The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 4

The Making of Shardfall: A Dragon Legends Adventure – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The 90-Minute Problem

Our first full playtest lasted almost five hours. The second? About four and a half.

We were headed in the right direction… sort of. The game worked. The systems functioned. But our target was clear: 90 minutes. And at this rate, we weren’t going to hit that goal in this lifetime.

After each session, we sat down, took notes, and tried to separate the fun from the fluff. What worked? What dragged? What felt clunky, and what moments actually sparked some excitement? It became pretty obvious: this wasn’t the smooth, fast-paced experience we had imagined. It played more like a long RPG session with board game trimmings, not the streamlined hybrid we were aiming for.

One of the first big problems was the Trader, a character we’d placed in the center of the board to allow players to exchange items, buy upgrades, and get new gear. Seemed smart on paper.

In practice? Total bottleneck.

Everyone just hovered around the center. No one wanted to explore the outer zones. The board became stagnant, cramped, and uninteresting. We needed to rethink everything, starting with the map itself.

So, we ordered a dry erase board off Amazon and began sketching out a new layout using colored markers. Honestly, it looked like something straight out of a fourth-grade math classroom. But it got the job done.

We started asking the right questions: How many spaces per zone? What do you roll for movement? What happens when you land on a blank space? Should movement be random at all?

It’s tough to stare at something you’ve poured so much time and energy into and realize… almost all of it needs to change. But that’s exactly what had to happen. And funny enough, that’s when Shardfall really started to become Shardfall.

We simplified things. The trader was pulled off the board. Movement was a d6 roll (we’d scrap that later). Combat was handled with a d20. Monsters could actually hit back. Players could find powerful loot and start wrecking shop, if they pulled the right cards. We rebalanced the decks (and realized we had way too many cards in hand). Then we redid what we could, piece by piece, rule by rule. It became faster. Sharper. More fun. Not perfect, not polished, but fun. And it finally started to look like the gateway to tabletop RPGs we had envisioned from the beginning.

And then came the worst part of making Shardfall. Not the balancing. Not the mechanics. Not the rewrites.

No, it was the cards…

We spent an entire month hunting down placeholder art. AI-generated stuff, just to visualize everything for prototyping. Then came the real grind: printing, cutting, and assembling over 300 individual cards by hand. Every. Single. One.

It was tedious. Monotonous. Paper-cut-inducing madness.
Sure, they were better than the old index cards… but that didn’t make it fun.

This was the point where passion met exhaustion. But somehow, we pushed through.

And then it came.
The mother of all tests.
Playtesting with a normie….