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2025, what a year huh?!?!

We entered 2025 pretty exhausted after handling the production of Perilous Pond and making sure all the Kickstarter backers got their games. Given this we had quite humble ambitions for the year, we wanted to get Perilous Pond into some stores and we wanted to go to a couple of conventions.

All in all it was a good year and we did what we set out to do and we even got some inspiration for new games (though we haven’t got anything to show yet). We’ve had a ton of fun, met a bunch of lovely people and got our energy back!

Conventions

During the year we didn’t go to as many conventions as we had hoped for due to various reasons but we did manage to go to a few: LinCon, NärCon and MimiCon.

We love these events. Not only is it a ton of fun showing our games to new players it’s a chance for me (Åke) and Per to meet in person. We live 500 km apart so it’s not that often we get the chance.

LinCon was great this year, our room was in a great spot and we had lots of visitors. We’ve been there many times and it’s an excellent convention for boardgamers.

NärCon is a festival for all things geek, and it’s great just watching all the cosplays. There are boardgamers here but they’re not a majority but a couple found us and kept the room relatively busy. A bonus was that after closing the room in the evenings we could sit down and zone out in front of Super Mario Bros 3 and during the worst heat we could cool down with a cool milkshake from the juice bar!

MimiCon is the new kid on the block, a small convention in Falun. They’re all over the place: Cosplay, lectures, geek-market, board games and role playing games but most of all a really good vibe. We got setup next to Bärserk Entertainment and had a great time with them. We’re looking forward to coming back this year!

The Games

Our games did really good this year not only did people seem to like them at the conventions, we also succeeded in getting them into stores all across Sweden (and some games were even sold to Denmark). Perilous Pond sold out in several stores during the year and we have had followup orders which feels really good.

We also sent games to reviewers and got mostly kind words for both Perilous Pond and Bushido Duels. Many reviews ended up on instagram but some were in written form on boardgamegeek.

The Future

During the second half of the year we started play-testing some new prototypes*, we can’t say that any of them will see the light of day. However, I can say this: It’s really nice working on new games again and not just worry about colour profiles, how yellow looks in bad lighting and so on…

we hope for more prototyping, more conventions and meeting more great people in 2026!

* Schhhh! Not so loud!

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Find our games in stores!

We’re really happy that our games are in both web-stores and stores out in the really-real world!

Bushido Duels

Bushido Duels has been in circulation for a while. We’ve played several hundreds of duels and we still think it’s a very fun little game. It can be found in these stores:

Perilous Pond

As I write this it been just over a year since we sent sent the game out to our Kickstarter backers and we’re happy to report that in the past year several stores has picked it up:

These are the ones we’re pretty sure still have the games in stock, we will likely be wrong and may have missed some stores. If you see something missing or if something in the list is wrong, let us know and we’ll correct the mistake!

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Gamebox icons for all!

Hi Åke here, if anyone need gamebox icons for age, playtime and number of players as vector graphics (svg), we’ve made ours freely available here!

The icons, simple but functional

While doing the layout for the Perilous Pond box we ran into some issues with the Open Source icons we were using. The format they were distributed varied and we couldn’t find all of them in vector format. To make all the icons usable we had to re-create them in Inkscape as svg’s. The icons were not just traced/converted but improved to make it easier to use in a printed product by separating the entire black areas from the white areas so overprint can be applied without issues.

The original icons were licensed under the very permissive CC0 license, and we’ve kept that license since it’s very hassle free and allows creators to use the images in any way they like without any considerations. But! we’ve created a github-repository for them so if any of you would like to improve on the design, correct some errors or discuss them there is a place for it.

We hope these will be of use to someone 🙂

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Frogs Away!

We are super happy that the games arrived from Germany without issue and that we could quickly package and ship the rewards out to our Kickstarter backers.

Now that the Kickstarter campaign is complete we have added the games to our webshop for anyone to buy.

It’s been quite a journey but we made it. It was great working with Ludo Fact and we don’t think the process could have gone much better (even if we hoped that we could have managed our part quicker).

Emily did a great job with the art for this game as well and went above and beyond to create the look and style of the game.

With this intense time behind us we look forward to visiting conventions and show off our games!

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A couple of months into 2024…

Time flies when you’re having fun. This post has been sitting as a draft for some time now, if you’re reading it we’ve actually published it!

At the end of last year we funded Perilous Pond through Kickstarter! If you backed the game, thank you so much for your support! We’re speeding along towards the actual production of the game.

We started the year with dealing with a some practical things:

  • Getting proofs for the mini expansions, Life Lessons and Bigger Teeth
  • Refining the rules
  • Starting the conversation with our production partner, getting all the templates and making decisions on colors and other production details.

Getting the proofs early was important to us to make sure our digital mock-ups would work in real life and if not be able to make changes without causing delays. Luckily our ideas seem to work well.

Crocodiles from the Bigger Teeth expansion has surrounded a flock of frogs.

We’ve had to make a lot of tiny decisions regarding colours and designs. Our backers already know that we needed to change the dice material to make sure the designs would work out, but now we’re out of the woods and are preparing the files for production.

We’ve dug into the rules, trying to stream line them somewhat. We thought it would be a quick process and done back in February and we mostly was…but we still find things to improve. No actual changes to the rules, just clarifications.

Right now we’re focusing on preparing all the files for the printer. Converting colour profiles is always nerve wracking but things are moving along nicely and we should have no problem delivering the files in time.

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Perilous Pond Kickstarter Pre-launch Page is Live!

We’ve just launched the Kickstarter pre-launch page for Perilous Pond! (There was much rejoicing!).

Perilous Pond is a fun push-your-luck game about frogs eating fireflies in an ever-changing pond. The previews are all very positive and we’re super-stoked about getting the game into the next phase! If you’re at all interested in Frogs, push-your-luck games and/or cool dice give us a follow over on Kickstarter, it would mean the world to us!

For more info about the game check the Perilous Pond page on this very site!

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Wrapping up 2022

2022 has been a rough year on a personal level for both me and Per. We have however rolled with the punches and made it a really good Frozen Maze Games-year.

Conventions!

We managed to visit three conventions this year.

LinCon is one of the older[citation needed] conventions here in Sweden and very much focused on playing board and role playing games.

NärCon Summer is a festival with cosplayers everywhere, K-Pop bands playing on large stages, lots of different foods, video games, arcades, an entire building with artists selling their artwork and much much more. Everyone was super friendly and the atmosphere was great.

…and BibbCon is a tiny convention hosted by Jönköping City Library (Bibliotek in Swedish) and just a single day. This convention is hosted in the city library so entry was free for all and small kids ran around trying new games or playing Mario Cart everywhere.

Some of the awesome gamers who played Perilous Pond at conventions this year.

The most important thing about the conventions are meeting people. In addition to all the gamers, we met some exceptional creators. We met the people behind Falkenjack Gaming Woodcraft at LinCon, they make and sell custom dice trays, towers and DM screens (We managed to trade a copy of Bushido Duels for a lovely dice tray for Perilous Pond). We also met Emma, coordinator of Uniting Geeks. They run various events and geek markets. We also briefly met with Swedish Meeples and the Tody’s crew our friendly competitors and got some input for Perilous Pond.

Our Games!

Our upcoming title, Perilous Pond, has come a long way this year and is now in a very mature state. We’ve been getting feedback from We’ve done some rule changes after comments from play-testers and we’ve just received the first version of the Swedish rules from the printer, we can now start to send the first boxes to Swedish reviewers and content creators.

Bushido Duels has been ticking away. People at conventions still seem to enjoy the game which in my opinion is the most important measurement. Sales have also been ticking along slowly but steadily. We are now featured on the shelf of a large share of the stores here in Sweden.

And much more…

We contributed prizes to the Helpful Pixels charity stream for the Tim Bergling Foundation, we had a booth at the Nördarnas Julmarknad market, learned blender (to some extent) and much more!

/Åke

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Perilous Pond Preview Edition

As part of the Preparations for the upcoming Crowdfunding campaign we’re starting to assemble the Preview copies of Perilous Pond.

The more complicated components like card decks and game box are all designed and has arrived. The standard meeples we’re using has arrived and we have enough of the custom pike meeple for 10 games. The current issue is the crystal gems we’re using as fireflies. We have received plenty of the red, white and blue ones but the dark yellow ones were out of stock at spielematerial.de. We’ve ordered some yellow ones from The Game Crafter but we’re not sure if they are the same hue.

The big pile of game components

Hopefully this preview edition will be much closer to the final result than the Bushido Duels preview edition. We’ve learned a lot* about designing the various things that make a game a game…

My favorite thing is, the box size matches Bushido Duels almost exactly so the games makes an excellent pair.

Let’s briefly cover the elephant in the room…I haven’t mentioned the rule-book yet, and yeah…That’s still a bit away. We’ve worked through the book in Swedish and are getting quite close to having all needed graphics and text. There are still rough patches that needs to be ironed out and after that we’ll translate into English**.

So to summarize, we’re close to having all components for the preview editions of Perilous Pond. Rules are also coming along nicely but will likely be the last piece of the puzzle.

* By “a lot” we mean “a little”

** Should be quick… Right?

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Kickstarter preparations for Perilous Pond

To help with the (hopefully) upcoming Kickstarter campaign I started messing about with 3d-rendering using Blender.

The game box rendered in Blender

These images show the progress so far. A decent representation of the game components along with the box. We will hopefully be able to use these scenes / models on the back of the box, on some promo-material and in an eventual Kickstarter campaign for the game.

A game in progress.

The hardest part has been to get the look of the firefly crystals right, I’m still not 100% satisfied but I think it’s good enough for use on the back of the preview edition. Cards, dice and meeples were surprisingly easy to get into decent shape.

The intended use of the rendering above is to use on the back of the prototype box we’re producing for preview copies.

Another nice thing is that we’ve been able to try out different options for the dices. Producing three dimensional images really helps bring a choice to life.

We’re really partial towards the black ones.


Working with this has been sort of relaxing. Sitting down an hour or two at a time and just working through a scene or trying different shaders…