Lunch
The Game of Playground Politics
A deck-building war game for 2–4 players that takes place in an elementary school playground, featuring elements of deception, negotiation, and trade.
- My role
- Co-Creator and Lead Producer
- Timeline
- Early 2023–present
- Team
- Beta Games
In the fall of 2023, my college friend and longtime collaborator Jacques Manjarrez was graduating from an MFA into Hollywood’s writers’ strike, and I was two years into a stable but less creatively focused job as a software engineer. Those years had given me room to grow professionally and settle into adult life, especially after the disruption of the pandemic, but I was itching to get back to making games with the same enthusiasm I’d had in college.
We decided it was the right time to pour ourselves into something neither of us had taken on before: going beyond prototypes and class projects to make a full, original board game from scratch. After the isolation of the pandemic, we wanted to channel our creative energy into something that would bring people together to have fun again, in person. And, in the case of the playground—literally and figuratively—touch grass.
I am Lunch’s Co-Creator and Lead Producer, working with co-designer and illustrator Jacques Manjarrez as a two-person core team, with additional graphic design help from Manny Vega. Alongside my software engineering work, I’ve helped take Lunch and its expansion through design iteration, playtesting, production, and release. That has meant working on the rules as well as teaching them at convention tables, coordinating a launch, and bringing the game to stores.
Premise
Lunch turns an elementary-school playground into an arena for strategy, negotiation, and shifting alliances. Players recruit Friends, take over play structures, and bargain their way through elections. A game takes around two hours, with deck-building, territory control, and the people across the table all shaping what happens next.
Jacques and I spent many college nights playing Dominion with different card setups, and that shared interest gave us a starting point for Lunch’s deck-building. For the setting, we drew on his childhood memories of using pinecones as currency and inventing factions on his actual elementary school playground, backed by redwood trees. We wanted to bring that spirit of imaginative, unstructured play into a board game, with a setting that people of different ages could recognize and connect with. Elementary school gave us that familiarity and charm, as well as expectations we could subvert through the cards and artwork. An Adult card or a kid in a tank can poke fun at what belongs on a playground precisely because the setting is otherwise so recognizable. That balance of familiarity and unexpected absurdity became part of the character we wanted Lunch to have.
Design
Lunch takes place over twelve rounds, each representing a month of one school year. During each round, every player takes one turn. Every three rounds, the changing season brings changes to the playground and triggers a Quorum phase, during which players collect resources based on their territory, vote for student council president, and pass first-player priority to another player. Throughout the year, movement, combat, territory control, and negotiation interact with an economy built around ephemeral pinecones and persistent pennies. The player with the most victory points wins, with points earned primarily through recruiting elite cards, controlling territory, holding the presidency, and receiving end-of-game Yearbook Superlative Awards.
Our main goal with Lunch was to make something people could enjoy together. Artistically, we wanted to explore absurdity and subversion within a familiar, seemingly innocent setting. The playground gave us expectations to work with, while unexpected card concepts and artwork let us poke fun at them. Bringing political ambition, bargaining, and struggles for control into that childhood world added another layer to the humor.
We also wanted that enjoyment to extend to everyone at the table, regardless of who was winning. Competition gives the game direction, but discovery, creative expression, and shared surprises can make non-optimal playing rewarding in its own right. We wanted players to retain a sense of agency even when they weren’t in the lead, and to come away with moments they felt proud of and stories they enjoyed sharing, even when they lost.
Our gameplay goals centered on simple, varied Friend recruitment and meaningful player interaction, with room for players to negotiate creatively and decide how much to trust one another. We also wanted every player to have opportunities to feel powerful in the late game, even when their chances of winning were slim. Our balance philosophy was that if everyone felt overpowered, then no one was overpowered, with different strategies offering their own satisfying combinations and ways to challenge one another.
Friend recruitment and card design
Recruitment and engine-building
There are two types of Friends: normal Friends, recruited with pinecones, and elite Friends, recruited with pennies. Recruiting a Friend immediately triggers its one-time effect, after which the card enters your discard pile. It joins your deck the next time you reshuffle, and its recurring effect activates whenever you play it.
Balancing the types and quantities of resources each Friend provides, alongside its combat power and recruitment cost, was central to the game’s design. These choices shaped the engines and playstyles players could develop, giving different strategies their own ways to feel powerful.
Players begin with a seven-card deck containing five pinecone cards and two movement cards, so their opening five-card hands constrain their recruitment options. Early purchases involve tradeoffs between generating more pinecones or pennies in future turns, recruiting units to build voting power and a presence in combat, and gaining movement. Movement helps players explore the board early on and later becomes important for repositioning units and contesting territory.
With only twelve rounds and limited opportunities to cycle through a deck, we wanted card choices to reflect the changing priorities of the game. Basic resource generation and movement often supported early development, while efficient cards and permanent passive effects helped players build toward powerful late-game turns. Balancing those benefits gave players a reason to consider both what a card offered now and how it would support their plans for the rest of the game.
Card choices at different stages
Clean Jr., for example, lets players trash a card—permanently removing it from their deck so useful cards come around more often—but provides little resource generation on its own. Trimming the deck too early can also mean giving up resources when they’re still scarce. Players have to weigh a more focused deck against the resources they need to develop it.
Adult offers a different kind of situational value: it lets a player immediately claim the presidency. Its effect is often most useful in the mid to late game, when a well-timed change in political control can make it a powerful choice.
Rock and Paper, meanwhile, are geared toward early play. Both are trashed when played, but provide four combat power and four defense, respectively. Those substantial one-use effects can help players launch an early attack or deter aggression, trading a lasting addition to their deck for immediate strength.
Card concepts and artwork
Calling the cards “Friends” sets up an expectation that players are recruiting fellow elementary-school students. The card concepts and artwork let us subvert that expectation: some characters look suspiciously old for elementary school, while others are dogs, cats, or even a pair of scissors. Then there’s NOID, a mythical dragon summoned by a group of nerds diligently doing their homework. We enjoyed stretching the idea of who—or what—could belong on this playground, using that familiar setting to give the absurdity something to play against.
The children themselves are often drawn in absurd or grotesquely exaggerated ways, giving visual form to the insecurities and shifting identities of elementary school. The artwork lets us explore how those feelings might shape the characters they become on the playground.
NOID also offers a power fantasy that can be satisfying to pursue for its own sake. It may arrive too late to meaningfully change a player’s chances of winning, but summoning a mythical dragon through diligent completion of homework can still feel like an accomplishment. We wanted to leave room for players to pursue an absurd, even strategically unhelpful goal simply because they enjoyed the idea and wanted to see it happen.
Similarly, BigBoyTank brings a tank onto the playground, offering another exaggerated power fantasy. Its obvious mismatch with the setting lets us poke fun at adult conflict finding its way into a seemingly innocent childhood world.
Elections and negotiation
How elections work
The election phase brings unpredictable variety to Lunch by giving players room to negotiate, role-play, and express themselves. Players can embrace their identities as playground constituents and political figures, while their promises and alliances influence decisions with real consequences on the board.
Each player’s voting power equals the number of units they have deployed on the board. This gives unit recruitment another purpose beyond combat and territory control, making early deployment a way to build political influence before the first election. Losing units to detention can therefore affect both a player’s strength in a fight and their influence in the next election.
The elected president receives three victory points and can recruit units at the tree, the board’s central hex, when it is unoccupied or under their control. They also assign the other players their cabinet roles, including Warlord, Anarchist, and Treasurer. These positions offer powerful benefits that support distinct playstyles: Treasurer boosts penny generation, while Anarchist boosts unit generation.
Negotiation, trust, and counterplay
Depending on a player’s strategy, a cabinet position can be more valuable than the presidency itself. Players have reasons to campaign for someone who promises them a useful role, but the appointment ultimately rests with the president. We’ve seen alliances and deals form around those competing interests, with players weighing the benefits of a role against their trust in the person offering it. Sometimes, a player may even want to avoid being elected because a cabinet position would better support their strategy.
Those appointments also create opportunities for betrayal. A president might offer a cabinet role in exchange for an alliance, support, or a promise not to attack them, but those agreements are not binding. Giving someone a powerful role therefore means weighing how useful their cooperation could be against what they might do with that power once it’s theirs.
Players have room to bribe, persuade, make political promises, or put pressure on one another, while deciding for themselves whether to follow through on the goals they have presented to the table. Each Quorum reopens that negotiation as roles change hands, alliances need renewing, and different positions become more valuable to a player’s developing strategy.
Negotiation also extends to trading and combat support. Coins can be given only on a player’s own turn, so repayment must wait for the recipient’s turn; cards and victory points cannot be traded. Players can request support from adjacent players’ units, even when those same players are rivals for territory or election votes.
Distributing power this way also gives the table ways to respond to a player who is pulling ahead. In a four-player game, the other three can join forces in an election and use cabinet appointments to limit the leader’s access to abilities that would strengthen their strategy. We wanted political cooperation to remain a meaningful counterweight to individual power, while leaving space for creative negotiation and personal judgment about whom to trust.
Artistic intent and whimsy
Artistically, we enjoyed bringing intense political bargaining into the context of a playground cabinet. The contrast is funny, but it can also invite players to reflect on how political struggles emerge: control of resources and territory creates competing interests, while access to useful powers gives people reasons to cooperate, bargain, or betray one another. Those connections can emerge naturally through play, even as the immediate argument is over who gets to be Treasurer at recess.
We also wanted elections to bring whimsy to a game with plenty of engine optimization and traditional wargaming decisions. Each newly elected president is required to give a speech to their constituents, creating a moment for players to step into their roles and address the table. It gives the political phase room for personality and humor alongside its strategic consequences.
Movement, combat, and territory control
Resources and a changing board
Lunch’s territory falls into four categories: spaces that generate units, spaces that provide pennies, spaces that award victory points, and the central tree. These different rewards give players reasons to move toward and contest particular parts of the board.
The hexes surrounding the tree are randomized at setup and typically revealed during the first season, before the first Quorum. Resource locations therefore vary between games, creating different opportunities around each player’s home hex. We wanted territory and deck-building to influence one another: a player’s cards and developing strategy can shape which resources they pursue, while nearby resources can encourage them to build their deck in a particular direction.
The central tree
We deliberately kept the tree’s early-game value modest and dependent on a player’s strategy. Players aiming for the presidency in the first election may prioritize it, while others may recruit Friends whose ongoing effects make controlling the tree valuable independently of holding office. We wanted the center to offer a powerful advantage to the right deck without making it a mandatory objective for everyone.
Early exploration and turn order
Each unexplored hex adjacent to the tree awards one victory point to the first player whose unit enters or passes through it. We designed this reward to encourage players to use their movement and explore before the first Quorum, rather than stay in their home hex while developing their decks.
The bonus also helps offset turn-order advantages. A player acting immediately before Quorum has the last opportunity to change the board before territory rewards and voting are resolved. Giving earlier players the first opportunity to claim exploration points provides a counterbalancing incentive, helping smooth out the opening without removing the importance of turn order.
Reflecting on past, present, and future playthroughs
Reworking the opening turns
In early playtests, both our own experience and player feedback suggested that development felt too slow. With only twelve rounds and limited deck cycles, players needed opportunities to establish a strategy sooner. The earlier version seemed to favor staying put and building an economy, which also limited interaction in the opening rounds.
I proposed doubling the movement provided by the starter cards, alongside stronger incentives to deploy units and explore before the first Quorum. The aim was to make early territory development more worthwhile and give players reasons to recruit for movement or combat, alongside investing in their economy. The related changes included:
| Change | What we wanted it to encourage |
|---|---|
| First-exploration victory-point bonuses | Give players a reason to venture out and compete for new spaces early. Also give the first player a slight advantage to offset the benefits of moving later, closer to or immediately before a Quorum phase. |
| Doubled movement from starter cards | Give players more opportunities to reach and respond to activity around the playground. |
| Cards that encouraged advancing through combat | Make fighting another way to move forward, connecting conflict to a player’s plans for the board. |
| Randomized high-resource tiles in central hexes | Provide variety across different playthroughs, and encourage competition for riskier, more distant tiles. |
In subsequent playtests, we saw players become less locked into purely economic engine-building. Earlier contests over territory and combat created immediate needs that influenced recruitment: players had reasons to choose cards that addressed the situation on the board, even when those cards weren’t the strongest long-term investment in their engine.
That early variety also carried into the late game. We observed players taking increasingly divergent paths as they built on their earlier recruitment choices, giving their decks more distinct identities and supporting the range of playstyles we wanted to encourage.
Recent convention experiences
Teaching the game to different players
At conventions, we’ve demoed Lunch for families with players ranging from eight to eighty. We hadn’t set out to design specifically for young children, so it was encouraging to see younger players pick up the game alongside adults. Across those demos, I saw newcomers find their footing while experienced players still found enough variation and strategy to stay interested.
The playground setting seemed to help: recruiting friends, collecting lunch money, and getting sent to detention give players familiar ideas to attach the rules to. For me, approachable depth means helping someone make choices they understand in their first game, while leaving room to discover more possibilities as they play. Watching people learn Lunch made that goal much more concrete.
Several players have described Lunch as a more approachable Twilight Imperium. Hearing that comparison, alongside seeing complete newcomers enjoy the game, was especially encouraging. Making room for both groups in a game they can play over an afternoon is something I care about. Seeing the design decisions I’ve described here support the experiences we intended—from approachable choices to unexpected discoveries and meaningful interaction—has been incredibly rewarding. Watching those intentions take shape at the table and bring people joy is what making games is about for me.
That enthusiasm also helped us connect with event organizers. KublaCon Prime 2026 was our first convention, and a Strategicon organizer who attended remembered our booth fondly enough to give us a prime spot in the dealer room at Strategicon in Los Angeles that fall. It felt like recognition of the care we’d put into Lunch and the enthusiasm we brought to sharing it. Seeing that resonate with people who help bring games and players together was encouraging in its own right.
Finding NOID at KublaCon
At a tournament we organized for fans at KublaCon Prime 2026, a player named Robert was nearing the end of a game without much chance of winning. Then he discovered that his collection of unwanted Homework cards could summon NOID, a powerful dragon tucked into the game as a bit of an Easter egg. As expected, he didn’t win, but seeing how delighted he was by that discovery has stayed with me. At that point, winning seemed almost optional to him.
Robert’s enthusiasm extended beyond his own game. He stayed with us for the entire weekend, helping out at the booth and sharing Lunch with other players. It was heartwarming to see someone enjoy the game so much that he wanted to help others experience it too.
I’ve felt a similar sense of accomplishment during playtests when someone was having a great time even while falling behind. Those moments have helped me understand what I want to make room for in a game: discovery, interactions with other players, and satisfying things to try throughout the experience. Competition matters in Lunch, and I also want players to have reasons to enjoy their time at the table when a win looks unlikely.
Looking forward
Everything still feels fresh for us: only this year have we fulfilled our Kickstarter orders, begun the convention cycle, and started getting Lunch into retail stores. Thinking about a second or expanded edition feels premature. Even so, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to reflect on our design decisions and what we hope to carry forward into future games, whether they’re related to Lunch or something entirely new.
One idea we’d enjoy exploring is a collector’s edition of Lunch packaged in an actual lunchbox. The appeal is mainly in the object itself: a playful way to carry the playground theme beyond the board and cards. It’s a possibility we’re excited by, rather than a plan for changing the gameplay.
From a rules perspective, watching newcomers play has been especially useful. Players unfamiliar with deck-building or similar games don’t necessarily share the conventions and design language that experienced players take for granted. We worked to make the rulebook explicit and account for edge cases, but seeing people encounter unfamiliar situations has helped us recognize assumptions that can still shape how we explain the game.
Those playtests and demos have made me more attentive to the different backgrounds people bring to the table. In future projects, I want to bring that perspective into the design and teaching of a game from the outset: considering what players already know, what needs explaining, and how they can discover their options. Whether we’re revisiting Lunch or making something entirely new, that empathy for different player experiences is something I want to carry forward.
Producing a board game from start to finish
To be quite honest, we’ve been figuring this out as we go. Beyond designing a game worth playing, we’ve had to learn what it takes to get a board game made. Learning everything for the first time has been overwhelming at times, but it’s given me a much greater appreciation for the work behind even a seemingly simple game.
As Lead Producer, I coordinated scope, milestones, and launch criteria as we moved from flash-card prototypes to sample copies from domestic manufacturers, then refined the artwork and graphic design. We assembled pitch materials and approached game companies about publishing Lunch. We negotiated and closed a licensing agreement with Cryptozoic Entertainment, whose subsidiary Pan-Universal Games Worldwide took on production and helped us get the game manufactured in China and shipped over.
We also ran a Kickstarter to build initial funding and enthusiasm, reaching 139 backers and exceeding our funding goal by 21%. That meant learning a whole new set of skills: marketing, preparing artwork and campaign materials, and designing the campaign itself. At times, figuring out how those pieces fit together felt like a game of its own.
Fulfillment meant storing games in a warehouse, picking up boxes upon boxes, and bringing them back to my apartment. We worked out a mailing system, ordered shipping boxes on Amazon, and folded and packed them ourselves, adding signed notes and stickers. Getting Lunch into someone’s hands meant learning to produce, pitch, advertise, and ship it, alongside designing it.
Now we’re getting the business organized to work with retailers and distributors at a larger scale, while managing the marketing and logistics of the convention circuit. We sold over 100 copies at conventions in 2026, and Lunch is stocked by independent stores in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The production and business side could fill a page of its own; I’ll leave that fuller story for another time since I want to keep the focus here on design. I’m sure that this is only the start of a long, long journey, but to that end, it’s been nothing but fun at every step of the way.
And of course, an infinite number of thank-yous to the countless people who helped make this dream happen. Friends, family, partners, strangers—it seems like everywhere we’ve been, we’ve found people who have gone above and beyond to believe in our dream and help make it a reality. For that, I’m eternally grateful.