak for itself, rather than me have to explain things, or players having to read too much.

Tsuro is a beautiful game with straightforward, tile-based movement, and some pretty brutal yet subtly limited strategy. You play tiles down onto a set grid, that will move your rock (your playable character) along a set path. Initial versions of Frodge borrowed the tile-placement mechanics from Tsuro, but the final Frodge game has all tiles already placed. The simplicity of the rules of Tsuro are the main reference Frodge maintains. The player is given only a few options of what they can do during their turn, which, especially for younger audiences, makes the game seem less daunting, and they don't have to think 10 turns ahead. Additionally, both Tsuro and Frodge incorporate a subtle randomness/luck system, whereby your progress in the game is shaped by the cards you draw, but ultimately you choose which cards you play. Many games use this, but I like it for striking that balance between player controlled strategy and board game luck. We all enjoy rolling the dice sometimes, just not if our lives/games are entirely dictated by it.

My life has always been surrounded by the environment. Both my parents are ecologists/zoologists, so not only do we have plenty of pets in the family home, we are always working on some kind of nature-themed project. When I was younger, I used to help out with 'frog walks', where we'd wander around a lake with groups of school kids (usually around my age) and look for frogs. Since those days, frogs have remained one of my favourite animals, next to foxes, octopuses and praying mantis (I like to be diverse, alright?).

Even now I keep the environment close to my heart, working as staff and education assistant at the Herdsman Lake Discovery Centre, for the WA Gould League - the same folks who used to run those frog walks! Having also spent my whole life wanting to make a game, I knew I had to combine these two passions, with Frodge!

I didn't just make Frodge because I like frogs. I made Frodge because I have a rock solid belief that the environment we live in is truly amazing, and so I want to celebrate that in whatever creative ways I can. And, hopefully, inspire others to adopt a similar belief. As quickly as the space race is progressing, our Earth is a pretty cool place too, and nothing should let us forget that.