by David Ausloos

The First Spark (No Meeples Were Harmed)

When I started developing Rival Seas, I revived a peculiar little ritual from the making of Dreamscape, one that had somehow become part superstition, part creative compass, and, if I’m honest, part excuse to avoid getting down to "serious" work. One that has helped me kickstart every project since. It's a simple but effective method: build a rough improvised cardboard playground. A small imaginary arena to put pieces on, move them around, and discover what the game wants to become. I've found that this kind of tinkering sparks ideas far more naturally than staring at a notebook. It's a bit like a child playing with toys on the kitchen floor. It creates an intuitive thinking space where mechanics emerge through play rather than analysis. And so, on a bright summer morning I found myself sitting at the table with a board-shape that would later prove to be spectacularly wrong. One thing however was clear from the very beginning: this had to be a maritime game. I've always loved bustling coastal towns, little rural harbors, and the romantic notion of setting sail toward the unknown. Apparently, I also love cutting cardboard at a kitchen table and pretending these unevenly cut pieces represent a functioning economy. That first prototype was rough. So rough it probably needed its own sea-based rescue operation. But somehow it already contained the core DNA of what would later become Rival Seas.


Twinstar Valley, my SPIEL Essen release of the previous year, revealed something I wanted to explore further with Rival Seas. What fascinated me most about Twinstar Valley were its opening turns. You begin with very limited capital, and every coin matters as you struggle to get your company off the ground. Eventually, though, the economy opens up and money starts flowing much more freely. With Rival Seas, I wanted to preserve that specific tension of those early turns until the very end. I wanted every investment to matter, every opportunity to come with a trade-off, and every decision to carry just enough sting to make players hesitate...but never enough to make the game intimidating. By this point, one thing was becoming increasingly clear: Rival Seas was shaping up to be an expert-level game.

The Fine Art of Knowing What You're Building

To keep the economy of the game tight, I wanted players to invest in order to grow, ensuring the cash flow of the player to be challenging to manage. That idea found its way into the design very early through a stockholding system. Buying shares in a container company means committing to it for several turns. You wanted that company to thrive, but just as interestingly, you sometimes wanted it to struggle once your rivals started investing in it as well. Especially when they manage to become CEO of the given company. In many games I've played, stockholding is a source of powerful emotions: the fear of losing control of a company you helped build, or alternatively the fear that other players won't use the company enough to make your investment worthwhile. The stockholding system itself was surprisingly streamlined from the start. Balancing it, however, was another story. In early prototypes, buying shares was too profitable. It created joy-filled moments, ruthless power plays, and enough drama to keep therapists fully booked, but it also overshadowed the game's other pillar: earning money by shipping containers across the sea. The solution turned out to be remarkably simple: reduce the opportunities to buy shares. Suddenly, every share purchase became a weighty commitment rather than an obvious move. The stock market remained exciting, but no longer dominated the game. It transformed into a constant source of tension that lived alongside, rather than above, the shipping economy.


The biggest design challenge, however, was finding a unique action-selection system that felt so organic that players barely noticed how much machinery was ticking beneath the surface. In the end, it took three complete redesigns before it became what I had envisioned. The first version used a rondel. Players moved their markers around it to produce containers and carefully timed their actions, trying to be in the right place when the next opportunity presented itself. It worked but it felt a little scripted. The second iteration replaced the rondel with an action-slot system. Players selected actions from different slots, with less powerful actions offering small bonuses and better intitiative to act, compensating for their lower impact. It was a more flexible design and created interesting trade-offs. But once again, I felt something was missing. I wanted players to have genuine freedom: an open playground where they could adapt, improvise, and outsmart opponents. A place where the game doesn't hand you a script, but throws you into a constantly shifting situation and asks: "So... what are you going to do now?" For that to be possible, the system needed a more organic core. A system not unlike that first cardboad playground I build in the early stages of development to play around with.


The Prototype Finally Stopped Fighting Back

The breakthrough came during a playtest at a local game club, with two critical testers sitting across the table from me, sharpening their feedback like they got paid per emotional scar. We call them "Bruno" and "Jean-Pierre" out of self-preservation. They're the kind of playtesters who will sigh dramatically halfway through a session, get up in dead silence, walk into the crowded hallway, and explain their existential crisis with your game to complete strangers. If your prototype survives them, it can probably survive publication. Your ego, on the other hand, may require a few more playtests. After yet another revised version, Bruno finally uttered the words a designer wants to hear: "It plays well." A brief unsettling silence followed. "...but..." There are few words in game design more terrifying than a compliment followed by "but you could also make it..." Fortunately, I'd had one of those rare flashes of foresight and started recording the conversation that followed on my iPhone. Two hours later, I had a complete philosophical dissection of Rival Seas safely stored in a single massive audio recording. Looking back, it was the most valuable two-hour therapy session I never knew I needed.

Night after night, before going to bed, I replayed Bruno and Jean-Pierre's conversation, hoping my subconscious would do some heavy lifting while I slept. Apparently, my brain was happy to take over the design work, as long as I stopped bothering it during office hours. One morning at the breakfast table, it finally delivered: I noted down a timetrack system that would change Rival Seas forever. The old system worked, but it felt procedural, like the game was quietly filling in paperwork. The timetrack opened up everything. Turns suddenly flowed naturally, downtime nearly vanished, and players finally had the freedom to perform well-timed actions as a reaction to others. Because every action now came with a specific cost. Moving further on the track might offer you the perfect opportunity to act, but it also means handing the initiative to your rivals for the next operations in the shared playfield. Buying another share might be tempting, but if it pushes you too far ahead, your opponents might get several actions before you can react. The timetrack became the backbone of Rival Seas: a living puzzle where every action reshapes the next.


Another key mechanic that slowly revealed its true purpose during development was the Demand system, a deceptively simple idea that would become one of Rival Seas’ defining features. I wanted the market to feel alive: a constantly shifting network of needs driven by what coastal towns actually received. Once a demanded good was delivered, that town's demand should change. This evolved into a rotating queue system of demand markers. After a delivery, the matching demand marker is removed from the town and placed at the back of a queue of demand markers, while the entire line shifts forward. The first marker in the queue then replaces the old demand at the coastal town. The result is a dynamic system that keeps these coastal towns in constant motion. It also adds another layer of importance to initiative on the time track. Getting to act first can mean placing a valuable demand in exactly the right location...turning a small timing advantage into a major opportunity. Sometimes, in Rival Seas, the difference between a good move and a great move comes down to reading the currents of the market. Positioning yourself for future demand is not about luck...it is about making the right decisions before the opportunity even exists.
Shares and dares...

Also crucial in the gameplay is the connection between shares and route building. Once you own shares in a container company, you can use an action to place "Navigation Points" on sea spaces, creating shipping routes for vessels to travel between harbors. When points connect two harbors, ships can sail the route. But, naturally, there is a catch. Every time you use a Navigation Point, you pay a credit from your personal capital directly into the treasury of the company that owns that point. And here comes the delicious twist: for every share you own in that company, you can use one of its Navigation Points for free. This creates a tricky balancing act. Investing in companies gives you access to valuable infrastructure, but using your rivals' networks too often is basically handing them money and politely asking them to become richer. Meanwhile, using routes owned by companies you invested in makes those companies more profitable, allowing you to reclaim part of that wealth through dividends payed out to you at the end of each round. In other words: sometimes you're building your own shipping empire. Sometimes you're accidentally funding your opponent's yacht collection. Finding that perfect balance between cooperation, exploitation, and "wait... why am I making my rival richer?" became one of the core tensions of Rival Seas. Holding the majority of shares in a company makes you the CEO, giving you a small but powerful amount of control. Most importantly, during the payout phase: you decide how many dividends are paid to shareholders from the treasury. But be careful...if the treasury can't cover at least 1 credit per share, the company's stock value drops. And trust me, these treasuries are often painfully tight. Keeping your investments healthy requires careful planning, perfect timing, and constantly watching what your opponents are trying to pull off. Because nothing hurts quite like seeing your carefully nurtured company run out of money thanks to someone else's "perfectly reasonable" decision.

This layered approach to money management is, for me, what makes Rival Seas such a challenging economic system. Every dollar has a purpose, but knowing where to put it, and when, is where the real game begins. You are not just trying to keep your own shipping company afloat by delivering containers that are currently in demand, chasing the highest values on the ever-changing market, and planning profitable routes. You also need the container companies you've invested in to succeed, because their treasuries are what fuel your dividend income. And your rivals know this. They will happily disrupt your plans by timing their actions perfectly, making that crucial delivery just before you are ready to cash in. Since everything in the game is open information, you can't rely on surprises...You have to plan ahead, read your opponents, and leave a little room for someone else’s carefully planned sabotage. It would be rude to assume they haven’t planned anything. In Rival Seas, your biggest threat might not be a collapsing market. It might be that innocent looking player sitting across the table, smiling politely while silently dismantling parts of your unprepared business plan.


Writing this, I realise I have only scratched the surface of what Rival Seas has to offer. It is a game that creates new dramatic situations with every play, because a single decision made by a player changes the landscape for everyone else. I have played it more than 100 times across all its mutations, and even now I still discover new approaches to play. But more than anything, Rival Seas feels alive. It is not just a collection of gears clicking together. Those systems are there, of course, but they exist to amplify the choices players make. Every playthrough spins a new story, complete with different challenges, different opportunities, and at least one decision you'll defend long after it has obviously ruined everything.


The Gentle Art of Calling It Done
Looking back, the journey of Rival Seas stands out as one of the most formative chapters of my humble life as a game designer. And, judging by the number of times I rebuilt the game, possibly one of the most expensive forms of therapy too. I learned the importance of stubornly returning to a core idea again and again, even when that means tearing everything down and starting over from scratch. A game is not finished simply because it works well. That is only the beginning. For a game to truly blossom, it needs to feel alive. I discovered how much I value player interaction, and how it keeps a game from devolving into an exercise in mathematical optimalization. The systems you create are only the stage. It is the players, and the way they interact within that shared space, that create the tension, emotions and unexpected moments, that shape a session.

And now, the final stretch towards SPIEL Essen has begun...that wonderfully chaotic beast where more than 1,700 new games fight for attention, shelf space, and the last remaining scraps of human concentration. Among all that marketing noise, Rival Seas will have to find its place. The words "battle" and "uphill" immediately come to mind, not necessarily in that order. Still, despite our modest booth, one thought keeps me calm: Rival Seas is the game I wanted to make: a compact playing time, a short ruleset, yet filled with difficult choices and intense interaction. So, if you’re at SPIEL Essen this year, come and say hi at Booth 2D130. I’d love to see you, show you Rival Seas, and perhaps convince you that container shipping is far more exciting than it has any right to be. If you take the time to sit down at the gaming table, you will discover an intense experience packed into a surprisingly compact box. A box that looks completely innocent...until two hours later careful planning has turned into cold panic, small-time endaveours have developed into grand shipping empires, and someone realizes the absurdly daring move they laughed at earlier was apparently genius. And honestly? That thought makes me disproportionately happy.