Designer Diary: Unvention | BoardGameGeek News

by Amir Aien

Hi there, BGG,

Amir here, designer of a new print-at-home, roll-and-write game called Unvention. I have been working on and playtesting Unvention for the past three-and-a-half years, and I am incredibly proud of the game it turned out to be. In this post, I am going to share a bit of my backstory, how Unvention came to be, and a few design challenges and lessons learned that I find interesting.

Unvention is funding on Kickstarter through mid-April 2025, and if you enjoy playing roll-and-writes, handling print-at-home games, or supporting independent designers trying to break into the crowded board game design space, I’d love for you to check it out.

First Things First: What Is Unvention?

Unvention is a competitive roll-and-write game in which players take part in a prestigious weekend-long invention competition. Over the course of three days, players journal their designs, gather parts, and construct mechanisms to bring their most ambitious inventions to life. At the end of each day, players present their inventions to the judges. The earlier an invention is unveiled, the more impressive it is.

Each player has their own competition sheet to track progress — no crafting required. All you need is a printed sheet (A4 or letter) per player and five standard six-sided dice (5D6).

At its core, Unvention is a polyomino puzzle game in which players build the polyomino shapes themselves. The design has three core game systems, all heavily interlocked towards a single goal of creating elaborate inventions:

1. Journals: Mini Sudoku puzzles, with which players try to gather wrenches, the resource required to build mechanisms.

2. Workshops: Players gather parts here, then use wrenches to connect them and build polyomino-shaped mechanisms.

3. Inventions: The polyomino shapes of mechanisms are used in invention patterns, giving players full control to puzzle them in for points, depending on each invention’s unique scoring criteria.

Backstory

In 2014, I opened Board Cafe, the first board gaming café in Iran. Soon after that, I teamed up with Amir Salamati and Kambiz Sirousbakht and found Roomiz, one of the first board game media websites in Farsi, where we promoted the modern board gaming hobby to a whole new community. We wrote articles, made videos, and hosted events.

I was always interested in design, and I made a game called Shimiagaran that was signed and published in 2020. I also had the privilege of working on The Master Potter and Persian Carpet as a developer, as well as on a very cool game called Super Team as a graphic designer. Unfortunately, none of these games are available internationally.

A few life-changing decisions later, now I find myself relocated to North America. Before settling down in Toronto, I lived for a year in Istanbul, Turkey. Although the weather was lovely, I was fully cut off from any board gaming event, activity, or community — except for my good friend Amir, who was in the exact same situation as I was.

He introduced me to Voyages, a roll-and-write, print-at-home game by Postmark Games on Kickstarter, where the middle man is fully cut off and backers can quickly and easily access the game files right after the campaign is over.

Voyages

To me, this represented two amazing opportunities: First, a way that I could make some noise in the international board game design scene, and I could do it myself, without a big budget. Second, the limitation of a “single sheet of paper anyone can print at home with a normal printer” was an amazing design challenge, one that tickled my brain in the right way.

But where to start? Every roll-and-write needs a “rolling” mechanism. I was exploring different ways of creating an interesting input randomizer, a way to create the randomness that happens before players make decisions. Messing with a bunch of dice, the idea of rolling and grouping five dice occurred to me.

Here’s how it works: Players roll five dice, then group them into equals and unequals, so if you rolled 1,2,4,5,5, the groups would be 1,2,4 and 5,5. If you rolled 2,2,2,2,6, the groups would be 2,2,2,2 and 6.

I loved this system because it produces groups that are different both in size, and in usefulness. Similar numbers can be useful in some situations, while different numbers are better in others. As an added bonus with this system, rolls can be all different, e.g., 2,3,4,5,6 or all the same, e.g., 4,4,4,4,4 (a full yahtzee). From a probability standpoint, these rolls are not that frequent, but they provide an exciting change of pace in the otherwise repetitive “rolling” phase of a roll-and-write.

Next, I started exploring different ideas and game systems to build around this central mechanism. I knew I wanted some sort of resource in the game. I quickly fell in love with the idea of mini Sudoku puzzles in which the player gains the resource by completing rows or columns.

For those who are not familiar with the classic game of Sudoku, it is a puzzle with a 9×9 grid that you need to fill in with numbers 1-9, and the only rule is that each row, each column, and each of the nine sub-grids can house a single instance of any number. The mini Sudokus in Unvention, however, are 4×4, and you fill them with numbers from 1-6, so it is slightly easier.

Now that I had the resource management piece of the game, I had to create the game around it. My approach was to come up with an appropriate theme and take it from there.

I ended up with the invention theme, as writing in your mini Sudokus reminded me of an inventor figuring out the design of a new machine in their journal, then going to their workshop to make it. That basically became the theme of the game: You gather parts in your workshops, and as soon as you get some wrenches from your journals, the aforementioned mini Sudokus, you can build mechanisms with those parts. These mechanisms are basically polyominos you make in whatever shape you want, then you puzzle these polyominos into your inventions and score points.

Design Challenges

During the 3+ years of iteration and testing of the game, I have faced numerous design challenges and learned a lot about the end-to-end process of game design. Let me share a few examples that I have found to be most interesting in my process:

Challenge 1: How the game’s interface can help players pay attention to different game systems

There is a preconception with the weight of a game when it comes to roll-and-writes. Excluding a few well-known and deeply complicated games like Twilight Inscription or Hadrian’s Wall, most roll-and-writes are light, cozy, short, and not that involved.

Unvention, although nowhere near as complicated as the aforementioned games, is definitely not a light game. The core systems work closely together, and how to plan ahead and utilize all available options to create a high-scoring invention is not that easy to get the hang of. This is partially due to the nature of spatial puzzles, not necessarily something exclusive to Unvention.

Early in playtesting, I found that there are aspects of the game that (mostly new) players seem to forget. Players were so deeply focused on the core three puzzles that they would forget about other parts of the game such as tools or ideas. I saw a pattern in playtesting where, after the game was over, players would say, “Oh, I completely forgot about that.”

The easy way out would be for me to dismiss that sentiment with “Well, that’s the first game. You’ll get the hang of it in a few plays” — but that was lazy design, not the right way to synthesize feedback. I quickly learned that the placement of systems, which was at the bottom of the sheet, encourages a behavior of out of sight out of mind.

Additionally, there is a nuance in playing a game on a piece of paper that I missed as well: While you’re working with a single sheet of paper, it is likely that you rest your arm on the bottom right of the sheet (or bottom left if you are left handed), which contributes to whatever is at the bottom of the sheet being forgotten.

I was shocked by the impact of relocating those two items within the sheet. By placing ideas at the center of the sheet, players were always reminded of their importance, and tools being at the top beside the journals made them think of using a tool while they were struggling to puzzle something in their journals.

Lesson learned: When facing a problem in the design process, I have to try to think of solutions beyond mechanisms of the game.

Challenge 2: Difficulty, direction, and game modes

One of the biggest challenges I had with Unvention, from the very beginning, was the learning curve and difficulty. On one hand, I wanted the game to be easy to understand so that players can enjoy it from the first play. On the other hand, I wanted the game to have some bite to it and be challenging and deep enough that seasoned players would have a reason to come back.

The challenge laid in that balance: the more in-depth I made the game, the more confusing it would become for new players, causing them to do badly and feel discouraged. The more I removed from the game to streamline the experience, the more it lost its appeal after a couple of plays, with players asking for more challenge or content.

A natural response to this problem was to create different game modes. This was not something I felt too confident about as it meant two games to test, iterate on, and balance. It took me a while before I found it is not just about removing stuff from the game to make it “easier”.

I started thinking about difficulty in another way. Instead of thinking “What is more difficult to keep track of”, I started asking myself, “What is challenging players on their first play?” I soon realized that first-time players were figuring out the core game systems, and they needed a) direction and a clear goal to seek, and b) a way to mitigate past mistakes. With the same logic, more experienced players needed a) a less boring starting point, and b) more agency to take their game in different directions compared to other players.

Taking these into account, I created two game modes: “My First Unvention” and “Unvention: International Exhibition”. “My First Unvention” provides limitations as to which workshops could be used for which invention, with an easy-to-understand scoring system, and single-use tools that would help players work with the game.

“Unvention: International Exhibition” on the other hand, provided players the ability to plan more strategically and diverge into different paths. Players can impact how their inventions score, and players can unlock tools for passive abilities that suit their goals.

Lesson learned: Think of difficulty from the lens of players and how their first and subsequent plays can be different in how they experience the game.

Challenge 3: Solo mode

Roll-and-write screams solo, especially when it is a puzzle game with minimal player interaction. I knew I wanted to include a solo variant in the game, and it was easy to include a lazy “you have twenty rounds to score a lot of points” mode.

I felt unhappy with the approach above, and one more time, relying on the theme came to my rescue.

If I may digress for a second, I want to say how obsessed I am with the notion of tech trees in games. This has always been the highlight of any civilization video game for me, and most recently in the board game realm, Beyond The Sun has been a personal favorite.

All right, back to the solo mode of Unvention. Thinking of the theme, I was imagining an inventor behind their desk in the dark, working with loads of paper, trying to figure out a problem. They turn in for the night, then come back to their workshop to continue the work. I wanted to recreate this image in the solo mode by utilizing the three days in the competition. If I had a separate sheet for each day, the player wouldn’t need to finish the game in one go. They could play it one day at a time.

I wanted to create a part of the game that repeats from day to day and another part that stays constant, taking the progress of past days into the new one. This created room for complexity and progression. Here is where the tech tree idea comes in. I made an invention sheet with a lot of small inventions, each giving players some ability or scoring opportunity. This sheet will be gradually filled in a tech-tree like system in which finishing an invention unlocks a few other inventions to work on.

This has become my favorite way to play the game as this mini-campaign encourages strategic and long-term planning, and messing with the tech tree feels satisfying.

Lesson learned: Aim for a solo experience that uses the core game systems instead of a variant that just modifies the player count on the BGG game page.

Final Thoughts

This was the story of Unvention, and I hope it was somewhat insightful for other aspiring designers like me. If you are a designer, I wish you the best of luck and in return, I ask that you wish me the same.

I am very proud of Unvention and would love nothing more than it being played by lots and lots of people. I would love to hear what everyone thinks of the game, be it positive or constructive feedback. I believe the biggest challenge Unvention is facing now is the stigma around print-at-home games, as not everyone takes them seriously.

Please tell me in the comments whether Unvention sounds interesting to you, as well as your thoughts about print-at-home games.

Amir Aein

Unvention Games