Tenby: he drew every card and composed the soundtrack

Benjie Talbott is a composer. Piano and violin since he was five, then fifteen years writing music for film and television — a job where he builds entire orchestras from virtual instruments, fooling the ear. But he approached games from another angle: he had been designing them for years, on his own, as a hobby. The problem was, he never finished one. He felt — in his words — like a boat on a river, carried by the current, with half a dozen ideas open at once and none ever reaching completion.

Tenby is the seaside town in Wales where his mother used to take him and his brother as children. She passed away a few years ago, and it’s also one of the special places for him and his partner today: a place that connects two times, his childhood with her and his present life. It was his partner who told him to stop chasing everything and focus on just one idea. He chose this one. The drafting system came right after, and everything grew from there.

To publish it, he founded his own publishing house, Cosy Cub Games, in 2022 — with the stated idea of making games about community and kindness rather than conflict. Tenby is his first release, but not a stroke of luck: before printing, he did two rounds of prototypes, ten copies at a time, sent to reviewers to tear apart. The design is his, the illustrations — every single card — are his. And there's a third signature of his, which I'll save for the end.

Each round, you choose a card that gives you your actions. But the more enticing those actions are, the later you end up in the turn order of the next round. It’s a small pact you make with yourself every time: take a lot now and pay for it later, or give up something to go first next time. There’s never an obvious choice, and this tension never lets up throughout the game.

Then there's the true core: feature matching. A card is worthless by itself — it's worth something for what's next to it. A seagull, a cloud, a door, a wave: the score comes from the combinations. So you're not looking for the strongest card, you're looking for the right card for that spot, and you find yourself staring at the details of the drawing as if it were a small puzzle. That those details were drawn by the same person who designed the game is no coincidence: here, the illustration is the mechanic.

There's an honest roughness, and it's worth mentioning: the rulebooks. You can teach Tenby to a child in five minutes — a Meeple Mountain reviewer did it with his own son — yet the rules are scattered across multiple booklets, much denser than necessary. It's an editing problem, not a design problem: the underlying game remains simple and clean. Once learned, a game flies by.

In the box, on a small sheet of paper, there’s a QR code. Scan it and an album starts playing: TENBY (Original Game Soundtrack), eleven tracks, about forty minutes. Not a playlist put together with other people's songs — an original soundtrack, written by Talbott. One reviewer described it as a Japanese video game soundscape; his son, after hearing four bars, said it sounded like the music from a game he has on his Switch.

And here’s what struck me the most. A man who spent fifteen years setting other people’s stories to music, for film and TV, eventually set his own city to music. Among the tracks, there’s one titled Welcome to Tenby — in Welsh, Croeso i Ddinbych-y-Pysgod: it welcomes you to the place before you've even drawn a card. These are eleven tracks you can listen to right now, even without the game.

This is the enduring legacy of Tenby. Not the score, not who won: the music, which keeps playing when the cards are already put away. You put the city away and carry it in your ears — and because that city holds his mother and his present, what he has made public is something very private. And what's more, you can press play.

Track

A soundtrack as a dedication A professional composer wrote eleven original tracks for the game about his own city — and placed them behind a QR code, inside the box. The mark Tenby leaves isn't an image in your head: it's a real record, that exists and can be listened to. It's a memorial disguised as a board game. Childhood, his mother, the sea: all transformed into something that others can build — and listen to again. TENBY · Original Game Soundtrack — Benjamin Talbott, 2024 · 11 tracks

Almost all games end when you stop playing. Tenby leaves the radio on for you.