Blue Prince is a "true hybrid" of video and boardgame genius – the fact that it's an award-winning roguelike was never part of the plan: "Things spiraled way out of control"

Blue Prince is many things – roguelike, narrative adventure, puzzle game, walking simulator – all at once. Luckily, creator Tonda Ros can sum it up neatly. "The surface level is definitely a boardgame," he says. "It's like walking through your own boardgame."

Unsurprisingly, that's where its heart truly lies – and Ros' own, for that matter. "Most of my inspirations come from the board game world and the card game world, you know, games like Magic and Netrunner." Rummage through his personal favorite boardgames, as well as those he draws inspiration from, and you'll find that drafting plays a huge role in many of them.

"It's my favorite mechanic," Ros says. "When I started Blue Prince, what I was kind of preaching and professing as my favorite mechanic was the pick-three from board games." He uses Paper Mario's triple-choice leveling up process as an example of the pick-three system that initially inspired him. "Now it's so ubiquitous that it's more interesting to do other stuff." Enter: drafting.

Square one

Blue Prince's drafting system functions by way of crafting a literal blueprint for a house, with each new day signifying a blank slate upon which to draft new floorplans as you solve puzzles and build your way to the central chamber. But for a game many of us consider one of the most unique and best roguelikes of all time, Ros insists it never had the genre in mind in the first place.

"There's zero deckbuilder, roguelike influence on the core design," he says, with Blue Prince primarily governed by a "boardgame goal" above all else. "I remember when Slay the Spire came out, and I remember them being inspired by [boardgames like] Dominion and Ascension, and thinking, 'that is exactly what I'm inspired by'. The deck building, single session board games or card games," he continues, joking about how Slay the Spire beat him to the punch by "many years".

It all goes hand-in-hand, though. "I am thrilled to see the space between board game design and video games overlap, because I don't think everyone's caught on to it, but it just gives such rich and crunchy design to video games."

That boardgame ethos is baked into the movement currency of Blue Prince. Husbanding our daily quota of steps, Blue Prince asks us to make our way to the central chamber – the elusive Room 46 – while drafting new rooms and solving puzzles along the way. "Room 46 was actually in a different location in the first prototype of the game," Ros says of Blue Prince's initial build.

"One of the craziest things about this project is that we had a working build of the entire game in the first six months, and now that always blows my mind," he says of the "false sense of ease" it engendered about the timeline expectations of game development. "But of course, things spiraled way out of control."

The earlier days of conceptualizing were scattershot ones, recalls Ros. "I had a file of rooms. And by 'a file', I had a single paper on a notebook that just had sort of sketched out room ideas that I then converted to a digital Photoshop image.

"I don't think I really ever thought of it as digital or physical," admits Ros. Instead, his thoughts occupied a "hybrid space," a theoretical bridge between physical and digital editions of some of his favorite board games. But he knew one thing for sure: Blue Prince had to be first-person.

There was little reason behind that decision other than practical necessity. "A first person game is the only one you don't need a character model [for]. So I was like, 'this is easy.' The time that would have been saved by being 2D was probably immediately lost as soon as we hit the modeling stage, but for that first week, it was a big leg up, not having to do character animation."

Check, mate

Despite being the primary "ideas guy" behind Blue Prince, Ros shies away from calling himself a solodev.

He perceives two kinds of solo game developers: "sole vision-holders, which is a lot more like what I am, and then there's people like [Stardew Valley creator] ConcernedApe, who actually do do it all," Ros posits. "It's more that I'm doing a lot of it, and then I had an art director for two years helping me make 3D models [for example]. So whenever I see [myself referred to as a] "solo developer", I feel like it takes away some credit from other people that worked on it."

Ros might have had extra hands on board over the years, lending their technical prowess to give Blue Prince some professional sparkle, but he stops just short of calling it a collaborative effort.

"I don't think I'm the best to collaborate with," he laughs. "I'll just admit it: at least on Blue Prince, maybe because of how strongly I saw the vision, it was a lot more like, 'this is exactly how I'd like to have it done.' And then I got people that were talented enough to actually get it [looking] exactly the way it was in my mind."

But even with a psychic team of tech wizards in his corner, it sounds like building a hybrid entity like Blue Prince was not all floorplans and rainbows for Ros and company. "You just have a lot more creative freedom, which is not always a blessing," he says of the biggest difference between iterating a video versus boardgame of this magnitude, at least as far as baked-in puzzles and emergent secrets are concerned.

He likens the freedom of the digital medium to a "very, very, very long leash" with which to explore the bounds of where a puzzle or mechanic can go – but a long leash makes it awfully easy to strangle oneself, too. "I think the restrictions of a board reel in the scope of those ideas. But I like coming up with something and being able to implement it, even if it's going to take a year to do."

After such a lengthy development journey with many, many permutations of Blue Prince between, Ros still can't quite believe how quickly his ode to board and video games took off. The Game Awards 2025 saw it nominated for two categories – best independent game and best indie game – while Blue Prince was one of GamesRadar+'s forerunners for Game of the Year 2025.

"I honestly thought this game was really niche," Ros says of its lightning-in-a-bottle virality that saw it become one of the best Xbox Game Pass games of the year. "I was like, I don't even know if puzzle fans or board game fans are going to love this because of the injection of the other elements. It's a pure hybrid between the two. So I really thought this was going to be niche of niche."

That risk seems to have paid off. Blue Prince is a rare kind of niche. It's unique and specific enough to be an acquired taste, but has just the right sprinkle of familiarity to make it more widely palatable. Not just palatable; straight up moreish. The rest, as they say, is history – or in this case, a history that's yours to draft.

Blue Prince is one of GamesRadar+'s best games of 2025 for a reason. See where it ranks among the year's heaviest hitters!