Hello, I’m Litus, the creator and illustrator of Gold Nugget! I write all this to share a little about what the creation and design of this great little project was like.
I am not a person well versed in board games — but I am well versed in video games, and there is a difference between them that has always caught my attention: human contact, a contact that has increasingly been lost in the world of video games. In the past, we would meet up at home with friends to play a video game. It was something that I loved, that human contact, which little by little has been disappearing.
But in board games human contact has always existed and the field has maintained it. I’ve always wanted to make a game that would allow me to be together with my friends, which is why I was inclined to make a board game in which the main theme was the interaction between the participants.
The first version of Gold Nugget differed greatly from the current one since it was a team game: on the one hand the animals, and on the other a villain: the hunter.
A player personified the hunter, who used traps at different times of the day, with those traps being activated if they met a series of requirements. For example, the weight trap, which was activated only if an animal with three or more stones in its possession took a turn. The animals had to collaborate to avoid the hunter’s traps and avoid dying from his shots.
The interaction of the first versions of the game was verbal since turns were shared between all the player animals. They had to reach an agreement on who took the turn so they were collaborating, but at the same time, each one had their own interest in getting the gold nugget. In this way, a game of trust and betrayal was played between the animals themselves.
I designed this first version of the game in 2013, and it was not until 2015 that I decided to try to make it happen through crowdfunding…which I had to abandon halfway through due to medical problems. That was a hard blow for me, and Gold Nugget was abandoned for several years, along with other board games he had created.
It wasn’t until 2021 that I walked into a board game store and saw a game similar to one of my prototypes. That made me cry since I realized that person had fought for their dreams, whereas I had abandoned them.
So I reacted. I didn’t want to become someone who doesn’t fight for their dreams. I decided to return to the adventure of launching Gold Nugget, but the world of board games had evolved a lot in a short time, especially in Spain, and Gold Nugget also had to evolve.
I realized that, among other things, the world of board games was getting closer and closer to that of video games, and with Tabletop Simulator you could emulate any existing board game, losing that human contact that I liked so much about board games…so I decided to evolve Gold Nugget in a way that couldn’t be emulated on a computer.
How could I achieve that? It was complicated, but I came up with the idea of adding a touch mechanism. Let me explain: I thought that closing your eyes at some point in the game and performing actions with your eyes closed — thus having to use touch and pay attention to the noise made by the other players — could not be emulated in Tabletop Simulator, a result that I loved.
Happy with this mechanism, I dispensed with the hunter (which seemed violent to me) and added as a villain the great black raven, who was the possessor of the gold nugget.
This new version was fresher and faster than the previous one. Little by little, I changed the gameplay of what I had to beomce a more modern and accessible one.
These past years made me grow as a person and an artist. I had studied more and worked on other projects, so I was ready to evolve the art side of the game as well. As you can see in the following photos, the change is quite noticeable:
Once I updated the art and mechanisms of the game, I was ready to present it, so I started going to fairs with my friends, who helped me show Gold Nugget to all types of board game audiences, who gave it a lot of positive feedback. People thought it was a unique game, nothing like other games on the market. With effort, we polished the design until we presented it to the publisher that would later publish it: <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/30571/2tomatoes-games“>2Tomatoes games.
Once I signed the game to 2Tomatoes, I was able to spend a lot more time on the illustration, improving and updating art that I wasn’t happy with. I soaked up animal studies, photos, and sketches from Disney, who are geniuses at drawing animals, and created the current illustrations. Working closely with the publisher, the final version of the game was finally born.
