Print and Play Games!

It’s finally here!

I have completed and uploaded my official page full of free boardgames: Print & Play Boardgames

On this page, you’ll find a selection of the best boardgames that I have created over the last few years.

They are “Print and Play”. This means you only need to print one (or several) pieces of paper and you can start playing. For free!

Currently, as I post this, there are six games on the website. Three “One Paper Games” (which are exactly what the name suggests) and three more traditional games. The traditional games were originally created in Dutch (because that’s my native language), but I have since manually translated them to English completely.

There’s a folder on my computer with a whopping 50+ game ideas, all of which I found promising enough to write down, so you can expect this page to keep growing :)

Let’s look at some frequently asked questions:

How can these games be free? For two reasons: it’s very hard to make money from them and I actually refuse to make money from them.

I do not come from a rich background. Buying a professional game, which is usually 20-40 euros, is a big deal. This price tag is one of the things that keeps people, especially families with children, from entering the gaming hobby. Thus, when I started creating my own games, I set out to make them as cheap and as simple as possible. That’s why I invented the “One Paper Games”: you literally only need a single piece of paper. My other games usually require only several pieces of paper, and a few extra papers if you want to print the rules. I want my games to be enjoyable by everyone.

Additionally, if your game is, in the end, nothing more than a few pieces of paper - that’s not very sellable, is it? Imagine yourself buying a nice box for 20 euros, only to find there are just 100 printed papers inside. I never saw any chance of monetizing these games, so I doubled down on being free and accessible. Even though, in my humble opinion, the quality on these games is only rising and rising.

(Also, as I will repeat below, I think boardgames aren’t being innovative enough. Sure, there are some really nice games coming out each year, but in the end they all follow the same patterns and rulesets. I want to try completely new stuff, something that’s unlike any other game you’ve played, and if it works, I put it on the website! If it doesn’t work, well, I’ll probably write a frustrated blog post about that some time.)

How does it work? This is best explained on the page itself, but it’s simple enough to repeat here.

• Click on a game to visit its official page
• Each game has a big, colorful “Download” button near the top
• Click it and you are taken to a Google Drive.
• There are two locations: Files and Rules. They contain exactly what you expect: the digital files to print and a digital rulebook (PDF-format)

Just print the game you want, read the rules, and start playing!

What’s the quality? I am an artist in the most general sense of the word. I write (a lot), I draw, I design all types of games (video game, boardgame, physical game), I maintain several custom-made websites, all that jazz. This means that I should know what I’m doing. All skillsets needed for professional boardgame creation are familiar to me. However, I am still young and learning, and six games on this website (about twelve in total) obviously isn’t an impressive career record.

In short: I think these games are of an above average quality, especially for free “Print & Play” games, and I intend to keep improving and learning. My end goal is to make each game look, feel and play as if you had bought a professional game.

What types of games do you create? I love being innovative and experimental … but I also love being understood and able to play games with many people. I try to balance these things: create something that nobody has seen before, but also keep it simple and familiar. Each of my games has some mechanic or set of ideas that I have never seen before in my boardgaming life. But don’t think that I’m some abstract, vague, experimental artist with very deep and filosophic games - I try to be experimental within reason :p

(For example, in one of my games players are not a color or a pawn, but they are a side of the board. My “One Paper Games” are completely based on a new idea: you play the game by drawing with a pen(cil) on a single sheet of paper.)

Can I give criticism? Feedback? Help in any way? Of course! It’s very much recommended even! I am just a single (game) developer. I have the luxury of a large family and friends who like gaming, which allow me to test the games quite well, but it’s still only a small pool of people. I can easily make mistakes, miss errors, create games that do not consistently play well, etcetera. So, whatever your thoughts on a game, don’t be afraid to let me know.