For the last two months, my colleagues and I have been busy doing the final checks for Fly-A-Way, as we prepare to send the collated artwork for production.

At one point, I was training my eyes to glance anew at pictures and words that seemed to have become so familiar that they could be anticipated before being properly processed.

Then, taking a step back, I noticed something that I had known instinctively but never comprehended in totality before: there were refinements in detail that we owed to the knowledge and feedback shared generously by playtesters and fellow game designers.

They have become a community we treasure and I think, in the spirit of collegiality, it would be fitting at this juncture of Fly-A-Way’s development to share some of the insights we have gained from working with these wonderful people.

We launched Fly-A-Way on Kickstarter on 23 November 2020. It was the culmination of months of playtests, during which gamers often asked us about the process behind creating this game and the design choices we made. 

Here’s an overview of the various considerations we had when developing this board game on bird migration.