Merchants of Play Discord Activity
Client: Merchants of Play
Role: Founding Product Designer/Head of Design
Responsibilities: product vision, UX/UI design, game design, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, user testing,
Duration: 9 months (Nov 2024 - Jul 2025)
Tools:
The story begins…
It was my first day on the job. In our daily standup, our CEO said, “We’re doing a new thing starting today. We’re not building a playtest tool anymore. I want to make ‘Steam for Board Games.’ That’s our new direction, and we’re basically going to start from scratch.”
I was absolutely thrilled. I was about to design a brand-new product from end-to-end, and I was going to be able to leverage all of the valuable lessons I’d learned over the years in order to make this the best and most fun app yet.
Overview
Merchants of Play is a Canadian game company founded by the Godfather of NFTs, Mack Flavelle. Our goal was to build a Discord activity to allow users to play board games online, and to do it more intuitively and elegantly than our competitors TableTopia, Table Top Simulator, and Board Game Arena.
In addition, we sought to create a medium where independent game developers and publishers could build an audience and increase sales of their own games (when tied to a Kickstarter launch, for example). Unlike the vast majority of our competitors, we developed a pipeline where a game designer could see their game in our app within a number of days, rather than the months that it took for other platforms.
We launched the Beta version of our Merchants of Play activity in late June of 2025.
Team
Aside from Mack, who served as Product Owner, I also worked hand-in-hand with a global team of incredibly talented and innovative engineers including Gustavo Konrad, Dan Viau, Pooryia Raad, Fabiano Soriani, Michael Zsigmond (front-end development, project management, and sales), Jakub Adamski (3D modeling), and Keo Jimal (QA and testing).
Goals
Allow users to play board games online with their friends through a simple, intuitive, and delightful interface
Increase discoverability and drive sales for small publishers and independent game designers
Become the go-to app for gamers and game designers alike
Highlights
Background
Merchants of Play began its life as Tinker Table, a platform directed at board game designers who wanted to playtest their games with players across the world.
But on Day 1 of my journey with the company we decided to abandon Tinker Table in favour of something more modern and disruptive. After considering our options, we decided to take Mack’s idea of “Steam for Board Games” and turn it into a Discord activity. Our goals were to make it not only an easy way for users to play online board games with their friends (and do it more intuitively and elegantly than competitors like TableTop Simulator), but also a platform for game designers to market their own games.
Project Details
Challenge: Immediate Rebrand Needed
The parent company making Tinker Table was originally known as BigHead Club. Mack, as mentioned previously, is widely regarded as the Godfather of NFTs, and led the development and launch of a successful online game called CryptoKitties.
Because of this, initial research showed many of the board game nerds we sought to reach carried a healthy distrust of anything related to crypto, decentralized tech, and NFTs. And while all members of BigHead were delighted to not be part of that world anymore, the reputation continued to be a burden.
Radlands: The early test
Early on we had the opportunity to pitch our concept to Roxley Games, makers of the cyberpunk dystopian card game Radlands. This would be particularly advantageous for us, as Radlands had yet to be made into a digital version. I learned everything I could about the game, and set out making wireframes of what our experience would be like for players.
I wanted to make sure that the playing experience would feel natural and intuitive, and that it captured the feel of playing the game in-person while also taking advantage of the simplicity of online play. I spent a lot of time analyzing the flow of the game and how hotkeys and mouse commands might function.
Even though the majority of my career has been in UX and Product Design, I knew enough about branding to at get the company started off on the right foot. I worked very closely with Mack to help him refine his vision for what our new company was all about, and as I played Ralph McQuarrie to his George Lucas, I interpreted his ideas into a visual medium. I created four unique aesthetic experiences and presented them to the team: High Fantasy, Art Deco Dieselpunk, 1950s Raygun Gothic, and Cyberpunk.
The vast consensus from the team was Raygun Gothic, which we positioned as “like Fallout before the bombs fell.” So with those parameters established, I set about refining the typeface, colour palette, and the logo, all of which formed the foundation of the design system that I would soon build.
In those early stages we were also thinking about creating dedicated Discord activities for each game, and so a lot of my early research dug into the ways that each different type of game approached things like discoverability, cooperative play, looking for players (LFP), inviting players, and asynchronous play.
While Roxley was impressed by the speed at which we’d been able to produce such a well-thought out play experience, they weren’t ready to let us build one of their best-selling games until we’d proven ourselves on the market. We were excited by the prospect that we could one day publish Radlands on our platform, and that encouraged us to push harder.
Building our Platform
With our Roxley experience pushing us forward, we now had a clearer idea of what we wanted to include in our activity. We ultimately decided that, rather than have one dedicated Discord activity per game, we’d try to create an app store within an app store. We decided to create a Netflix-like experience that would allow users to browse games, invite friends, save favourites, and save unfinished games.
I started out by sketching out some different ideas, from information flows and user touchpoints to rough layout ideas.
A Shift in Thinking
Along the way I realized that I’d been thinking a little too linearly about what were actually endless possibilities. I’d spent so much time working with e-commerce websites that I’d kind of boxed myself into thinking of everything had to be a set of hierarchical pages.
But it occurred to me early on in the process that Discord wasn’t built like that; it was designed to be fluid and simple, and so I needed to reorient myself with this new flow in order to maximize my design impact.
As a result I chose to think of our game store as a spaceship made up of one long corridor, and along the corridor were a series of doors. On the other side of each door was an airlock, and beyond the airlock lay each individual game. This theme not only fit in with our “Raygun Gothic” branding, but would prove inspirational as the project continued to grow.
In fact, “Airlock” is the name that we gave our pre-launch screen, where players ready-up before the session captain launches the game
Mack and the team agreed with my approach to the app store, and so I continued on to the UI stage.
Challenge: No Dedicated FED
The first real operational challenge came after handing off the designs. The person charged with building the front-end framework did not have a strong background in development, but as often happens in startups, if you know a little bit about something, you jump in and help where you can.
The engineering team frequently made use of Windsurf, ChatGPT, and Claude to help them write code more efficiently, and while that did help save time in the long run (especially for more complex back-end solutions), it ended up causing problems for the front-end.
Our ad-hoc FED wasn’t familiar enough with HTML, CSS, and React to really know what to ask the AI code generator. As a result, he used natural language to get what he wanted, but this meant that when I had questions about how a coded section turned out, he didn’t know how to answer in technical terms or how to implement the changes that I gave him.
This is a challenge that would follow us through launch.
Crafting the Game Experience
My next challenge was crafting a game experience that would provide the unique spirit and feel of each game while still having a unified UI across the whole Merchants of Play platform. I created a master list of all of the functions that players would need to interact with the cards, tokens, and dice in our games, and the engineers worked on creating these functions.
During this time we also started signing our first games, including an unreleased sci-fi themed deckbuilding card game called Race to Kepler, and an indie Canadian card game called The Masters of Maple Syrup. These games gave us something tangible to work towards as we continued to build and refine our platform.
Identifying Key Problems
Key Problem 1: To Enforce or Not to Enforce?
We decided early-on that we would not be providing any sort of rule-enforcement in our games. We learned in our earliest stages of planning that adding rule-enforcement would limit our ability to be nimble in how we built our system. In general, we considered that since gameplay would take place over Discord, a platform known for voice and video chat, players would feel free to not only ask each other for help, but also to hold each other accountable and prevent cheating.
Then the challenge then became “If a player gets stuck, how do we show them what to do?”
Solution:
My solution to this question consisted of two parts.
The first one involved creating a “quick-reference” card for each game that would briefly explain turn order, what actions were available to a player, and any game-specific terms they might need to know. In order to make it easier for players to read, I created an “Inspect” modal. This multi-use function would come in handy, allowing players to not only read cards and flip them over, but also to select certain cards and move them to their hand.
The second step involved making the game rules accessible for each player. With our competitors, selecting the rulebook required either a separate PDF download (in the middle of game play, which was disruptive) or a giant PDF modal with no way to scan pages quickly. Because some games have manuals of 20+ pages, I wanted to make sure players spent more time playing than scanning.
I leveraged our Inspect modal, giving players the ability to quickly see how many pages were available, select one, and then zoom in or out using the mouse’s scroll wheel.
And now for something completely different
As the company grew and out platform inched closer and closer to MVP, we knew we needed to get the word out. I collaborated with Mack and Kristy, the head of operations, to generate ideas for outreach. Using a rough demo video from Mack as a guide, I wrote a script, recorded a voice-over track, and mixed it together with music and sound effects, and edited together dozens of video clips.
I chose to create one short reel for players and a second, longer one for game designers. Not only was this a fun project, but it also showcased a completely different set of skills that they didn’t realize I had.
The Values of User Testing
As we continued to refine our player experience, the time came for us to engage in user testing. I’d been a strong proponent of it from the beginning, but budget and velocity challenges meant that we had to push testing until later in the game. My kids are all Discord users, and so I would sometimes gather them for informal testing sessions so that I wasn’t designing in a complete vacuum, but I still knew that they weren’t representative of our target audience.
The time finally came for formal testing. We brought in a team of play testers in the Philippines and watched as they tried our software for the first time.
As predicted, the results were incredibly eye-opening. The primary challenges were:
1) Players had difficulty finding the rules.
I realized I’d made the incorrect assumption that, if a player didn’t know the rules, the first thing they would do is read the manual. Even though we had a menu option for “Read Instructions” in our limited navitagion, it wasn’t intuitive enough for discoverability.
2) Players weren’t able to easily find the controls list
3) Players didn’t realize they could exit the game without leaving the entire Discord activity
8
Games available on launch, with 6 more in production
10,000
Players reached
Identifying Key Problems
Key Problem 2: What type of environment to build?
Two of our three main competitors had chosen to implement a full 3D environment that accurately mimicked the experience of sitting around a table. Players could rotate cameras, flip 3D cards, and roll dice in a way that felt skeuomorphic and realistic. The problem was that the commands and controls allowing players to manipulate the environment were arbitrary instead of intuitive. Conversely, a third competitor only provided top-down views of the game boards, but because there was no way to shift your view, the experience felt very static, linear, and constricted.
Our goal was to bridge the gap between the two ends of the spectrum with a simple interface that didn’t require long lists of controls but still felt visually engaging and high-end.
But because our technical abilities were growing along with our platform, cameras were initially difficult to implement. I had detailed an experience where each player saw their own board at the bottom of the screen, and other players would be seated sequentially around the left, right, and top. This proved more difficult than expected on the back-end, and I had to create another approach.
Solution:
I spent a lot of time playing board games, both in-person and online, and studying the flow of play and the sequence of actions that each player would need to take. I suggested different camera angles that would help players not feel constricted in their view while also remaining unobtrusive.
Since players were not sitting around a table, I decided to keep any community actions such as drawing, playing, and rolling dice near the top of the screen, while personal player mats and hands would be kept down towards the bottom.
A prime example of this is Race to Kepler, where I opted to group all player mats at the lower half of the screen.
45m
Average play time