SwiftSmash Saga is a collection of simple party board games. They are all completely unique experiences, with their own design and rules, but they have one core mechanic in common: “Turns are simultaneous, and you want to react fast and tap the right card first.”

For example, the Saga started with Cookie Smasher. In that game,

Everyone simultaneously reveals a food card from their hand.
Each card has a different rule about when they are “poisoned”. (For example, “I am poisoned if there’s a fruit next to me.”)
The first player to smash the most poisoned card, wins that round!

Games are fast, because nobody ever waits for their turn. They support large groups, have very simple rules, and involve physical movement. In other words, they’re ideal for parties or playing with young kids who can’t sit still.

This worked so well that I quickly had a dozen ideas for such games. Which is why I turned it into a series that receives a few new entries each year.

What’s special?

I think this collection could also just be titled “all the simplest games Tiamo ever made”.

At first, it was hard to keep it simple. Because simultaneous turns has the huge disadvantage of losing a clear turn order, which 99% of games rely on to work. I had to think out of the box and try some new approaches to find out how to deal with that. Each different game in the series is basically the end result of another “what if we solve the Simultaneous Problem in THAT way instead?”

After finishing a handful of them—which is when I wrote this text here—I was able to simplify them all to just their core. Many entries are easily simple enough to be played at a party or with a large group. I think you could combine the rulebooks on them all and still get a shorter rulebook than a typical board game ;)

I learned a lot from that simplification process and subsequently applied many of those tricks to later designs. In fact, I hadn’t even intended to create this series so soon, but the games were so promising that I forced the deadline into 2025 anyway.

July 26, 2025 professional own project