by OnJoueTu

How Did It Start?

Mathieu Bieri: The story of Naishi is a story of chance encounters and happenstance.

I had been working on a prototype for a game called “Drakkar” that had a simple principle of five tiles on a card stand that would slide from left to right in a type of “tile-building” game in a Viking setting. The idea for that prototype actually came about randomly after multiple years of hosting a French-language podcast and YouTube channel about board games. Friends and family would always ask me, “Why don’t you create your own game?” — a question I’ve always thought peculiar as enjoying a game and designing a game are worlds apart in my head.

A year after I began working on “Drakkar”, my podcast co-host sent me a link for a “boardgame creation bootcamp” hosted by GRRRE Games in Grenoble, France. Being a massive fan of Nidavellir, I jumped on the opportunity.

It was at this bootcamp that I met Alex Fortineau. He was there with his own prototype in the hopes of refining it and learning the ropes of how to get a prototype signed and on the shelves. We both got along great and exchanged contact information and parted ways.

A year later, in 2023, we met again at Paris est Ludique !, a big outdoor gaming festival in Paris. I was there representing the YouTube channel and podcast to cover the upcoming slate of games for the rest of that year. We caught up on where our respective prototypes stood, and I shared a beginning of an idea I had to make “Drakkar” much more family friendly than it was.

At the time, “Drakkar” was a light expert game with quite a lot of fiddly rules, and I was frustrated by not being able to trim some of the fat off. He gave me great pointers and ideas on how to do exactly that and eventually, I asked him whether he would be interested in co-designing this trimmed-down version.

Alex: My first steps in game design began a few months before meeting Mathieu at the GRRRE Games bootcamp. I was working on a prototype of a game centered around building natural parks.

By the time the bootcamp ended, the game had changed a lot, and I started meeting with publishers at festivals. I didn’t manage to sign that project at my first Cannes festival, but I learned a lot about how to pitch a game and what publishers expect. Additionally and most importantly, I met many people who motivated me to keep going in this field.

When Mathieu suggested that I work with him on his “Simplified Drakkar” project, I thought it would be another great opportunity to keep carving out my path in the world of modern board games.

First Draft: Kōjo

Mathieu: We immediately got to work on it. The initial idea was for a game in which we had five cards face up on the table in a line and five cards in hand, all blocked — that is, we couldn’t freely change the position of our cards. Players would exchange a card from their hand and their line in the same position. Then, players would change hands with the player to their left and repeat the process for a certain number of rounds.

Alex: It’s important to note that Mathieu lives in Switzerland, while I live in Brittany in western France, so we worked on the game entirely remotely, using Tabletop Simulator. I tested this first version of the game with my parents and my girlfriend.

Here’s a piece of advice I can give to aspiring game designers: Testing your games with friends and family is a good thing, but make sure they’re comfortable enough to be honest with you. Sometimes people don’t dare to say what they think for fear of hurting your feelings, which, in reality, doesn’t help you at all. During that first test, my parents immediately told me the game didn’t work.

Quickly, we realized that the game needed to be a two-player game. We were into the mechanism of playing face to face and how a card in your fifth column would be in the first column for your opponent. The kind of mirror aspect of playing face to face intrigued us.

It seems strange to think that the Japan theme wasn’t always integrated into the design. Indeed, the first version of the prototype was only numbers and colors. The idea was to create poker-style combinations in your hand and in your face-up line.

I then decided that we needed to find a theme for the positioning of the cards to make sense and to help us come up with logical and thematic ideas. We first thought about how cards could represent different fruits and vegetables in a market. Needless to say, that idea didn’t last long!

Then I thought of the Japan theme as it often evokes a not-so-friendly game, which is what this was turning out to be. It was working well with the duel/tense/sharp and strict aspects of the game. The Japanese theme quickly gave us ideas for characters and buildings that score in different ways and had a different level of rarity. For example, we had a princess card that was unique and that we wanted to create a sense of urgency in the players to pick up. We settled on a name for this first version of the prototype by searching for the translation of “princess” and finding “Kōjo”.

About three months after we began working on “Kōjo”, in October 2023 I went to a small game festival near my hometown in Rennes, France. There, I hoped to get player feedback in order to improve the game as we wanted to have a polished prototype for the International Game Festival in Cannes. This is where most designers pitch to publishers to maybe later sign their prototypes in our part of the world.

It was indeed a small festival, and initially only two people played the game — but at the end of their first game, they told me that they loved it, then came back later with friends to make them play “Kōjo”. Only after that did they reveal themselves as having just started their own editing company — Merle éditions — with their first game being released in a couple of months.

One of them, Benji, said he wanted us to send them the game so that they could play again, and just a few weeks later he told us that he wanted to publish the game. I told him we’d talk about it and get back to them. We took a few days to think about it, facing the following dilemma: Should we sign with them for sure and guarantee our game would be published, even though it was a young publishing house, or should we wait a few months for the Cannes festival and hope to land a contract with a bigger publisher? In the end, Merle éditions’ enthusiasm was so strong that it convinced us to sign with them. From there, all that was left was to “just” develop the game!

The Game

Mathieu: The development of Naishi was a great collaborative effort between Alex, myself, and Benji at Merle éditions. Once a week, we would meet to play as much as possible and see whether there was an optimal victory path or if some strategies were too weak or too powerful. We would think about how to make card combinations unique and different from each other to avoid feeling repetitive, all the while keeping the design understandable with simple symbols.

Our goal was always to create a quick game that leaves players with a feeling of immediately wanting to get revenge on their opponent. We wanted players to ask, “Best two out of three?”

Alex: In the first version of the game, before signing with Merle éditions, the mountains didn’t exist. At first, we shuffled all the cards together, and the goal was to optimize your hand and your line by picking cards from the river. It quickly became clear that the starting luck was far too influential; you could begin with strong cards in the right spots, then try to end the game as quickly as possible.

That’s where the idea came from to let players end the game before the “natural” end. Shortly after that, the White Mountain cards appeared, which allowed players to start the game with “negative” cards and cancelled the luck factor of the beginning.

One of the things Benjamin and I debated early in development was whether the different scoring on the cards should be “perfectly” balanced. With his engineering background, Benjamin preferred to mathematically calculate a sort of “perfect” balance between the different cards.

On my end, I had read an excellent article by Bruno Cathala explaining that, in his view, overly mathematical balance could harm player enjoyment. That’s why I insisted that some cards should be much more appealing than others, with sharp, striking scoring. For example, the Naishi had to instantly create the urge to grab it. I eventually managed to convince Benjamin to design this way, and he still brings it up often today!

For the visual side of the game, I had come across Marine Losekoot‘s work on social media through a mutual friend, and I loved her style. When I suggested her to Merle éditions, it was love at first sight for them, too, and they quickly got in touch with her. This was also her first game!

Before the beautiful work of Marine…

The Actions

Mathieu: This is one aspect that we went back and forth on. In the beginning, we had thought of a type of player board in which the actions were tied to the positioning of a card. For example, if you took a card from the river in position 4, you could then switch two card positions because that was the action tied to position 4. That idea was dropped as it was too limiting.

The first version of the board

Alex: After the first test with these position-based actions, I cut up the sheet to place the actions on the side. We went through a huge number of different versions of how those actions should be activated by the players — but the actions remained the same from the beginning.

We were trying to find the perfect balance between blocking opportunities, creating a bit of a “race” feel, but at the same time not giving too much trouble to players for properly placing their cards. The move and discard actions soon became the ones that are still in the final version, but the stealing one was always tricky to manage since it wasn’t limited at first. In one version, when a player used the steal action, they placed a “shield” token in front of the stolen card. That card couldn’t be stolen again, but the other player could still steal a different card. It was too complicated. In another version, each player could steal only once…but then nobody actually stole cards. If one player stole, the other would immediately steal back, and the whole mechanism collapsed. None of the solutions felt right.

In this version of the game, all the actions to move cards were separated

At one point, I spent a weekend with other game designer friends. After playing the game with them and talking it over, the idea emerged: instead of each player having a steal action, why not make it a single action, shared between both players?

A few tests later, I was convinced. I immediately told Benjamin and Mathieu, and after just a handful of playtests, they were convinced, too. Limiting the steal action to just one player, once per game, instantly added the perfect layer of extra tension, while also fixing all the problems we had before.

Right before limiting stealing to only one player!

What’s Next?

Mathieu: The game debuted in September 2025 in the U.S., but it has been out for over a year in France and has been a commercial success for everyone involved, exceeding our wildest expectations.

We approached Merle with an idea for a Naishi expansion in December 2024. Of course, the guys at Merle were excited by the idea, but we all didn’t want to put out an expansion just for the sake of doing so. Some ideas for the expansion were initially in early stages of development that we went back to — and some still didn’t make it, like a four-player 2v2 mode similar to what Zenith ended up doing.

We also pondered having new families of cards that would be interchangeable, such as a marine faction that would replace the four Torii gates and would not disrupt the distribution of cards in the deck. That also would have been too great an endeavor for the size and price point of the original game, so we settled on the two modules of Legends and Travelers.

Alex: The Travelers are a completely new type of card, and they allow players to take extra actions when they recruit them or discard them. They shake up the usual rhythm of the game, which is always fun to do in an expansion rather than “just” adding new cards with new scoring rules. It still took a lot of testing to properly balance these cards, both the Travelers and the Legends, which introduce alternative scoring and therefore replace some base game cards. Since the base game was also balanced by the number of copies of each card, this was a real challenge!

Thanks

Mathieu: I wanted to especially thank Alex for the collaborative experience of bringing Naishi to life. At that same bootcamp where we met, renowned designer Théo Rivière gave a presentation of the benefits of co-designing games. One thing that he said that stuck with me was that whatever the outcome of the game, it’s something that you experience together. If the game finds its audience, you celebrate together, and if it doesn’t, you mourn together. In that sense, it was and continues to be a pleasure to celebrate the success of Naishi together.

Also, what can be said of the editorial work of Benji and Thierry from Merle éditions? For such a young company, we couldn’t have asked for a better team. The game clearly would not be the success it is without their hard work and dedication. Special thanks goes out to Marine Losekoot for bringing something unique to the visual representation of Naishi.

And finally, a huge thank you to my “On Joue-Tu?” community that showed excitement and support for my first edited board game. There really isn’t a better board game community.

Alex: A huge thank you to Mathieu for this fruitful collaboration. I’m really happy not only with the work we did, but also with the friendship we built along the way, full of jokes and teasing whenever I managed to beat him (which, of course, happened very often).

Thanks to Marine for her amazing illustrations, which truly elevated our work on the mechanisms and drew so many people’s attention to the game.

Thanks to Merle éditions for their trust and editorial work. Even though they were as inexperienced as we were, their relentless motivation and passionate work allowed Naishi to come to life in the best possible way and cross borders!

Finally, thank you to all the international publishers and distributors who took Naishi under their wing to distribute it in their countries, helping our little baby reach more and more players around the world. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better outcome for a first game!