01 | Overview
Creating a fish market
You are a fish with dreams. Upstream is a hybrid board-and-app game where players, as fish with entrepreneurial dreams, apprentice at shops in a bustling underwater market to earn the tokens they need to open their own. But there's a catch: only one fish can win. The board expands as you play, the shops you need are hidden in a secret prompt, and rival players are racing you to check out the last store front available at the fish market
Built over ten weeks for Stanford's CS247G (Design for Play), Upstream started from a broad prompt — "design of play spaces" — and evolved through eight full playtests into a polished MVP pairing modular laser-cut boards, CAD sculpted fish pieces, and twelve custom-built digital minigames.
Role
Game Designer
Frontend Developer
Backend Developer
Sole Physical Fabricator
Timeline
10 weeks
Tools
Figma, Fusion360, Nomad Sculpt, laser cutter, 3D printer, React Native, Supabase
Skills
Product Management,
Strategy, Communication
02| TL;DR
The Challenge
Context
The prompt was open-ended: design a game that toys with the concept of space.
Gap
Narrative games lacked tactile grounding. Escape rooms lacked replayability.
We wanted a physical game where every session felt new — where players built the world as they played.
Goals
Evoke delight, strategy, and friendly competition
Make every session feel different
Balance challenge with accessibility
Polish
The Solution
A hybrid board game with an expandable grid, secret prompts, and themed digital minigames. Players draw a secret market prompt and must apprentice at three shops connected to it — racing to check out before anyone else cracks their prompt. The board itself grows as players explore, with new tiles placed whenever someone reaches an edge. Each shop triggers a custom minigame on the companion app, themed to that shopkeeper's personality.
Expand the board — place new grid tiles as you hit the borders, reshaping the map in real time
Apprentice at shops — play themed minigames to earn tokens toward your prompt
Race to check out — deduce which shops you need, block your rivals, and get home first
03| Our Process
Overview
Ideate
Diverge → converge brainstorming
Narrative, mechanics, and spatial layouts explored in parallel
Landed on fish market + expandable board
Research
Studied Lasers and Feelings, Clue, Wordle, Club: Paradox
Readings: What is a Puzzle?, Designing the Puzzle, Alan Cheng on randomness
Defined emotional north star: delight, strategy, competition
Prototype
Paper grids → themed cardstock tiles → laser-cut boards
Mobile app built shop by shop
3D-sculpted player pieces
Iterate
8 playtests, 7 full iterations
Sessions with close, medium, and loose ties
Rules, minigames, and movement rewritten repeatedly