The Game Design Round Table

Anya, Director of Games for Kickstarter, joins Dirk and David to talk about how the crowdfunding platform works with creatives in the games industry. The three discuss why games, and especially tabletop games, have thrived on the platform and how to make sure a Kickstarter campaign has the best chance of working for your game. Topics covered include game-adjacent products, changes in Kickstarter over the years, community building, and discoverability on the platform.

Banana Chan joins Dirk and David to talk about her experience in multiple areas of game design, and how thematic games can be made in each medium. First, Banana discusses live action roleplaying (LARP) design at length, providing tips for a thematic design and explaining how monetization might work as a LARP designer. Next, the trio talks about tabletop roleplaying games and specifically on how to pick the right system and mechanics for a theme.

Kathryn joins Dirk and David for a round table discussion based on recent shows. Dirk and David get Kathryn’s perspective on card games and how they help her create story-based games. Then discussion moves to market trends and demographics for cooperative games. Next the trio talks about unused game concepts, inspired by the interview with Will Thompson. All three hosts have a conversation on past projects that are “the ones that got away,” using the episode with Jesse Howard as a starting point.

Will returns to the show with Dirk and David to discuss his game Winter Rabbit, a finalist for the Zenobia Award. A contest for designers from underrepresented groups in the hobby, the Zenobia Award pairs promising applicants with mentors and awards winners with a cash prize and help with publication. Will, a member of the Cherokee Nation, talks about how Winter Rabbit was designed from the start to incorporate indigenous themes.

Soren returns to the show with Dirk and David for the third and final episode in this mini-series on his game Old World. They talk about the reception for Old World now that it’s been released, the narrative elements of the event system that became important to the design, and how other systems were finalized through feedback from a lengthy early access period.

MJ Newman joins Dirk and David to discuss co-op card games and her work on the Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror LCGs published by Fantasy Flight Games. They talk about how these co-op games are designed compared to a competitive collectable card game, and how MJ’s love for narrative led to a stronger RPG-like aspect to the games she worked on. Finally, the game discusses some of the considerations when designing a Lovecraftian game.

Jesse Howard, one of the first guests on the Round Table podcast, returns after several years to chat with Dirk and David. He talks about the long journey of his game Hype Tag, originally called Ploy in his first appearance on the show. Jesse discusses his design process, which generally starts with a system or structure that he wants to mimic mechanically.

Andrew Navaro, a card game veteran from Fantasy Flight Games and now his new studio Earthborne Games, joins Dirk and David to talk about card games. The bulk of the discussion focuses on his time working with the wide variety of LCGs produced by Fantasy Flight. Topics include discussions on production timelines, what makes LCGs different from the similar CCGs, and set design. The conversation wraps up with Andrew talking about the design and inspirations for his new card game Earthborne Rangers.

Skye joins Dirk and David to draw the starting hand for a deep dive into card games! With some card game experts on deck for future interviews, the trio take this episode as a chance to explore the various reasons why card games work so well as a game component. Discussions cover the various card games all three designers have worked on, and also bleed into popular games from Dominion to Magic the Gathering and digital games like Slay the Spire and Griftlands.

Cole Medeiros joins Dirk and David to discuss his work on the board game adaptation of the popular Stardew Valley video game. The discussion covers thematic game design in general—how Cole approaches theme-first design, how mobile game design utilizes theme, and how a specific IP as a thematic setting can create both challenges and signposts for a designer. Several specific design challenges and iterations are covered as Cole talks about the development process for Stardew Valley: The Board Game.

To start the episode, Skye rejoins Dirk and David to finish off their deep dive into the MOBA genre. They talk about what they learned for their personal design work, as well as what they learned for improving future genre deep dives. The next series of episodes to get the Genre Deep Dive treatment will be all about collectible and living card games.

Kathryn Hymes joins Dirk and David to answer listener questions from our Discord channel. Questions range from practical designer concerns like pitching digital games and community building to more philosophical questions on topics like emergent gameplay and novelty vs structure.

Show producer Skye Larsen joins Dirk and David to talk about his first published design, Paperback Adventures. Topics include the balancing act that comes with mashing genres together, the path that led to Skye’s debut design, and the collaborative nature of the project. The discussion also covers some nitty gritty design topics, from the card-splaying mechanic to some of the inherent strengths and limitations for a solo board game.

Kathryn rejoins Dirk and David for another round table episode. After catching each other up on their current projects, the trio revisits four past episodes to discuss them further.

Brian “FeralPony” Feeney joins Dirk and David to talk about the new mobile MOBA game from Riot Games, League of Legends: Wild Rift. The discussion covers how the mobile format did and did not impact the gameplay for Wild Rift, and what the current audience for the game is like. The group chats about how even small changes like enemy spawn times can impact player decision making and game health.

Nicole Cutler joins Dirk and David to discuss her roles in operations and production in the tabletop industry. They discuss some of the production choices made when developing Gods Love Dinosaurs from Pandasaurus Games. Nicole shares insights into how the small teams common in the industry often end up with many of the production, operations, and project management roles blurring together.

Firaxis designer David McDonough joins the show to talk strategy game design with Dirk and David. Topics in their discussion include: player stories vs game stories, the spectrum between full sandbox games and historical simulations, and how immersion in player stories can be encouraged. Along the way many games are covered, including both the Civilization series and the XCOM series.

Alisha Thayer, a designer who has worked on AAA video games like Red Dead Redemption and Rise of the Tomb Raider, joins Dirk and David to talk game systems. They discuss both the strengths and limitations of designing games that allow multiple systems to interact with each other and create novel experiences. By walking through the different games she’s worked on in her career, Alisha explains how she learned why exceptions to procedural game systems can enhance the player experience.

Dirk, David, and show producer Skye team up to tackle the third episode in our deep dive into the MOBA genre. This time the group discusses an aspect that’s fairly unique to the genre: its constant changes. Topics include why MOBAs have such huge casts of playable characters, a digression into the QWER four-ability mechanic, how the cadence of changes can affect their impact and reception, and how character updates are handled in some of the genre’s top games.

Kathryn joins Dirk and David to answer some more listener questions. Discussion includes a deep dive into the role of complexity in design: where it makes sense and where it detracts from the product. In a similar vein, the hosts talk about “stout” games that are both heavy in decision making but short in duration. Other topics include the RTS genre, the idea of experience-focused design, and the favorite episodes of Kathryn, Dirk, and David.