Michael O’Connell - Finspan Guy

Forage + Honeypot A pair of fast and fun games for everyone, from the team that brought you the smash hits Point Salad, Calico, and Cascadia!

It's live!! The game I designed, Honeypot, just launched on Kickstarter!

Two years of loving work. Would be grateful if you checked it out & considered backing!

It's an "I stack, you choose" game where you play as secret agent bears setting and avoding traps!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/fla...

YouTube video by Bangers Project Why Finspan’s Simplicity Divides Board Gamers

youtu.be/m0iYCOToMfc?...

This person really delves into the decisions that we made to make onboarding much easier with Finspan (compared to Wingspan). It was cool to see.

I mean the other guy, the one who never works out.

Who is that guy? He is dead to me.

That’s the spirit.

It was a nightmare before Disney. Now, I imagine, it’s a nightmare within a nightmare.

Anecdotally, this is certainly true of Finspan - from my time at conventions.

It always pulls me out of the scene. It’s maddening.

Wait! Who is that cool guy?!?

With shared score of 90, feels super rare.

I had it happen once with Tapestry, which is even more wild because the scores were 200, plus.

At this point, I kind of prefer ties to using the tiebreakers. It’s fun to say “we tied.”

Mediterranean Parrotfish card from finspan with the fun fact “It starts life as female, then changes to male in adulthood, turning from bright red and yellow to gray and blue.”

Suck it JK Rowling

It’s inevitable. After reading Stephenson’s *Fall*, I was, like, “Yeah, but we’ll have a bit more time, right?”

NARRATOR’S VOICE: Um…

This has made working on expansions for Finspan so difficult. #finspan

This is my family’s favorite game. It really shines at 4 players.

Cover of the Spanish edition of the game (only thing that changes is the publisher logo & the language of the promotional text though), it shows a winged fish in the center flying over a sea-foam-y background that forms a gradient from a couple tones of blue in the bottom left to fully white in the top right. At the bottom the title is written in big, plain white letters.

Photo of a table with the game being played by 4 players, each with their own vertically oriented board. There are playing cards with images of different fish pieces on it, tokens for eggs, fish & schools & help cards all over the place. The game takes up so much space the bottom of each board is overhanging a bit.

204. 🎲 #Finspan was cool, got me 😵‍💫 at the start with its apparent high complexity but got the (or enough of a) hang of it quickly enough. Beautiful & lovingly researched, loved the facts on each fish species.
cc @biblosfera.bsky.social, @vanthulla.bsky.social (who won the game!)

That’s the movie-room-tiki-bar of a friend of mine. There are a couple more figures as well. He has a pretty incredible setup. The sound for movies is off the chain. We have a running joke from the Harkonnen “tone” (from watching the Dune movies there): “BWAHHH!” (That’s the whole joke.)

The Rebels’ desperate gambit to destroy the under construction Death Star failed (in Star Wars Rebellion).

No one does.

Yeah, I would have to order this. Basically, if you call something a flight, I will get it.

YouTube video by Stonemaier Games Stable Times: My Favorite Mechanism

@kristenmott.bsky.social, my co-designer on an upcoming game, was featured on Jamey’s “My Favorite Mechanism” for her game, Stable Times. So excited for her!

youtu.be/Jr9fheVoX9c

The women in the photo were clearly mesmerized by it…

@gamefaery.bsky.social Did you see I wore the fish you made me?!?

I tend to get lost in those types of games.

How did it go?

For me, it’s mostly whether or not the more opaque aspects of a game seem like a development miss. I expect each game I engage with to take the onboarding wins that it “should have.”

I come across a lot of well-designed games that have been underdeveloped.

I didn't expect this new board game to become my summer obsession, but now I've dropped everything else Finspan has my full attention

I somehow missed this…

www.gamesradar.com/games/board-...

One of my favorite movie exchanges. People want to be the thing that doing a thing represents, but they don’t want to actually do the thing.

I've definitely dealt with publishers who would listen to literally anyone else other than the designer. One playtester in one playtest out of thirty? We'd better get on that. Reddit? Absolutely. Someone who wandered in off the street? Tell us more, oh wise one! Game designer? Pft, what do you know?

I have worked with 5 different marine biologists on Finspan. This pressure is real.