Fathom Unplugged: Meet the Designer

Paper Fort Games are an independent tabletop game studio based in Nottingham, UK. Their first game Cosmoctopus was released through Kickstarter in 2022, followed by Terraria in 2024. With a passion for accessible games that encourage storytelling, co-operative play, and friendly competition, the team at Paper Fort Games are looking forward to launching their newest game Fathom this summer. We love to meet the brains behind the games, so we were delighted to get the chance to chat to the team further.

In our first interview with Paper Fort Games we talk to Dan Helfer, Game Designer of Fathom

_{Dan Helfer testing an early version of Fathom}

Hey Dan, nice to meet you. We are really looking forward to Fathom coming out! It looks great and we love the concept of deep sea exploration. Shall we take a deep dive into the game - can you tell us a little about what we can expect?

Hi. Thanks for reaching out. Fathom is a medium weight, tile placement game where you play as marine biologists leading competing teams to explore a deep-sea ecosystem. By navigating your ship and submersible, you are able to place and interact with location tiles, each representing a possible species or environmental feature to discover. Different discoveries score in different ways depending on their surroundings. At the end of the game, players will score their unique ecosystems and the player with the most points wins. Fathom is a quick yet satisfyingly strategic game that plays 2-4 players, ages 10+, in about 45 minutes.

There's quite a few people here who have backgrounds in the creative industries. Did you always know that working in the creative industry was something you wanted to do?

I’ve always known I’d be happiest in an industry where I could express my creativity, though figuring out which industry fits me best has been an adventure.

The Chaos Cards team were curious to know if there was a particular game that piqued your interest and made you think "I really want to be a board game designer"?

Fathom is my first game and, although I have been into games, both cardboard and electronic, most of my life, I never considered myself as more than a hobbyist. In fact, Fathom began as a pet project scribbled with my 2 year old’s crayons on a stack of note cards during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

I had just returned from France’s largest game convention, the Festival International des Jeux, in Cannes, super stoked about board games, when everything started shutting down. With no one to play with and in need of a project to fill my time, I began to page through my festival notes and brainstorm how I might improve the games that I’d played. What would have made them more fun? From there it wouldn’t be long until I was sketching out the first version of what would become Fathom. At that time, I just wanted to prove that I could create something playable and never really considered whether or not I wanted to be a “board game designer”.

_{The first prototype}

Where were you when you came up with the idea for this game about the deep sea? Do you find that inspiration can hit at any time, or do you have to sit and really think/research about something before you find an idea?

This is a tricky one. I think there are thousands of themes that would make good board games and find inspiration all over the place. My issue is figuring out how such games would or should play. For this reason, I usually go about designing in the reverse. I start with a mechanic I find inspiring, and then, in exploring that mechanic, look for a theme that can ground the mechanic in something familiar. I believe the good theme should help a player understand how to play the game.

_{Making the prototype digital}

Could you take us through how Fathom started to form as a game, did you have a spark of an idea you built on or did the concept hit you fully formed?

For Fathom, I started with the mechanic of tile placement through exploration. I had recently played Islands in the Mist by Volker Schächtele, and really enjoyed how you discover (somewhat haphazardly) a landscape over the course of the game. For those who haven’t played, you’re a hot-air balloonist blown around an undiscovered continent, drafting and placing different landscape tiles as you go. By the end of the game, you have quite a satisfying map that tells the story of your journey.

Anyway, I began experimenting with this bird's-eye-view, map-discovery mechanic, and what I came to like most was the excitement of not knowing what you might find and the challenge of working with whatever it may be. A real sense of exploring the unknown. I had recently watched two ocean documentaries, My Octopus Teacher (2020) and Last Breath (2018), and decided that the challenge of ocean exploration evoked that same feeling and would be a great thematic match. All in all, it was quite early on that I settled on the theme and principle mechanic for Fathom, but remember I was a first time designer and still leagues away from a polished game.

_{An early version of Fathom}

It has always been interesting to see the timelines from when games are announced through to when they are released, especially with things like Kickstarter where you can get regular updates on how production is going. What has the process been like for Fathom? Was it a long process from that initial idea we spoke about earlier to receiving a finalised version of the game? Did you experience any ‘blips’ in the process?

Wow. Designing Fathom was a long process. As I mentioned, it was my first foray into game design which I began during the Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020 and, honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. I have to credit my eventual success to the guys at Virtual Playtest (VPT). It's a discord server, run by Chris Backe and Ian Brocklebank, that organizes online playtests sessions three times a week. I’d highly recommend it! Their group’s patient feedback helped me cut and refine my ideas until I was ready for live playtests. This would have been around August 2021, a year and a half since the game’s initial conception. And yet it would take another year until the design started to feel polished winning two local festivals in the fall of 2022. Finally, in December 2022, I signed the game over to Paper Fort Games.

_{Cannes 2023}

The guys here would be interested to know how much the finalised version of Fathom matches up with that original idea we spoke about earlier. Did the game go through many evolutions before reaching the end product? Were there any ideas which didn’t make the final cut?

I think the game’s core, tile placement via ocean exploration, lines up with my original vision. What changed the most, when Paper Fort Games started development, was the game’s look and feel. My original design was much darker, focused on exploring the deepest depths of the ocean with an effort to maintain some scientific realism.  The Paper Fort Games team preferred a more whimsical treatment to fit with their other games and came up with the concept of Fathom Island and the legacy of Nautilus Leclerc.

Were there any unexpected hurdles you came across whilst developing Fathom? Did they have any impact on the final game at all?

Not really. I had no idea what to expect! Every step of the way I have learned something new and am a much better designer for it.

We would love to hear what you are most proud about in Fathom? After all the hard work that has gone into thinking of the game and designing it, do you ever sit down and play your own games for fun? (Other than for playtesting!)

I try not to design games I don’t find fun, even when playtesting for the 100th time. The real work is getting to that point. I’m so proud to see Fathom come full circle and it will feel amazing to donate a copy to my local game bar!

^{Early playtests with family and friends}

At Chaos Cards, we often come across games that we really wish we had come up with. Other than Fathom, is there a game out there that you REALLY wish you had designed?

Hmm. This is a tricky one. I like the advice I came across somewhere in my design journey: For every game you make, you’ll have hundreds of other grand ideas. So when you come across a game that's ‘stolen’ your idea, be glad, for that’s one less game you need to make.

Do you have any tips for any budding games designers reading here today? What’s a good piece of advice for them going forward in the industry?

Ideas are cheap. Scribble down some rules, sketch out a prototype, and get playtesting. Oh, and play more games!

_{Playtesting at UKGE}

Thank you so much for your time today. Just one more question! If you could invite anyone throughout history (dead or alive) to play Fathom with you, who would you choose and why?

I’d love to play with Monique and Naveen from Before You Play. They are my favorite content creators and I’d love to see what they think of Fathom.

_{The final look!}

Thank you Dan- it was great to chat! 

Paper Fort Games will be at stand 2-714 at the UK Games Expo this weekend (30/05/2025-1/06/25) so if you're heading up that way make sure to pop by and say hello!

Keep a eye on this page for upcoming interviews with the team at Paper Fort Games. We can't wait to share them with you.