by Elizabeth Hargrave

My game Sanibel is a love letter to my dad and to Sanibel Island. I’d like to tell you a little more about how it came to be.

The Beginning

My dad got a job at the University of Florida in the mid-1980s, and declared he would never shovel snow again. We were 90 minutes from the closest beach, and it was another hour to where my grandparents wintered in Venice, Florida.

My dad, brother, and grandparents at the beach in the 1980s
Containers around our house slowly started to fill with fossilized sharks teeth and miscellaneous shells. Mostly teeth: they’re especially abundant in Venice. My dad’s beach mode was walking for miles with a sandwich bag tucked into his shorts, looking among the light-colored shells for the little bits of black.

Fast forward 40 years to late 2022, and my family is still gathering at what is now my aunt’s place in Venice. My brother and I have moved away, but we come back to Florida almost every Christmas, and we often spend a few days at the beach. Meanwhile, I have become a full-time board game designer. So, while we’re having lunch after a morning of shelling on Caspersen Beach, my dad suggests: you should make a game about this.

I frequently brush people off when they have a game idea for me. I have way more ideas than I have time to design. But on this one I did a double-take. Why isn’t there a game about collecting seashells? It’s universally appealing. It’s got an obvious tie to set collection. Even better: you could mimic walking down the beach using one of my favorite mechanisms, a movement track with last-player-goes-next turn order (which many people know from Tokaido or Patchwork). And shells are something I love, which goes a long way when a game design often requires months or years of iteration.

So I dove in and made a first draft. It was only cards. The beach was made up of the card backs, and they flipped over like a crashing wave to reveal shells. Different shells had different rules for scoring, like Sushi Go. But it just wasn’t that interesting. I shelved it to work on Undergrove and the next Wingspan expansion.

Design Phase 2: This Shouldn’t Be a Card Game

Fast forward almost another year. Unpub (a big playtesting convention in Baltimore) is coming and I’ve been too busy working on secret Wingspan things to have a game to test in public. I pull Sanibel off the shelf and there are no notes in the box. The first page of my design notebook starts: “I made this prototype months ago, and I don’t think I made any notes! How should it play?”

Designers: don’t do this.

After messing around with it a bit, I had a realization: this shouldn’t be a card game. It needs to be on tiles. Within a week, I had made a new tile-based version, just in time to take it to Unpub.

My card based design had included cards with two small shells instead of one larger one. I leaned into this and made two sizes of tiles: hexagons, and diamonds that are a third of a hexagon. This was perhaps inspired by the fact that Facebook likes to show me posts from the Mathematical Tiling and Tesselation group. (I also briefly toyed with the Cairo tile pattern, but decided that asymmetrical pentagons are just too fiddly to place.)

Even in the early stages, it was clear this was the right direction. Adding a spatial element to the set collection gave you more to think about, and it just looked great on the table. A lot of my notes from Unpub are about muddling through tile placement rules:

I still hadn’t totally worked out the numbers of shells to pick up on the different spaces, or how many should be on the beach — but I knew that would be the next piece to really make each turn an interesting decision about how far to move and what to take.

Connecting with Avalon Hill

A few weeks after Unpub, I headed up to the Gathering of Friends. My friend Tanya Thompson was there, and asked if I had anything to pitch to her as the inventor relations person for Hasbro. I said no, but told her she could playtest the still-rough game I was working on if she was curious.

Tanya played Sanibel once and asked me to option it. Even in its rough form, I think Tanya could feel the same excitement I did about how it would eventually come together.

On my side, I was super curious about Hasbro’s new effort to establish a line of gateway-level boardgames that merges the skill and gravitas of Avalon Hillwith the global reach of Hasbro. As I’ve talked a lot about diversity in gaming over the last several years, a concept I keep coming back to is that games that are broadly appealing, accessible to play, and distributed to a wide audience have the best chance to diversify the pool of people who play them. I thought Sanibel could work toward that goal as part of this new line.

I asked for a little time to work out some more details before sending Avalon Hill a prototype.

Design Phase 3: The Final Framework

Most of my playtesting notes from that time have to do with the trial-and-error of working out the fundamental structure of the movement on the beach and the way new tiles came out. In May, my playtesting buddy Matthew O’Malley and I spent a morning hammering out what became the final structure of the footprint spaces — he deserves a lot of credit there, as he had recently finished working on the fantastic game First in Flight, which uses a similar mechanism for turn order. There are two giant stars next to the note in my notebook:

The trick was finding a structure that makes it enticing to push ahead to get more, while also making it viable to sometimes hang back and take less in order to have first pick of new shells later, especially when more tiles are about to come out. I love the push-pull feeling of tracks like this when they work well, and once we tried this structure it was obviously the one.

The mechanic for putting new shells out on the beach was also key. From the first card version of this game, I knew I wanted the feeling of waves revealing new shells. It’s not just thematic — the timed release of new tiles also allows you to narrow the number of tiles that players need to examine at any given time, while keeping things going long enough to have a game. But having refills at the end of each turn or even once around the table was too fiddly. When I realized I could add the wave almost as another player to trigger refills, I knew I had it — though there was math to be done later to make a good number of shells come out at each player count. There is always a spreadsheet.

In breaks between working on the mechanics, I was also locking in the species to include in the game. This involved poring through iNaturalist for Sanibel Island, looking at shelling blogs, and even finding a couple of scientific papers with surveys of shells on the west coast of Florida. Some designers switch between games when they get stuck; I like to just switch to completely different tasks.

Design Phase 4: The Details

By July, I had a signed contract and had a kickoff meeting with a whole team of people at Avalon Hill who would work on the game. This was a new experience, as most of the companies I have worked with have tiny staffs — when I signed Wingspan, Jamey Stegmaier was the only full-time employee of Stonemaier Games!

Once I started working with my developer, Doug Hopkins, most of the work that remained was refining how the shells score. Most of the scoring conditions started with how I think about collecting the different types of shells. I’ll post a separate blog on that, as an excuse to show off some of my personal shell collection!

Doug and I bounced back and forth between mathing out expected values, and playtesting to see what people actually did in practice. I always love seeing how different companies do this: we were able to send the game to some families and watch them play on a video.

Other key players on the Avalon Hill team were Tess Hogan and Samy Ventura. Tess is the one who researched and wrote all the shell facts at the end of the rulebook, and made the rest of it flow so nicely. And Samy is responsible for most of how the game looks, including finding Dahl Taylor to do the art, directing the graphic design process, and designing the delightful folding player aids.

It was great to see it all come together!

Taking Sanibel back to Sanibel Island

At that point, the design work was done. But it’s worth telling the story of how I’ve circled back multiple times to take Sanibel to Sanibel Island.

As you can see on the first notes pictured above, I was calling this game “Sanibel” from the very beginning, even though my family spent more time shelling in Venice. For one thing, “Venice” has obvious problems as a name for a game about shells and not gondolas. But also, if there’s one place I think of for shells, it really is Sanibel Island. Its weirdly perpendicular orientation as a barrier island catches more shells than anywhere I’ve ever been. We’d drive the extra distance to Sanibel for special occasions as a family.

Somehow, I was still surprised when I first took the game to Unpub by how many people saw the name and immediately went, “oh my gosh, I love it there!”. It has continued everywhere I’ve taken the game since. Even in Essen, where I had a German woman excitedly come up and tell me that she had just gotten back from Sanibel Island! It’s a place that really sticks with you once you’ve been: not just the beautiful beaches, but the emphasis on local businesses (chains aren’t allowed, with a few grandfathered exceptions), the lack of highrises, and the large nature preserves.

Completely separate from the fact that I was working on this game, my mom wanted to go to Sanibel Island for our family Christmas in 2024. Category 4 Hurricane Ian had done serious damage to the island in September 2022, including taking out the bridge to the island, part of the iconic lighthouse, and damaging a lot of the housing. We wanted to visit because we love the island, but also to help support the recovering businesses there.

As the date approached, however, multiple wrenches were thrown in this plan. Hurricanes Milton and Helene hit the island in September and October 2024. Around the same time, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Eventually, the plan came back together: we got the go-ahead from his doctor that he should be fine for a week, and from our lodging that we’d have a place to stay. (The water damage to the elevator was not repaired yet when we arrived, though, turning our vacation condo into a third-floor walkup!)

Dad wasn’t taking his normal miles-long walks, but we definitely found some good shells on that trip — including my spouse finding an incredibly rare Junonia. I have just a brief note in my playtesting journal that my parents, husband, and brother played Sanibel on the day after Christmas. I didn’t manage to take any pictures. But I definitely remember that my brother and my dad were in a fierce competition for the most shark teeth — and that my dad had the most by the end of the game. It is a memory I will treasure, because he was gone just 6 weeks later.

I got to go back to Sanibel Island two more times in 2025. In March, we filmed a fun https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w3WMqEiuP1E/default.jpg‘ alt=’video’>for the game. And then in December, Hasbro worked with the Chamber of Commerce on Sanibel to come do an event for the business owners on the island, who have been through so much. It has been heartwarming to see people be so touched to have a game named after their little island — and to have them tell me I got it right. It was also an amazing opportunity to support the island directly: Avalon Hill contributed $10,000 to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

While we were there, the Chamber of Commerce also asked me to put a copy of the game in a time capsule they were putting together for the town’s 50th anniversary. (Is it cheating to share a picture?)

As much as my games have all been about the real world, this is my first game that has such a connection to a particular place. I’m so glad I picked this place. I hope you feel a little bit of the love I have for Sanibel Island and for my dad when you play this game.