The journey to Kangaroo Island has been long and winding. It all started on February 21, 2021 when designer Jeffrey Allers took the time to teach and play his tile-laying design Pandoria with me over Zoom. I found the game and Jeff’s explanation fascinating because of how the game evolved tile-laying into a thoroughly nuanced, involved, and thinky experience. At the time, I had recently completed the bulk of the design work on my first ever design (First Monday in October with its 2020 design diary available here), and I had no intention of ever making a second game. Unexpectedly, there must have been some magical combination of inspiration from Pandoria and encouragement from Jeff on that Sunday afternoon that led my subconscious over the next week to come up with my own involved and thinky tile-laying game. I did my first playtest of what was then affectionately referred to as Galaxy’s Edge or Galactic Frontier on February 28, 2021, and I’ve continued to play what has now become Kangaroo Island countless times throughout the next few years as it evolved and grew into what I’m thrilled to say Rio Grande Games now plans to publish in 2025.
It is such a vastly different experience to design a game starting from the mechanisms than from the theme. First Monday in October was rooted in a desire to reflect over 200 years of U.S. Supreme Court history, putting players in the position of longstanding philosophies or institutions to shape the composition of the Court and influence the outcome of landmark cases through a tug-of-war over Federalist and Antifederalist principles. The design decisions and the incorporation of various mechanisms all flowed from that core theme. The experience with Kangaroo Island has been almost entirely 180 degrees removed from my first game. I started from my two decades of love and admiration for Klaus Jurgen-Wrede’s phenomenal Carcassonne (which hangs on my wall as a singular work of art), and my desire for a game that would present players with even more difficult and meaningful decisions. I layered on top my incredible appreciation for the way in which the player boards in Hansa Teutonica create an engine of growth that give the game a compelling narrative arc and that give players clear objectives and paths to pursue. The third initial piece of the puzzle was my long-time fandom for the scoring system pioneered by Reiner Knizia in Tigris & Euphrates, which I was eager to incorporate into my game to compel players to earn points in all categories rather than simply specializing in one.
The original theme for Kangaroo Island in 2021 started as an intergalactic space exploration game in which the players emerged from the central black hole of another galaxy and were tasked with mapping and laying claim to the new galaxy, while discovering new planets and stars to build new spaceships of various types. The theme was not particularly important or resonant in those early prototypes with colored pencils and construction paper (perhaps in part because the scale of the various terrain types was vastly out of step with reality), but the gameplay seemed to resonate with many early playtesters.
One of the pieces of encouraging wisdom that Jeff Allers shared on that call was that he hoped First Monday in October finds an audience. That phrase stuck with me because I had never really thought of releasing a game into the wild as the game finding an audience — but rather as a longtime game hobbyist and fan as those of us in the public being the ones trying to discover and find the games. I decided from the beginning that I was the audience for what would become Kangaroo Island. I would make this first and foremost a game that I would love to play over and over. My shelves are literally overflowing with incredible new published releases from all over the world, so if I’m going to make my own game and make sure that it is both solid and immensely replayable, then it needs to be something that I’ll personally be more than happy to play over and over and over again.
With that in mind, throughout 2021 and 2022, I showed “Galaxy’s Edge” or “Galactic Frontier” to everyone I met through many different board game events, and I welcomed feedback that I was eager to try out and then incorporate whenever it made the game more enjoyable. For instance, playtester Lucy McVeigh had the early idea to make each players’ hand of tiles open, and it made the game so fun to see what tiles other players had and plan accordingly (especially when placing that fateful third piece of a waterhole). And playtester Camilla Garner Greer had the idea to shade what are now the waterholes (and what were then gaseous planets and stars) so that they had to be constructed into circular patterns rather than interminable rivers. Playtesters Erik Arneson and Joe Huber helped convince me to streamline the game by combining what were then the obstructing military cruisers and the exploring scout vessels into what is now the singular platypus. When Jason Matthews playtested the game, he also helped me see how fewer animal pieces would create more tension, which led to the introduction of the stones on the upgrade tracks. And more recently playtesters David Vestal, Connie Vogelmann, and Elizabeth Hargrave found and exploited a weakness of the bushfire token’s predecessor (which was then called the “stomp tile”) that gave me the opportunity to fix and significantly improve that part of the game.
Those are just a few of the ideas along the way that came from many incredible playtesters that helped make Kangaroo Island the game it is today. I brought the game to the Gathering of Friends convention in April 2022, and I mistakenly thought it was done at that point. I showed it to various designers and publishers, and I got the disappointing but encouraging feedback to keep working on it for another year. I might have stopped then and there if it were not for the hugely motivating encouragement of designer Roberta Taylor and playtesters Becca and Nathan Morse, who urged me to stick with it.
Luckily, I enjoyed playing this work-in-progress tile-laying creation, so I ultimately had no trouble getting it back to the table repeatedly throughout 2022 and 2023. It was not until 2023 when Jason Matthews played the game again, recognized that it had come a long way from that early 2021 rough draft, and told me what the theme and title would be. Jason had worked as the developer on First Monday in October, and he had actually come up with the title for that prior game already, so I was more than happy to have him tell me the theme and title for my second game. He told me all about this incredible island off the coast of Australia, which is home to a huge abundance of various incredibly adorable wildlife. The theme fit the mechanisms like a glove!
I was so happy to have a real setting for the game, especially given the plethora of wonderful outer space games that you can already play (Galaxy Trucker, Nexus Ops, Dune: Imperium, Roll for the Galaxy, Eclipse, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Wars: Rebellion, just to name a few). I began reading all about Kangaroo Island and its increadible natural wonders, hoping I could go there someday, and wandering the island via Google Maps and Street View. It felt so natural to change the settlement ships into kangaroos, the science vessels into penguins, the merchant barges into koalas, and the newly combined scout ships and military cruises into platypodes (although they were briefly caterpillars in between, but that’s a whole other story). Throughout playtesting, my son Henry had come up with various fun ideas to add to the tiles, so we worked together to transform those into the new setting. He had the idea for the asteroid fields that would obstruct movement (which became human construction sites) and for the wormholes that would allow teleportation (which became caves / tunnels). I actually think that the construction sites and caves give the growing map an important level of texture that makes the decisions about movement and tile placement vastly more interesting, and all credit goes to Henry for those ideas.
Ultimately, the long and winding process of designing Kangaroo Island has felt more like uncovering or discovering the game than designing it. Over the years, I’ve found a game that I love playing through an intensely collaborative and iterative process. By way of example, I did not think there was any way at all to make a solo mode for Kangaroo Island, but a long car ride discussion with playtester Clyde Wright coupled with detailed feedback and guidance from designer Connie Vogelmann proved me wrong. Finally, in 2024, I was able to crack the nut on a solo mode that I could be proud of and that I hope will… find an audience.
There’s no way that a design diary about Kangaroo Island could be complete without mentioning the unbelievably fabulous artwork and graphic design of Susie O’Connor. When Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games agreed to publish the game, he was looking at a bland black-and-white Microsoft Word document, but he quickly found Susie and she has brought the game to life in a way that I really never could have imagined. For a while now, every few weeks, I’ve received a new piece of lovely and cuddly artwork in my inbox from Susie. She came up with the bulletin board concept for the player boards and the rules, which I completely adore, and she created the stunning animal visuals and the brand-new platypeeple shape. The artwork is what will draw people to the game, if anything, and hopefully the design will be strong enough to keep them coming back. If enough of you enjoy the game, then maybe I’ll even get to bring to life one or more of the expansion ideas I have for adding additional Australian animals to the game!
My brother once asked me what it was that I like so much about modern strategy board games (as compared to the mass market board games of our childhood), and after pondering for a bit, I came up with the idea that I like board games that confront me with difficult and meaningful decisions. I want games that are chock full of player decisions; I want those decisions to be difficult so players have to wrestle with their decisions; and I want those decisions to be meaningful so that they impact the subsequent turns, the game state, and the outcome. I want all of that with limited downtime between turns and in 1-2 hours. My goal with Kangaroo Island all along was to deliver on those desires — to create the perfect game for my tastes that would be full of difficult and meaningful decisions.
The part of the design that I think best reflects this is the way in which the game separates out tile placement from point scoring. When you place tiles, you can complete terrain features that unlock important advancements on your player mat that give you a new unit or improved abilities, but you cannot earn any points through tile placement. This is a conscious and fundamental break from the inspiration of Carcassonne. This is coupled with the somewhat counterintuitive turn structure that has players completing movement and claiming territory before the tile placement step of your turn. While playtesters are often eager to place their tile at the beginning of their turn, this would make decisions often too obvious because you would move onto and claim territory on the tile that you just placed. Inverting the order of the phases means that players need to consider how their tile placement may be exploited by their opponents for points. The difficult and meaningful decisions that I’m aiming for are wrapped up in how players prioritize competing incentives, how players space out their limited animal units, and whether going with your instinct to complete a given terrain feature is always the best path in a given situation.
I’m hopeful that players will find challenging decisions in both movement and tile placement, and that you’ll be torn in a few different directions. I’m hopeful that players will have fun when they discover clever plays using bushfire tokens, cave tiles, and the ever-fearsome platypus. I’m hopeful that others out there want to build an island out of tiles with their friends and family, exploring and laying claim to that island with their adorable herd of local fauna. Ultimately, I’m hopeful that the game finds an audience.
