Treat, Please! Design Blog: From Deck Building to Hand Building

When I first started working on Treat, Please!, I wanted to create a highly accessible deck building game with an inviting theme of being a silly, spoiled dog. I really enjoyed playing deck building games, but I knew how intimidating they were for me at first and that a lot of my friends and family felt similarly. My goal was to make a game that introduced deck building as a mechanic and captured all of the strategy but under the guise of a cute, light-hearted dog game where you “learn” new dog behaviors to grow your deck.

Very early on in the process, I started changing things up and sending the game in a different direction. I was playing a lot of Gloomhaven that summer, and I absolutely loved how the game makes you determine the optimal time to play specific cards from your hand while having the option to get your cards back by resting. I thought it would be fun to implement a similar rest mechanic in Treat, Please!, where dogs can choose to “Take a Nap” to get their behavior cards back from their discard pile, rather than having to wait until they’ve fully cycled through their deck. At that point, I decided to eliminate the deck element of the game entirely, leaving players with just their growing hand of behavior cards and their discard pile.

This change also allowed me to focus on making each behavior card unique, since I could reduce the total number of cards needed and eliminate duplicates. Each time you flip a new behavior card into the market, it’s a fun surprise you haven’t seen yet during the game!

I didn’t really know how to describe the game for awhile…how can you have a deck building game without each player having a deck? Eventually, a playtester described the game as “hand building” – a mechanic I had never heard of before and that I fully embraced from that point forward!

Stay tuned for more Treat, Please! design stories! Follow the project with the button below! — Courney Shernan