The recipes might be an expansion or addition but the goal is to make them to silly but sort of real.

Here's the sell sheet for the current version of the game. I've changed scoring too! Now instead of randomly valued foods, you're trying to collect sets of food types (Meats, Cheeses, Fruits, and Veggies). For now, you just get more points for more of the same but I'm working on Trashy Recipes too!

January Events to try out One Man's Trash:

Protospiel Online: Jan 16-18
Protospiel MN: Jan 23-25
2D Con Unplugged: Jan 30-Feb 1st

I will have the most up to date version of the game at each event!

A snippet of the card anatomy from the One Man's Trash Rulebook.

Digital (Screentop) version of the play space for One Man's Trash.

A skip to the present:

I will use this account to share updates for new art assets and changes to the game. Below is an example of the current card anatomy and a digital version of the board.

With the backs, we also needed to identify the resources. Felipe put together the icons (and the main art of course!) and I worked on designing the card layout and distributions. Through several iterations both for readability and positioning, we came up our most up-to-date layout.

The Junkyard in One Man's Trash has three sections that get more dangerous and more rewarding. I wanted to be sure we had a way to easily distinguish those sections at a glance. Felipe started with a design for the back of the cards, then we incorporated the Sections onto the hanging sheets!

Here's some more sketches from Felipe as he worked through the process of developing the Hidey-Hole. At first it was a Ditch tile that slowed down the raccoons, then it became a safe haven, they could use to hide from the Human!

With a lot of the gameplay changes made, and the initial batch of tiles completed by Felipe, it was time to put together a rule-book. This helped me to keep track of changes I made as much (if not more!) than it helped people to learn the game.

June 2025:

With the two nearly back-to-back events, I had a lot of changes I wanted to make and I had more art from Felipe to make the game look even better. Next, I worked on changes to the speed of the game, taking it from 3 to 1 round and making it approachable for an 8+ audience.

Over the three days, I was able to test One Man's Trash with a large number of people. Playing other designer's game was also a great opportunity to ask questions and learn more about their design philosophies. On the Saturday of the event, it was non-stop testing with nearly back-to-back games!

Protospiel Twin Cities 2025

tabletop.events/conventions/...

Coming right off of Protospiel Online, I learned of an in-person event taking place in only a couple weeks. I worked to take the feedback I received and make changes to prepare for another chance to showcase the game to the local boardgame community in the Twin Cities, Twin Cities Protospiel!

Sketch of a Dumpster with some color added.

Sketch of a spotlight with some color and shading added.

The Secret Tunnel tile, a sewer grate with water pouring out.

May 2025:

Protospiel Online went well and I made a lot of changes to the game. Gone were any sort of health or stamina tracks and the variation in the tiles continued to increase. With the help of Felipe, I created new tiles that so much Junkyard flavor!

A link to their Bluesky account and their main site:

bsky.app/profile/protospielo.bsky.social (@protospielo.bsky.social)

protospiel.online

Sample art for the trash piles on the card backs.

We spend the next couple months working on our pieces of the game. Once we had some art together and I had a better idea of how I wanted the main gameplay to work, I took One Man's Trash to our first event with some other designers in the board game community, #protospiel-online.

Felipe is from Brazil and, since I don't speak Portuguese, we decided to communicate mostly via Discord and email. Once we got used to this form of communication, Felipe got to work on some sample pieces while I worked on play-testing the game.

March 2025:

I reached out to a few artists on Reddit in some freelance art subreddits and got some samples from each before finding Felipe's page:

www.instagram.com/cherpa.art/

I loved his style and felt that the semi-serious but still fun art style suited One Man's Trash perfectly!

I spend the next month or so testing the game before deciding that, although the gameplay was coming along, I was a bit tired of looking at black & white images. If I were to do it again, it likely should have waited a little longer before taking my next step, but decided to find art next!

The game originally was played over three rounds, and your raccoons had health that they would need to keep track of. Before getting into the weeds with the game, players were knocked out too often and I wanted to change the game so that there was no player elimination and the game was less painful.

Basic setup of the original version of One Man's Trash.

I felt like the idea had formed enough that it was time to start working on One Man's Trash in earnest. The theme came first and the game-play afterward. I started by borrowing assets online and developing a basic game in Tabletop Simulator. All the cards were black and white.

Hello. I'm starting a designer diary here to keep everyone interested up to date with One Man's Trash and any future games from Masked Mammal Studios. Since I am about 9 months into the development process for One Man's Trash, I'm going to use this opportunity to go back to when I started.