Ferret's Chase

A chase game for 3-5 players, where a lone ferret hunts a group of prey animals through a shifting forest board, and even getting caught doesn't mean you're out of the game.

The problem
Chase games with one hunter and multiple prey have a classic flaw: players who get caught early are eliminated and have nothing to do for the rest of the game. We needed a hunt that stayed tense for the predator, varied for each prey animal, and never truly ended the game for anyone.

The approach
Instead of simply removing eliminated players, we gave them a new role: the Fuoco Fatuo (Will-o'-the-wisp). Once caught, a player doesn't leave the table — they start rolling event and weather dice that reshape the board for everyone still in play. Being eliminated becomes a shift in role, not an exit.

A key decision
We also had to solve a subtler balance problem: how do you make a single powerful hunter feel fair against a group of weaker prey? Rather than giving every prey animal the same movement, we gave each one an asymmetric ability tied to its identity — the rabbit gets a speed bonus hopping between bushes, the rooster can fight back and repel the ferret, the quail turns invisible in mud, the mouse gets faster the closer danger gets. We also reversed the turn order between roles: prey move first and then roll for a bonus, while the ferret rolls first and then moves — giving prey a guaranteed minimum action each turn, while the ferret's whole turn rides on the dice. That asymmetry is what keeps five very different animals equally fun to play.

Outcome
The result is a game where getting caught doesn't mean the game is over for you, and where every animal — hunter included — has a distinct rhythm of risk and reward. Ferret's Chase is currently in active development, and we're looking for a producer to help bring it to release.

My contribution

I was involved from the very first steps, market analysis and brainstorming to figure out what would make our chase game stand out from similar titles already out there.

From there, I designed the core content of the game: the characters, the board tiles, the collectible objects, and the unique abilities tied to each animal or item. Balancing five very different creatures against a single hunter meant a lot of back-and-forth. I ran and iterated on playtests until each character felt equally viable, adjusting movement bonuses, ability triggers, and dice odds whenever one animal turned out too strong or too weak to play.