Hello everyone, and welcome to Newsletter #19! 🚀

In this newsletter, we’ll take a deep dive into the development of Prosperity Protocol, with a special focus on the player board!

Prosperity Protocol is still very much a work in progress! Right now, I’m focused on building the game’s core framework, exploring which mechanisms belong in the game and how to make them feel as intuitive and natural as possible.

One of my main goals is to create a game with excellent replayability—a game where every session feels different, and where you’re already thinking about what strategy you want to try next before the current game is even over.

At the heart of the game are the production lines. Starting with raw resources that you harvest, you’ll refine, develop, and transform them into advanced resources through three different production buildings and processing steps. Each player has two production lines that can be customized to suit their strategy, with every step offering opportunities for technological upgrades and powerful bonuses.

I also want the game’s economy to feel dynamic. Resources will gradually become depleted over the course of the game, encouraging players to trade with one another. While it’s technically possible to do everything yourself, trying to build a completely self-sufficient economy will usually result in an inefficient machine. Specialization and cooperation should be far more rewarding.

The strategic paths I want players to feel are all equally viable include:

• Specializing in the advanced production of two of the four raw materials.

• Developing cutting-edge technologies to sell to other players.

• Expanding your electricity network and becoming the group’s primary power supplier.

• Focusing on exploration and scavenging for rare materials.

• Harvesting large quantities of basic resources to sell on the market.

• Maximizing Ruble-generating strategies.

• Creating hybrid strategies by combining any of the above.

You can excel at one or two of these paths, but you won’t be able to master them all effectively. Success should come from reading the board, understanding what the other players are doing, and identifying the strategy that gives you the biggest advantage in that particular game.

To support all of this, I want the player board to be as intuitive as possible—almost functioning as a built-in player aid that naturally guides players through their production engine and available options.

After just one playtest, I decided to scrap the entire action selection mechanism.

My glorious 3DASS (3-Dimensional Action Selection System)—which I was incredibly proud of—turned out to overcomplicate the game and make player interaction feel clunky and awkward. It was one of those ideas that seemed fantastic in theory but simply didn’t work the way I had imagined once it hit the table.

Still, I think it’s interesting to look at the thinking behind the system and why I designed it in the first place.

After countless ideas and sketches, I came up with this system using two circular boards that combined to create an inner and an outer action. Each circle contained four different actions, and by rotating the top circle you could create new combinations of inner and outer actions.

The inner action was performed only by you, while the outer action was performed by every player in turn order. Each action could be upgraded over the course of the game, and one quarter of the top circle was cut away to reveal a socket (the red circle) underneath. Here, players could insert special exploration tokens they had discovered, unlocking unique actions. These tokens could also be traded before being socketed, creating even more strategic possibilities and making every game feel different.

To keep things relatively simple, the inner actions were Move Units, Develop Technologies, Generate Electricity, and one customizable section with four interchangeable sockets. The outer actions were Production Line 1 & 2, Build Units & Buildings, and Excavate (Mine).

If I may say so myself, I thought the system was groundbreaking—innovative, elegant, and incredibly cool! 😉

There was just one problem…

It wasn’t fun.

It wasn’t intuitive.

It created huge amounts of analysis paralysis, and instead of encouraging trading, long-term planning, and reading the table—the very things I wanted the game to revolve around—it got in the way of them.

So the phrase “kill your darlings” has never felt more appropriate. As painful as it was, I decided to scrap the entire action selection system and start over.

The second time around, I approached the design very differently.

Instead of chasing an innovative, groundbreaking mechanism, I made the goals of the game and the flow of play my top priorities. Rather than asking, “How can I make the action system unique?”, I asked, “How do I want the game to feel when people play it?”

That shift in mindset made all the difference.

(HERMAN curve, anyone? 😉)

Of course, I know it’s difficult to fully grasp all of the concepts from these rough sketches and work-in-progress Photoshop files, but this new system takes a very different approach from the old 3DASS.

Instead of long, complex individual turns, each game round is now divided into several distinct phases.

In the first phase, players take turns moving, exploring, excavating (gathering resources from the map), and energizing(generating electricity with their Tesla Towers).

The second phase is performed simultaneously by all players. This is where the economy really comes alive. Players trade resources, negotiate electricity prices, buy and sell technologies, upgrade their actions, run their production lines, and develop the technologies they’ve acquired. My goal is for this to be an exciting and slightly chaotic phase where everyone is constantly interacting with one another.

The third phase returns to turn order. Here, players construct new buildings and units, collect their income, and fulfill any government contracts they have completed.

Once that’s finished, a new round begins with the movement and exploration phase.

The idea behind this structure is to create a smoother game flow while making the trading phase the social and strategic heart of the game. I’m really excited to get this version onto the table and see how it performs in playtesting!