Description:

Join us for a discussion on the craft of tabletop game design, featuring a panel of local board and card game designers. What does it take to make a tabletop game and take it to market? We’ll discuss tools and techniques for developing your own tabletop games, as well as the states of both the industry at large and the local community for tabletop game design.

Panelists’ Bio:

Rachel Reilly began game design as a hobby in her teenage years. In college, she slowly built a repertoire of game concepts and designs while studying to get her Bachelors of the Arts in Sociology. Through many years she has refined her game design methodology and style. She likes to use theme to hash out new and intuitive game mechanics in each of her games! Her first published game, Flipology, will be available in Winter 2019!

TauCeti Deichmann designed his first board game when he was five (and it was as bad as you’d expect). Since then, he’s experimented with extreme asymmetry and bizarre systems while building numerous tabletop games for his friends. He’s a regular at the local Spielbany playtesting group and friends with a few of the bigger names in the industry. Tau’s first published game, Sidereal Confluence, was released in 2017 and is doing very well for itself (Game of the Year at No Pun Included, currently on the top 100 list at Reddit, and ranked 581 on BGG). Tau knows numerous tricks for quickly handcrafting professional looking games, plus some rules-of-thumb for getting playtesting teams together and balancing the impossible.

Peter McPherson is a freelance writer and board game designer. His first published game is Tiny Towns.

Moderator’s Bio:

Brian Shurtleff is a game designer for 1st Playable Productions, taught board game design as an adjunct at RPI, and is the designer and co-developer of the card game #DoodleFail.