Made by one person who couldn't stop making games.
I'm Alex — the guy who brings the games to every gathering. Playproof started as my own private frustration, and slowly became the tool I wish I'd had the whole time. Here's how it happened.
It started at a table
I grew up in a family where holidays meant heading up to the attic with all the cousins and the cool aunts and uncles, and playing board games for hours — learning a new one, then another, then another. That pull toward games never let go. Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments with my friends. Magic: The Gathering later on — I grinded Arena from Bronze all the way to Mythic. By adulthood, I was always the one who brought the games. Eventually I got restless with the same boxes, the store ran dry, and I thought: what if I just made my own?
The hard way. Then the harder way.
My first prototype was index cards and a pen. Then I switched to pencil, just so I didn't have to remake a card from scratch every time I tweaked a rule. Eventually I figured: I do technical support for a living, I know how to code — I can make this programmatic. So I taught myself a new language and built a little tool that could generate cards, and I used it to iterate on the game itself, playtesting draft after draft at home until my printer was drained dry and every sheet came out wet.
Once the game actually held together, I moved into professional design software, built a polished final deck, and had it printed — once, properly, on real matte coated playing cards. It looked incredible. But it had taken months, and behind it was a mess: a code editor for the scripts, a spreadsheet for the card data, a notes app for rules and playtest notes, folder after folder of exports just to keep it all straight.
"It was fun to figure out. It just wasn't fun to use."
Why I stopped — and came back
So I didn't make another game for years. The process had been exhausting enough that "I have a game idea" stopped feeling like fun and started feeling like homework. Then the itch came back — I wanted to build something again — and it slowly turned into a different itch entirely: making sure that inventing a game never had to be the worst part of inventing a game again. That's the whole reason Playproof exists. Not a business plan. A grudge against my own workflow.
What I wanted it to be
Beautiful, on purpose
Design is a feature. I wanted something you actually want to sit inside — nature-inspired, dark or light, quietly alive. I still catch myself watching it breathe like a screensaver.
Accessible by default
Years on support taught me this: the best software in the world is junk if nobody can figure out how to use it. Intuitive isn't a nice-to-have here — it's the point.
Yours, and offline
Your games are yours — not a server's. Playproof works with no internet, on purpose. Good ideas don't wait for wifi, and plane wifi is terrible anyway.
A lot of the small stuff comes straight from using it myself. I once ended up with a dozen decks all named the same thing while testing import and export — which is exactly why every deck now carries a version number and a unique ID. I'm the app's first and most annoyed user.
Cards are just the start.
Building my own game in Playproof, I reached for a die — and then a board — and realized the whole tabletop deserves the same treatment. So next up are dedicated designers for boards, tokens, and dice, so a full game can come together in one place. Beyond that: clean export paths into professional design tools for anyone who wants an artist's touch, and digital playtesting so an idea can be tested before a single card is printed. And the biggest step of all is already underway — Playproof is being rebuilt as a true native app for Mac and iPad.
The difference between a good game and one that doesn't exist is just following through on the idea.
That's what I'm building a tool for. The native Mac & iPad app is on the way.