Both of us in Chequered Ink are quite fond of prototyping board games, but we've not really got too far with them. Actually, our first ever project together was one called Rounds - I bought a pack of blank cards, wrote dumb things on them, and drew a rudimentary board on it. In that (also drinking) game, you collected dice. It was... okay, but it wasn't great, the end game was terrible, half the cards were awful, and it would have been a nightmare to either get custom printed without it costing a fortune, or present it in another way other people could play.
That game has lurked in my head for some time, though. And recently it led me to morph the idea a little - instead of making dice a commodity, why not make their rolls one instead? That fixed Rounds' terrible endgame and reduced its complexity. But with Procjam coming up, the idea of replacing Rounds' cards with a board that filled in as you went along clicked. I checked with the jam runners if entries had to be software, and they confirmed it didn't - so I thought it would be novel.
And the rest blossomed from there! I came up with the best way I could think of making a reusable scorecard, and every game component, out of just a handful of pieces of card and some common stationery, me and the other half of Chequered Ink spent a couple of nights testing it, I redid the board and some of the cards after the first to standardise the game's language and make it more generally playable, then built a PDF so other people could download it, make it, and enjoy it themselves too - something Rounds never had (and was worse anyway)! 😄