Fintastic Sea Dev. Diary: How Marine Biology Shaped Our Board Game

Pektis Studio
Nov 27, 2025
3 min read

Designing a board game is far more than writing rules—it’s about creating a living system that feels intuitive, immersive, and meaningful. In this first Design Diary, we take you behind the scenes of how Fintastic Sea was created and how real marine biology directly shaped its mechanics, balance, and player decisions.

Although the game is already finished and available, its development took tons of iteration, testing, stress, redesigns, and discoveries. With this design diary series, we want to share not just the final success—but also the struggles that made it possible.

Why Theme Was Our Top Priority

From the start, we didn’t want Fintastic Sea to be “just another card game with fish artwork.” We wanted every single fish to behave like it would in real life.

That meant:

Studying how fish eat
How they hunt
Where they live
How they move
How they survive predators

This research directly shaped fish abilities and interactions, making the game feel both educational and intuitive.

Real-World Fish That Became Game Mechanics

Here’s how real marine behavior was converted into actual gameplay:

Butterflyfish (4) & Lionfish (7)

Both species naturally live near coral reefs. Their in-game abilities allow players to capture fish adjacent to coral. Since Lionfish are larger predators, they can only target small or medium fish.

Sardine (2)

Sardines move in massive schools. In the game, their power stacks when placed together. One sardine has power 2—but two sardines become power 4.

Shrimp (1)

Shrimp sit at the lowest point of the food chain, but to balance gameplay, they received a powerful ability: they can pull an adjacent fish back into the player’s hand, acting like bait.

“Dory” (6)

Inspired by forgetful memory behavior, this fish interacts with the discard pile, letting players recover cards from the past.

Blowfish (5)

Blowfish inflate when threatened. In the game, this became a board control mechanic that pushes all adjacent fish one space away.

Many of these details never appear in the rulebook—but they shape the soul of the experience.

Reserve vs Ecosystem: A Strategic & Thematic Choice

Every time you catch a fish, you must decide:

Do you use it later for combos?
Or do you commit it to your ecosystem for scoring?

This reflects real-world conservation strategies, where marine biologists must balance:

Immediate research needs
Long-term ecosystem health
Endangered species protection

This is where strategy and theme fully merge.

The Wave Phase: A More Thematic Board Reset

Most card games simply discard and refill the board. We wanted something that felt alive—so we created the Wave Phase.

During the wave:

All fish shift in the wave’s direction
Fish pushed too far from coral are discarded
New fish are then added near the reef

This simulates:

Natural ocean currents
Coral as a food source
The danger of drifting too far from the ecosystem’s core

It also acts as both:

A round tracker
A player-scaling tool
- 2 players → 8 rounds
- 3–4 players → 6 rounds

Even better, the wave concept came directly from community feedback during a demo.

Why We Share Our Design Process

We didn’t want to only show you the finished product. We wanted to show the hard decisions, the broken prototypes, the difficult balancing acts, and the joy that comes from solving problems that sometimes feel impossible. Game design is messy—but that messiness is exactly what makes the process so exciting, creative, and deeply rewarding.

Here is a video version of this blog post:

https://youtu.be/GkmUbA2MhGg