Fintastic Sea Dev. Diary: The Hidden Challenge
- Pektis Studio
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
At first glance, Fantastic Sea looks like a simple, compact card game. The box is small. The rules are easy to learn. But what most players never see is how complex the balancing process was behind the scenes.
Many people assume that designing a card game is easier than designing a large board game. In our experience, the opposite is often true. Because card games rely so heavily on probability, timing, and interaction, balancing becomes incredibly delicate. One small change can ripple through the entire system.
In this design diary, we break down the three major balancing systems that made Fintastic Sea one of the most challenging projects we’ve ever worked on.
1. Balancing Theme and Mechanics
The first and most important layer of balancing in Fintastic Sea is between theme and mechanics. From the very beginning, we made a strict design promise to ourselves:
Every fish ability must reflect real marine behavior.
That meant extensive research into:
How fish live
How they hunt
How they move
How they survive
From that research, we created abilities that acted as clean abstractions of real-world behaviors. This wasn’t always easy. Some species don’t have dramatic traits, yet still needed to feel exciting and meaningful when played.
When players see the blowfish pushing other fish away or sardines growing stronger in groups, we want them to instantly feel that the mechanics match reality. That emotional recognition is what makes a thematic game truly immersive.
2. Balancing Ocean Abilities and the Food Chain
The second major balancing challenge is between ocean abilities and the food chain system.
Each turn in Fintastic Sea follows a simple structure:
You play a fish into the ocean.
You activate its ocean ability.
Then the food chain activates, where higher numbers eat lower numbers.
At first, this creates a dangerous imbalance:
Large fish feel overwhelmingly powerful.
Small fish appear weak and ineffective.
To solve this, we ran countless playtests with different player types and strategies. Our final solution introduced a deliberate tradeoff:
Large fish keep their raw eating power but receive weaker ocean abilities.
Small fish, despite limited eating power, gain stronger tactical abilities, such as:
Drawing cards
Swapping hands
Extending turns
Manipulating the ocean state
This created real strategic tension between:
Pure strength
Tactical flexibility
However, every single change forced us back to the drawing board. Each time we adjusted a value, we had to re-check that the updated ability still matched real fish behavior. It became a continuous cycle of testing, research, and refinement.
3. Balancing Ocean Abilities and Reserve Abilities
The third—and most overlooked—layer of balance is between ocean abilities and reserve abilities.
To streamline the game, reserve abilities were designed as stronger reflections of ocean abilities. This encourages players to store fish and build powerful combos later. But this introduced a new issue:Not every ocean ability made sense when amplified.
Some fish already felt strong in the ocean. If their reserve abilities were made even stronger, they became overpowered. Other fish felt weaker in the ocean but became devastating when placed in reserve.
The sardine is the perfect example. On its own, a single sardine often feels underwhelming. But when combined with another sardine, its power spikes dramatically. Even more importantly, its reserve ability allows players to create massive number boosts.
This taught us a crucial lesson:
A card that feels weak in one system can still be extremely powerful in another—and both must be evaluated together.
A True Three-System Balancing Puzzle
In reality, balancing Fintastic Sea wasn’t just one problem. It was a constantly shifting three-system puzzle:
Theme vs. Mechanics
Ocean Abilities vs. Food Chain
Ocean Abilities vs. Reserve Abilities
Adjusting any one of these areas forced us to re-evaluate the other two. It became a continuous feedback loop of:
Research
Playtesting
Tweaking
Rebalancing
And retesting
In practice, we weren’t balancing three systems—we were balancing four major forces at once: numbers, theme, ocean abilities, and reserve abilities.
The Final Result
Balancing Fintastic Sea was, quite honestly, one of the hardest things we’ve ever done as designers. Three of us worked on it for a very long time. There were moments of real frustration. But hearing players say that:
The abilities feel logical
The strategy feels deep
The game feels intuitive
Every decision feels meaningful
…made all of the effort worth it.
Yes, Fintastic Sea is easy to learn. But its strategy, combos, and long-term planning run far deeper than most people expect from a small card game.
Video version of this blogpost here:
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