After sketching out the rules I realized I don’t know a thing about protyping a boardgame. I didn’t let it stop me though, and started planning how to distribute the actions across the player’s board:

That night I turned it into this so I could easily print one for each player and modify it whenever necessary, along with a spiral board to track the ship’s situation.

I searched around for tokens and I remembered this game by Dom Quixote called “Mar Largo”. It had some nice colored coin-like pieces that I could use. The blue bead tokens are sold as interior decorating fluff to fill vases and aquariums but they work really well as game tokens. The shields are black thin cardboard and the dice are (very cheap!) warhammer dice I got from ebay.

This is what it looks when it’s all set up. Each player gets a ship and a screen to cover their bids, the resources and crew members are piled up and the spiral at the center of the table is used to track the ship’s state.

It’s ready for its first playtest.

With this I learned that making prototypes is not hard at all.