Forever Soup

A quick-to-play co-op perpetual game based on perpetual stew.

Awards

Tools Used:

+ Rapid Prototyping + Excel

+ InDesign

Golden HAM - Best in Show at FUSE 2024

Nominated for Best Family Game at BostonFIG 2025

Nominated for Best Theme at BostonFIG 2025

Team Lead

Producer

Lead Designer

Card Game

2 Years

What Is It?

Forever Soup is a co-op perpetual card game where you and up to 3 others add ingredients to a pot of soup and feed the village folk before you run out of ingredients in your pantry. It started as a catapult project for Bradley University's FUSE showcase. Of the 16 catapult games pitched, it was one of the 10 that were chosen to go into production. In its 27th iteration the game won the Golden HAM award for best in show at Bradley University's FUSE showcase.

We've since taken the Forever Soup to the digital and in person Boston Fig 2024 events. In its 32nd iteration Forever Soup was one of 3 games nominated for Best Family Game and Best Theme at Boston Fig.

Forever Soup's 34th iteration was play tested in the First Exposure Playtest Hall at Gen Con in 2025. Our team is working hard to improve Forever Soup as a home game experience. We hope to publish a final version in the next year.

What Is My Role?

I was chosen by my professors to lead a FUSE catapult team. Our department of 300+ students is split into 16 teams and given a few weeks to pitch an exhibit for FUSE. As team lead, I act both as the lead game designer and a producer.

My responsibilities include:

Roadmapping
Running daily stand-ups
Checking in with all disciplines
Communicating with Professors
Creating new iterations
Maintaining a version history log
Playtesting
Giving feedback
Laying out cards in InDesign
Creating rules documents and videos
Teaching the game
Taking the game to conventions

Since FUSE we've turned this class project into a passion project. I've created Nonstick Studios LLC to obtain the rights to this project for my team. I've continued to submit this project to compeitions and take it to conventions. I'm working towards publishing Forever Soup in the next year.

Development

Version 1 of this game was a team vs team game where 2 rats and 2 chefs add positive and negative value cards to a pot.

Forever Soup has evolved through its 34 versions to become a game centered on community and working together. It's become a quick and calm strategy game.

Throughout the development cycle, I maintained spreadsheet of all the card data to ensure that the game was mathmatecilly balanced.

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To ensure our gameplay stayed simple our paper prototypes were paper with yellow, magenta, and blue lines on them.

My mindset for a simple game like this is if the solution to your problem requires adding more moving pieces, look for a different solution.

I've iterated on designs for storing the game after game play. As a perpetual game, as long as your group has won their game, you keep the board in the state it's in and continue playing off the contents of the last game's soup. As such we needed to create a way for players to reset their next game. I prototyped 3 versions of a box using slots to separate and label which cards were which. However, I found that it is much simplier to use seperator cards in a smaller deck box to achieve the same goal.

In order to share our game with people online, I've created a version of the game.

Screentop

I've taken Forever Soup to BostonFIG 2024 online and in person as well as GenCon 2025. With every convention our email list of people interested in the game grows. Check us out at our next convention!

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