Designer Diary: Super Boss Monster | BoardGameGeek News

by Hayden Dillard

Super Boss Monster is the 2025 sequel to Boss Monster: The Dungeon Building Card Game. It’s a great example of what happens when you release a best-selling game, but spend the next decade thinking about how you could have done it better. While Boss Monster has no shortage of expansions, Super Boss Monster completely revamps key elements of the game by introducing a market, a board, and even some basic worker-placement mechanisms.

I’m Hayden Dillard, Development Lead at Brotherwise Games. I’ve been developing and designing for Brotherwise for the last five years, but before I continue this diary, let’s hear from my boss and co-designer, Johnny O’Neal.

•••

Old Boss, New Tricks

Thanks, Hayden, and hello, BGG! I’m Johnny O’Neal, the designer of Boss Monster and co-founder of Brotherwise Games. Boss Monster is the game that changed my life. It launched Brotherwise and went on to become one of the most successful hobby games of all time, with over a million units sold around the world. It’s the reason we’ve been able to make other great games like Call to Adventure, Adulthood, and Mistborn.

However, we’ve heard plenty of critical feedback over the past decade, and we tend to be our own harshest critics. I’ve always wanted to make a version of Boss Monster that captured the original essence of the design, while appealing more to experienced gamers. Three years ago, I started the design journey for Super Boss Monster by making a post on r/boardgames asking for critiques.

The responses to that Reddit post crystallized a lot of things we’d heard over the years: The original Boss Monster felt too random and didn’t offer enough player agency. At the same time, a surprising number of folks chimed in to say that they like how Boss Monster delivers big, exhilarating moments, so we knew we’d have to walk a tightrope of fixing the game’s problems without losing its essence.

Luckily, I had help from our intrepid developer, Hayden Dillard. Around the time of my Reddit post, I was working with Hayden on Boss Monster: 10th Anniversary Edition, and we knew Super Boss Monster would be close behind. Along with my brother Chris, we set two major constraints for the design:

▪️ Retain the core mechanisms, that is, building your “dungeon” tableau and “bidding” for heroes with treasure. Any new mechanisms should reinforce those elements.

▪️ Ensure backward compatibility with Boss Monster and all of its expansions. We wanted to enhance the experience, not invalidate the original game.

While Hayden and I share the design credit on this game, partly due to my role as the design lead for the original Boss Monster, he did the heavy lifting on design, so I’ll hand it back to Hayden to talk about the game’s iterations!

•••

Super Directives

When I was given the chance to lead design for Super Boss Monster, I worked with Johnny and Chris to set five specific goals based on the insights Johnny had collected from Reddit and years of player feedback:

1. Reduce the randomness of drawing cards. Players wanted more agency over what kind of dungeon they built, which is tough if you’re just drawing cards off the top of the deck.

2. Make spells easier to acquire. Spells are a fun part of Boss Monster, but the original game made their acquisition too luck-based.

3. Avoid situations where heroes bunch up in town because of treasure ties. This could create a cascading effect in which games would go several rounds without any heroes being lured, then end a game immediately when they all went to the same dungeon.

4. Feel like the next stage in Boss Monster‘s evolution…

5. But be fully compatible with all past Boss Monster cards.

As Johnny noted above, backward compatibility was a key constraint. He gave me freedom to change some of the game’s underlying rules, but we wanted every existing Boss Monster card to work as a component in Super Boss Monster.

Getting on Board

We experimented with a lot of different ideas at the beginning, but the first solid change we started with was the card market. We even brought some versions of this idea into playtesting for the 10th Anniversary Edition. We tried both a live market that was constantly refreshed and a market that was refreshed only at the beginning of the turn. Despite requiring the use of a rotating first player, we liked the once-a-round refill better for a few reasons. It saved time since a new card didn’t have to be read every time a player took a card, and it removed the helpless feeling of a powerful card showing up right after your draft. By placing one spell card in the market, spells became easier to acquire.

The market didn’t make it into the 10th Anniversary Edition, but when we started on Super Boss Monster, it was the first thing we implemented. Johnny and I both felt that a physical market board would be a great way to handle this, while creating a major visual difference that felt “Super”.

This change fulfilled design goal number five since a market would still work in any of the original Boss Monster games. A couple of the original cards, like “Witch’s Kitchen”, put up a perceived fuss initially, but we were able to work around them. More importantly, it felt natural within Boss Monster, and I wouldn’t be surprised if players had homebrewed this system themselves somewhere.

Better Bidding

With issues 1 and 2 at least partially addressed, our focus turned to goals 3-4 and how we could shake up the process of “bidding” for heroes with treasure. The first idea we had was giving each player a six-sided die — not to roll, but to set, with each side giving a different treasure bonus to your dungeon each turn. The goal was to break those ties that let 5+ heroes build up in town, which could lead to cascades of souls or wounds. Unfortunately, if a contested treasure symbol was present, both players tended to set the same treasure, extending the problem.

We needed a way to keep players from setting the same treasure type, so we went back to the drawing board and eventually landed upon the concept of a simplified worker-placement mechanism. If too many heroes showed up, they’d move down to locations in town that could be summoned by the bosses. I brainstormed the initial ideas for the board locations while sitting outside, waiting for my now-wife’s engagement ring to arrive in the mail, but that’s not really relevant. (She does show up as one of the heroes in this set, though!) Please forgive my handwriting — I like to make my design notes with pencil and paper:

As you can see, my biggest problem was finding a good name for the thief location in town. (None of my thief names made it to the final map as we settled on “The Hideout”.) Instead of just the four treasure symbols, I also imagined a graveyard as a place you could go to deal with souls and a hospital as a place to upgrade wounds.

Interestingly, the “mysterious stranger” — who ended up as the Minion — had three functions listed here, and all of them are present in the final game. Quite a few ideas there didn’t make it to the current town board, but I wanted to show you the first draft of the town that came from this brainstorming:

This version had only one action spot per landmark, utilized coins, and allowed any number of mysterious strangers to visit a landmark, but they would lure the heroes there only if they were the only one present. If two mysterious strangers visited a hero who was present at the arena, then the hero wouldn’t be lured.

I liked this concept in theory, but it was clunky, contentious, and convoluted. The core idea was sound, though. With playtesting and tweaks — and several bad ideas we quickly abandoned — we landed on this prototype:

…which looks a lot more like the final board (though not nearly as pretty). The biggest change from this to the final gameplay was reorganizing the order of the rows.

And with that, after more than a year of design, the town board was pretty much done.

Goal number three was effectively accomplished as there was now a limit on the number of heroes in town and there wasn’t as much bunching up. The game as a whole, though, still needed a lot of work.

Refined Villainy

Coins were removed pretty early in development. They felt like a natural inclusion at first, coming right on the heels of Rise of the Minibosses, and for a while I stubbornly clung to including them. It took Johnny and Chris as an outside perspective to recommend removing them — because they were too complicated for new players when combined with the town — and the design suddenly ran a lot more smoothly. I just had to update all the prototype cards that used coins.

The final piece of the game’s identity we arrived upon was the emphasis on damage counters in rooms. The +1 damage tokens were an inspired idea from Chris. They’d showed up on Boss Monster cards in the past, but only in small ways. What if we made them a central mechanism, allowing us to use them in ways we couldn’t before, even as a currency? This idea turned out to work really well, creating a unique mechanism for the cards in Super Boss Monster even beyond the new Minion placement and adding that extra pizzazz it needed to stand on its own legs.

Throughout the entire process, I was designing bosses, the main characters of the Boss Monster games. I knew from the moment that we introduced the town action spots that I wanted to have some action spots in the players’ own dungeons. What better way to do that than by creating some level-up abilities along those lines? Enter the Arcadian Beast:

This boss had an action spot that would let it gain two cleric treasure symbols at the cost of discarding two room cards. It was a convoluted ability with a cost to balance the benefits of having three cleric symbols ready at a moment’s notice. That morphed into the first version of Pluto, which gave it two different treasure symbols, but we found players rarely used this ability. It was too rare for players to need both those symbols in one turn, and they’d sooner just visit the town landmarks.

After further iteration, our favorite disapproving father figure ended up here, giving two distinct benefits, which made him worth visiting without being overpowered:

Of all the original bosses created for the prototype, only one ability survived into the final version unchanged – and it was on a promo card, Unnamed Swan Boss. The other Boss cards have all completely changed over hundreds of playtests.

If there’s a theme to this Designer Diary, it’s to show how development is full of constantly changing and adapting designs. The original prototype of Super Boss Monster is unrecognizable from the product we published, and that’s a good thing.

Development is iterative, one change building on another, then another building on that. One of the hardest things for me to do as a designer/developer is to let go of my ideas I like, and believe me, I’m still learning how to do it. Super Boss Monster is an undeniably better game for its changes, though. In the end, I believe I met all five of our design goals.

What Comes Next?

With Super Boss Monster in stores now, our eyes turn to the future. What’s ahead for Super Boss Monster 2? It’s a little ironic that the journey to this project started with “How can we make Boss Monster less random?”, but in the pursuit of retro-inspired fun, we’re setting aside our never-say-die attitude. The future of Super Boss Monster is six-sided…

We can’t wait for you to see it. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek: