I didn’t fully realize what I had created until I released it into the wild.
Frontier Gambit Market Hunters is a mint tin game built around a gameplay loop inspired by the extraction shooter video games I love. At its core, it is an Extraction Shooter Board Game, but redesigned for the tabletop.
In classic extraction-style gameplay, players are dropped into a dangerous area, compete to survive, search for valuable loot, fight enemies or rival players, and then attempt to extract with their bounty. I wanted to capture that same tension and decision-making in a compact, highly re-playable board game.
In Frontier Gambit Market Hunters, players take on the role of Market Hunters competing in an alternate, dark-fantasy version of the 18th-century frontier. Each round, hunters must leave the relative safety of town, venture into the wilderness, track dangerous game, and, if they survive, haul their prizes back to town for points toward victory.
Just like in an extraction shooter, survival and resource management are everything. Players must carefully manage provisions, which directly determine how far they can travel on the map. One of the defining features of the game board is that the farther players move away from town, the more dangerous the frontier becomes. Deeper regions hold better opportunities—but also deadlier encounters, stronger creatures, and far greater risk.
Hunters may run into terrifying monsters from the dark woods, or, if luck turns against them, another player who decides that your hard-earned bounty is worth fighting for.
Combat in Frontier Gambit has its own twist. Players hold a limited and highly valuable resource called musket shots. These allow hunters to improve their combat rolls in two different ways: A musket shot can be spent to add directly to a roll, but players can also physically throw the musket shot cube onto their dice in an attempt to change the result. This adds a light dexterity element to combat that creates dramatic moments and memorable table stories, and it’s a mechanic I’ve never seen used quite this way in other tabletop games.
I designed Frontier Gambit Market Hunters to be a tight survival adventure in a truly small package. The entire game fits inside a pocket-sized tin, making it a perfect mint tin game to throw in your bag before heading to a brewery, coffee shop, or game night with friends.
In just a few minutes, you can open the tin and transport your group into a dangerous, fantastical frontier where every decision matters, every hunt is risky, and making it back to town is never guaranteed.
If you’re curious what an Extraction Shooter Board Game looks like in a compact tabletop format, I hope you’ll check out Frontier Gambit Market Hunters and experience the hunt for yourself.