It started on my drive to work. I passed a cop sitting on the side of the road, and the words "speed trap" popped into my head. Then the idea hit all at once. If you do any sort of creative work, you know what that inspiration feels like. It's a feeling that you don't ignore.
So I didn't. I sent Isaac an audio message and rambled at him about a card game where you take risks to be the fastest. The catch is that if a speed trap gets you, your progress is badly slowed or stopped completely. Go fast, push your luck, and hope you don't get caught.
Isaac and I went back and forth about it all Thursday. By the end of the day we had a few cards mocked up, a short list of cards, and a simple paragraph explaining how to play. It was rough, but it was real.
The timing was almost too good. That weekend we had an Airbnb booked with about seven other couples for a friend's birthday. So we set a goal: if we worked fast, we could get a playable prototype ready in the next 12 hours and bring it along to playtest all weekend.
That night we wrote down every card and every action. We used AI to make some quick images so the cards would feel approachable for casual gamers, not just a sheet of text. Then we sent the whole thing to FedEx to print on heavy cardstock.
Friday morning my wife picked up the prints and cut out the cards. One problem: they were way too flimsy to shuffle or hold up to a real game. So on the way to the Airbnb we stopped at a board game store and bought a cheap deck of poker cards and a pack of sleeves. We put a poker card in each sleeve with a prototype card in front of it. That gave us a sturdy, shuffleable deck of roughly 100 cards. Not pretty, but it worked.
We played the first game that night. We'd designed Speed Trap for two to four players. We played with six.
I'll be honest, that first game was nerve-wracking. We'd changed some of the rules on the drive up, so even we weren't sure how it would play. But by the second turn everyone was hooked. People were cheering, goading each other into drawing one more card, and getting way more animated than you usually see in a casual game. Everyone at the table was invested.
It was an immediate hit. Friends who had been watching from the sidelines wanted in. Before long we were running eight-player games, more than one of them, and all weekend we played versions with anywhere from three to eight players.
One moment from that weekend sums up Speed Trap for me. One player had drawn twelve risky cards and was flying. Then someone played Road Rage on them, which forced them to draw two more. Their next flip was a Speed Trap. The whole table erupted, roaring and jeering, and because of a Construction Zone played on them earlier, that player who was about to win was fully out of the game.
That's the feeling we want Speed Trap to create: a whole table on the edge of their seats over a single card flip.
Something else surprised me. Speed Trap was fun for the strategy gamers in the group, and it was just as fun for the people who don't usually play board games. A few of the wives who don't normally get into board games played, and they used the card abilities to be absolutely menacing to everyone else. Watching that was some of the most fun I had all weekend. It told me Speed Trap could work for serious gamers and for families too.
That first night was only the beginning. We kept playing all weekend, and those later games taught us a lot.
We had great moments where we had games where people raced to get a hundred, and multiple players were close to the finish line. But then we also had games where someone won by being the last man standing. Having this good blend of multiple different end conditions and having them all be achievable on our very first draft was another huge confirmation of this game's playability.
We're so excited to share Speed Trap with the world. join our email list to stay in touch, and you'll be the first to hear when our Kickstarter launches in June 2027.