I know every hidden flag, every archetype matchup, every decoy pattern in DoomsDay before anyone sits down. If that knowledge is still enough to beat you, I haven't finished my job.
Become Sifu, the first game Cube 13 ever built, is a solo martial arts idle clicker. You train, you fight, you climb the ranks yourself, and somewhere along the way you stop being a student and become the Sifu, your own style, earned by you, for you. Nobody hands you the title. There's no teacher in the room to lean on. That idea, that mastery isn't given to you, you have to earn the right to be the one who knows more than everyone else at the table, is the same idea I can't stop chasing in every game I build.
Which brings me to DoomsDay, and a problem that's been eating my brain for the better part of a year: I know more than everyone else at the table, and that's a design flaw I have to actively fight.
Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody talks about when they talk about playtesting. The designer isn't a neutral tester. I wrote every rule in DoomsDay. I know exactly what a Marksman can do with no range limit, exactly how a Spy steals a flag for two charges with zero counterplay, exactly which building on the board is statistically the best place to stash a decoy. A brand-new player is reading a rulebook for the first time. I'm reading my own diary. That's not a fair fight, and if I sit down across from a new player and win, I haven't learned anything about whether DoomsDay is balanced. I've just learned that knowing the answer key beats not knowing the answer key. Every designer already knows that.
So I built a rule for myself, not for the game: if I can beat a competent player using nothing but system knowledge, on a board that's supposed to reward decisions, then the system is still doing the winning instead of the players. That's the whole test. It sounds simple. It's brutal to actually hold yourself to.
DoomsDay is a 3v3 Heroes vs Villains capture-the-flag board, and the reason I can still run it as a playtester without the game collapsing into "the designer wins because the designer built it" isn't any single mechanic. It's the whole system refusing to hand anyone, including me, a structural advantage.
Start with the flags. Every building hides three: one real, two decoys. That layout resets every game, so my rules knowledge tells me nothing about which building this session decided to trust. I can know the entire system cold and still walk home carrying a worthless fake, same as a first-timer.
Then there's combat. A fight doesn't just resolve on whoever has the better stats, it opens with an initiative roll, so neither side walks in already owning the exchange. I can know the attack and defense dice inside and out and still lose the right to swing first. Positioning still has to be won on the board, in that game, against whoever's actually sitting across from you.
And underneath all of it, the archetypes themselves have to hold up dual-sided. Every one of the six shows up on both the Hero side and the Villain side, and neither color gets the objectively better kit. A Speedster on the Hero roster can't quietly be stronger than a Speedster wearing Villain colors. If one side had a real structural edge, my system knowledge wouldn't even be the deciding factor, the box would already be picking winners before anyone rolled a die.
Early in playtesting, the Spy's flag-steal was a two-charge ability with no roll attached to it. No combat, no counterplay, just walk up and take it. I noticed I was winning almost every match where I played Spy, even against players who'd been through the rules three or four times. That's the signal. Not "did I win," but "did I win in the same boring way, over and over, regardless of who I was playing against." When the answer is yes, the piece isn't clever. It's just correct, and a correct piece in every matchup is a broken piece.
Same story with the Marksman's unlimited range early on. I kept winning fights I hadn't earned position for, because the archetype made position irrelevant. Both got reworked. Not because a playtester complained. Because I noticed I was the one who kept winning, and I already know better than to trust my own win rate.
DoomsDay ships with Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert modes, all sharing the exact same board and flag rules, only the power layer changes. That structure exists because "balanced" can't just mean balanced at the table where I'm playing my sharpest opponents. It has to hold up at Beginner, where power types are stripped out entirely and it's pure movement and flag-hunting, and it has to hold up at Expert, where the power die and Epic Powers are live and a single roll can end a fight. A five-year-old and a veteran strategist are supposed to sit at the same board and both get a real game. If my design knowledge gives me an edge at any one of those three tiers, that tier isn't done. That's three separate tests I have to pass, not one.
I'm not trying to build a game I lose on purpose. That's its own kind of dishonest, and players can smell a designer softballing them from a mile away. What I'm trying to build is a game where my years of staring at the rulebook stop being worth anything the second the flags get hidden and the dice get rolled. Where the guy who built the thing has to win it the same way everyone else does: by reading the board, reading the opponent, and making the better call in the moment.
DoomsDay's still got a working prototype and a growing pile of playtested sessions, and I'm still finding pieces that win for the wrong reasons. That's the job. The day I sit down, play my own game, and can't rely on anything except what's actually happening on the board in front of me, that's the day I'll know it's ready. Not a day before.
The Guy in Cube13
Playable Ideas · Cube 13 Gaming