Episodes

  • Amabel Holland — Games as Political Art, Print-on-Demand Freedoms, and the Architecture of Systems (#113)

    Amabel Holland — Games as Political Art, Print-on-Demand Freedoms, and the Architecture of Systems (#113)
    Oct 22 2026
    About Amabel HollandAmabel Holland is a prolific board game designer, developer, and publisher who, as co-founder of Hollandspiele, has been responsible for over a hundred board games and expansions. Much of her deeply experimental work explores the potential of tabletop games as political art, how rule systems create cultural meaning, and the nature of games as living artifacts. In a profile by The New Yorker, she was cited as “widely considered one of today’s most innovative game designers” a title she remains humble about, but graciously accepts. A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Amabel also creates documentaries exploring uncredited 20th-century designers in her free time. In this episode, we unpack how she built a self-publishing model where “even her flops are successful,” how game mechanics can model real-world systems of oppression, and how her evolving personal journey shifted her design focus from processing pain to crafting pure joy.* Find Amabel on Youtube and Hollandspiele.comAh-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Even My Flops Are Successful: Build a business model that protects your creative freedom instead of trapping you under a mountain of inventory debt. By using print-on-demand for Hollandspiele, Amabel bypasses massive manufacturing and warehouse costs, so even her smallest, weirdest games turn a profit. Once you take away that financial risk, you give yourself total permission to take wild design swings on niche ideas traditional publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.* Pain Makes Good Art, But Not Happy Artists: Channeling personal rage, grief, and societal injustice can yield profound, critically acclaimed masterpieces like This Guilty Land or Doubt Is Our Product. At the same time, marinating in heavy, painful subject matter for years takes a real mental toll on the creator. As Amabel worked through personal grief and found genuine daily happiness, her design work naturally transitioned toward joyful, fun experiences like Dragon Pizza. It’s a good reminder that while pain can fuel powerful art, your long-term happiness and mental health as a human being should always come first.Show Notes“Taking a move in a board game is not as intuitive as moving in a video game. It’s not as immersive as watching a film. And you can use that distance to try to have people think about what the game is representing, think about systems.” (00:09:50)Unlike movies or video games, board games have a built-in superpower: physical distance. Because players have to manually flip through rulebooks and move pieces around, they aren't just zoning out in total immersion. You can use that deliberate friction to get players to pause, look under the hood, and actually think about the real-world systems you’re modeling.“It’s a game presented as a, an alien artifact with a rule book written in a iconographic language that you have to translate, and I will not answer questions about whether you got it right or not.” (00:13:00)Never underestimate how hungry players are for mystery. Amabel assumed City of Six Moons, which is a game with no text and an undeciphered alien rulebook, would only appeal to a tiny niche, but it became her biggest hit. When you take a risk and build something completely uncompromising, players may step up, form communities, and invest deeply to decode your vision.“The margins for print on demand are not are not gonna let you have a full-time living in New York City generally, right?” (00:27:50)High overhead can destroy creative freedom. By keeping her living costs low and operating out of an affordable spot like Detroit, Amabel built a real fortress around her lifestyle. When you strip away huge monthly bills, you never have to sell out your artistic vision or chase generic trends just to keep the lights on.“For me, the worst thing would be a game where you do bad things, and the game wags its finger at you.” (00:51:25)If your game forces a player to inhabit a villain or navigate heavy moral compromises, don’t lecture them through your mechanics. Shaming a player for executing the exact actions your game instructed them to take completely breaks player trust. Use abstract presentation and thoughtful mechanical distance so players can analyze the system objectively rather than feeling cheapened by preachy moralizing.P.S. If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.You can find Think Like a Game Designer on these platforms: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Elizabeth Hargrave — Distilling Wingspan Pocket, AI Ethics in Tabletop, and Building Equity for Designers (#112)

    Elizabeth Hargrave — Distilling Wingspan Pocket, AI Ethics in Tabletop, and Building Equity for Designers (#112)
    Oct 8 2026
    About Elizabeth HargraveElizabeth Hargrave is an award-winning board game designer best known for her runaway smash hit Wingspan, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019 and has sold over two million copies worldwide. Her diverse body of work, including Tussie-Mussie, Mariposas, The Fox Experiment, Undergrove, and Sanibel, explores rich corners of the natural world. Elizabeth recently released Wingspan Pocket, an absolute masterclass in distilling the core of Wingspan into an accessible, 30-minute, small-box game. Beyond design, she is a co-founder of the Tabletop Game Designers Association (TTGDA), where she champions a games industry that embraces diverse voices and respects the labor, creativity, and intellectual property of designers. In this returning episode, Elizabeth and I break down the mechanics of condensing big games into small boxes, the mission behind the TTGDA, and an honest, nuanced debate about generative AI, human intent, and the ethics of art.Connect with Elizabeth:* Elizabeth’s Website* Wingspan Pocket* bluesky: @elizhargrave Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Don’t Fall Asleep at the Wheel with AI: As machine tools get faster and more accurate, there’s a real danger of falling asleep at the wheel. Even if a model seems 95% or 99% reliable, never trust the machine over real human playtesting and lived player experience. Stay actively engaged in your process, verify your data, and remember that an algorithm can never replace the authentic human feedback loop.* Elegance is Deep Decisions with Fewer Rules: True game design elegance comes from the depth of player decisions while drastically stripping back the rules and components. Wingspan Pocket is a perfect execution of this exact principle. By shrinking setup friction and focusing on pure decision-making, it proves you don’t need a massive box or tons of tokens to deliver a rich, weighty experience.* Contract Details Matter (Even for Pros): Every single detail in a publisher contract matters, and you should never just blindly sign away your hard work. Look, I literally went to law school before I became a full-time game designer, and I still hire a lawyer to review my contracts! That’s why the work Elizabeth is doing with the TTGDA is so vital—giving emerging designers the tools and guidance they need to negotiate better deals.Show Notes“What would (Wingspan) look like to have a smaller version a more accessible version?” (00:05:40)Mass market retail doesn’t always require dumbing down your initial design. Wingspan proved that mainstream audiences at Target were eager to embrace a heavier hobby game, and iterating a pocket-sized, highly accessible version opens up a massive second wave of players who want that same engine-building magic without the setup footprint or intimidation factor.“But the actual ideas I don’t want to outsource. There’s a thing I’m trying to say.” (00:32:00)Elizabeth hits the philosophical heart of why we design games. Even as technology evolves to automate statistics, spreadsheets, or playtest simulations, the fundamental creative spark, the specific human perspective you want to express about the world, cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Games matter because they connect one person’s lived experience to another’s around the table.“We put out a little position paper recently. When you talk about games, don’t just say who it’s published by, name the designer.” (00:54:40)How the industry uses language dictates how it values creators. Shifting public habits from “published by X” to prominently crediting the individual designer isn’t just about ego; it treats game design with the exact same authorial respect we give to novelists, directors, and playwrights. Normalizing designer attribution builds long-term equity for every creator in the space.“Because I feel like that’s there’s a whisper network. You hear about publishers that you don’t wanna work with, but if you’re a brand new designer and you don’t have the connections to hear those things, then you could end up working with people that you would rather not work with. I love being able to get that information to people who need it.” (00:56:30)Industry protection shouldn’t depend on who you happen to know at the bar. By creating peer-driven support networks through the TTGDA and formalizing contract reviews, Elizabeth is turning insider knowledge into a public resource, ensuring new designers are armed with real data before signing away their IP. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr
  • Scott Morris — Making Memories Over Games, Navigating Personal Tragedy, and the Law of First Principles (#111)

    Scott Morris — Making Memories Over Games, Navigating Personal Tragedy, and the Law of First Principles (#111)
    Sep 24 2026

    About Scott Morris

    Scott Morris is the founder and CEO of Steel Wing Games, a boutique tabletop publisher focused on approachable, high-quality games, as well as the Global Brand Director for Lucky Duck Games under Goliath. A two-decade industry veteran, Scott previously served as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Lucky Duck and President of Passport Game Studios. His latest project, Rainbow Boulevard (designed by Adam Wyse), represents a decade-long journey of patience, personal resilience, and deep human connection. In this deeply moving episode, Scott shares the origin of Steel Wing Games, the harrowing personal tragedy that put his career on pause, and why game publishers aren’t just selling boxes, they’re building lifelong memories. Plus, we unpack the mechanics of eliminating player downtime, the shift from positions to principles in design debates, and what it really takes to launch a crowdfunding campaign today.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Ben Robbins — Revisiting Microscope, Designing Uncomfortable Games, and the Mechanics of Shared Stories (#110)

    Ben Robbins — Revisiting Microscope, Designing Uncomfortable Games, and the Mechanics of Shared Stories (#110)
    Sep 10 2026

    About Ben

    Ben Robbins is an acclaimed indie game designer best known for creating Microscope, In This World, Kingdom, and This Means War. Ben’s flagship design, Microscope, revolutionized GM-less storytelling games by allowing players to collaboratively build vast, non-linear histories from the top down. In this returning appearance on the podcast, Ben and I dive deep into the psychological hurdles of revisiting a beloved, successful game to create Microscope v2. We explore the creative trick of fooling yourself to bypass pressure, the design spectrum between "wings vs. rails," and why opening your playtesting process up to the public saves time while yielding better results. Plus, we break down his experimental new game This Means War (which strips narrative control away from players) and engage in a passionate, honest debate on the role and impact of AI in the future of game design.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • Ryan Scott Dancey — From Fake Mail Order to Legend of the Five Rings, the Power of Self-Belief, and the Future of AI (#109)

    Ryan Scott Dancey — From Fake Mail Order to Legend of the Five Rings, the Power of Self-Belief, and the Future of AI (#109)
    Aug 27 2026

    About Ryan S. Dancey

    Ryan S. Dancey is an absolute titan of the gaming industry whose strategic vision has fundamentally shaped the modern tabletop and digital landscapes. Ryan co-created Legend of the Five Rings, published the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and spearheaded the creation of the revolutionary Open Gaming License (OGL) alongside an elite team at Wizards of the Coast—a move that forever altered the trajectory of role-playing games. His entrepreneurial journey spans from bootstrapping a "fake" mail-order company that accidentally became real, to orchestrating Wizards’ historic acquisition of TSR, to living in Reykjavik as CMO for CCP Games working on EVE Online, and serving a decade as Chief Operating Officer at AEG (publisher of the Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia). Today, Ryan serves as President of Wide Pacific Horizon, a strategic consulting and content creation firm based in Everett, Washington. In this episode, we unpack the wild dawn of the '90s TCG boom, the mechanics of collectible economies, what it takes to pull off industry-defining business deals, and a deeply honest, transparent conversation about the reality of AI and the future of creative work.

    Connect with Ryan:

    * Website: widepacifichorizon.com

    * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rsdancey

    * BlueSky: @ryandancey.com

    Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

    * The Fine Line Between Self-Belief and Arrogance: To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to possess an almost irrational confidence in your ability to figure things out. When you are young or broke, you take wild leaps because you truly believe you will survive the fall. Look, you don’t need to have every answer on day one, but having the intrinsic belief that you can pivot, adapt, and learn on the fly is what separates dreamers from builders.

    * The Math and Mechanics of TCG Booms: Trading card games are powered by an irresistibly addictive loop of intermittent positive reinforcement and a healthy, long-term TCG ecosystem requires a delicate balance across three distinct groups: competitive players, casual collectors, and serious collectors/investors. If your game tilts too heavily toward speculation without a solid player base, the bubble will inevitably burst when investors run out of buyers.

    * Practice with AI : We are living through a civilizational inflection point right now with machine learning. While the origins of these models come with thorny ethical questions, hiding your head in the sand will only leave you behind. These tools are democratizing production, allowing single creators to execute projects that used to require entire studios.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • Game Design Inspiration from Gen Con

    Game Design Inspiration from Gen Con
    Aug 11 2026
    I just got back from a whirlwind convention tour, speaking on multiple panels and showing off the early prototype of The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ at San Diego Comic-Con and Gen Con.You can see a full playthrough of the game here. If you want to be one of the first to get the game, there’s less than one week left to back it on Gamefound! You can also read a deep dive into the mechanics in my design diary updates on Gamefound.The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™We launched Ascension at Gen Con 16 years ago, and it was such a joy to come back, interact with fans, show off the game, and even hang out with Tom Bombadil! But Gen Con is also one of the few times each year that I set aside to play new games and see what mechanics are out there. I wanted to write a quick review of the games I played and break down the interesting mechanics behind each one. These games aren’t necessarily new this year at Gen Con, but they were new to me, and some of them are quite innovative. Spoiler alert: I saved a sleeper hit for last!Wingspan Pockethttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/473508/wingspan-pocketThis new entry from Elizabeth Hargrave is my new go-to version of Wingspan. We talked about Wingspan on the last podcast episode I recorded with Elizabeth, and the game has been a massive hit, spawning numerous expansions and variants. But Wingspan Pocket does what few games have done well: it translates the emotional core of a medium-to-heavy game into a bite-sized version.Wingspan Pocket uses the backs of cards to represent the food types and resources needed to play your birds, while tucked cards represent bonus points. A simple reserve-row and active-row system lets you acquire birds, resources, and eggs before building an active row of up to six birds, triggering the engine-building abilities that make the game what it is.Each turn presents a meaningful but simple choice: draft two resources or birds, play a bird by paying its cost, or lay up to three eggs, followed by triggering any active bird powers. Once someone plays their sixth bird, the game ends at the conclusion of the round after all players have had an equal number of turns. You earn victory points for birds played, cards tucked beneath birds, and optional goal cards. There’s also a solo mode that I haven’t tried yet.In the spirit of games like San Juan and Monopoly Deal, this is a hit for players looking for smaller, portable games that pack the strategic and emotional punch of their larger counterparts. It’s an excellent example of a designer who truly understands the core tension of her game and can present it in a much more compact package.Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Winterhaven Woodshttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/339302/winterhaven-woodsThis game has a beautiful minimalist forest theme and a simple draft-and-play mechanic similar to games like Sushi Go! and my own game Dungeon Draft. The theme and mechanics, however, are a bit of a mismatch for me.You draft predators, herbivores, and trees, then place them in one of your three woodland spaces or out in the open meadow. The scoring system for these different animals and plants, however, felt a bit convoluted. For example, wolves can hunt animals in your meadow or in other players’ meadows. They must hunt in sets of three, they can only hunt unprotected animals, and there’s a timing system based on the moon phase shown on the cards that determines which player hunts first.It’s a medium-weight scoring system layered on top of a lightweight theme and drafting mechanism. The game is decent, but I felt the scoring complexity didn’t earn its keep relative to the gameplay value. For a lightweight drafting game, I’d rather play Sushi Go!; for something heavier, 7 Wonders or Dungeon Draft pack more bang for the buck (no pun intended in a game about hunting).Time Breakerhttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220234/time-breakerThis Looney Labs game fulfills the promise of being simple and cute while staying true to the company’s brand (congratulations to the Looneys on celebrating 30 years of publishing!).You play as time cops hunting a time bandit on a randomized board made up of different time tiles, each of which allows you to “jump” to another tile. On your turn, you either move through one of these portals or play a card from your hand to move yourself or the time bandit. If you’re in the same space as the time bandit, you arrest him and he moves with you until another player arrests him or a card causes him to change locations.My only complaint is that the board contains a lot of numbers, with each tile listing a “Travel From Time,” “Current Time,” and “Travel To Time,” making the paths a bit difficult to follow. Other than that, it’s a simple, cute, lightweight game.Chrononauts is another time-themed game from Looney Labs that I ...
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    14 mins
  • Chad Ellis—Reality Gaming at Boda Borg, the Psychology of Negotiation, and Building Ego-Free Teams (#108)

    Chad Ellis—Reality Gaming at Boda Borg, the Psychology of Negotiation, and Building Ego-Free Teams (#108)
    Jul 30 2026

    About Chad Ellis

    Chad Ellis is a game enthusiast, strategist, and designer with an incredible range of experience across competitive tabletop, corporate leadership, and live reality gaming. Chad started his game publishing career partnering with Rob Dougherty under the Your Move Games brand, releasing innovative designs like Battleground Fantasy Warfare: a clever system that compressed large-scale miniature wargaming down into card sets. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has held executive leadership positions across a wide range of organizations, from small startups to global giants like Siemens. Today, Chad is the founder and operator of Boda Borg Boston, a massive 30,000-square-foot reality gaming center featuring 24 distinct, physical “Quests” that challenge teams mentally and physically. His tabletop roots run deep, from playing on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour alongside the legendary Your Move Games testing group, to competitive chess, to running an epic D&D campaign for his kids. Chad also writes a political Substack titled Letters to my Uncles at happygeekchad.substack.com.

    Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

    * Mutual Teacher/Student Relationships: The secret to building an elite playtesting group or an incredible business partnership is surrounding yourself with people where you are both a teacher and a student at the exact same time. Zero ego with a radical willingness to share and learn. When we were coming up in the Your Move Games house back in the day, nobody cared who had the higher Pro Tour finish, everyone listened, everyone pushed each other, and everyone grew together.

    * Bad Clients Drive Out Good Clients: Bad clients will drive out good clients every single time if you let them. If you dilute your messaging trying to appeal to everyone, you end up captivating no one. Nobody gets to unilaterally decide who loves their game; it’s a designer’s job is to get out there, test with different groups, and discover who it actually resonates with.

    * Test a Hypothesis, Don’t Just Test: Don’t just run blind playtests hoping to stumble on feedback, instead test a very specific hypothesis. You need to know exactly how every single test converts into actionable data, and more importantly, you have to possess the discipline to change when the the data proves you wrong.

    * Frictionless Hook Points: Identify your game’s exact hook point, which is the precise moment where a player’s eyes light up and they go, “Oh wow, I get it”. Once you know where that moment lives, your entire design goal is to ruthlessly strip away every single ounce of friction between a person sitting down and experiencing that spark.

    * Negotiation as a Co-op Game: Negotiation isn’t a zero-sum, competitive battle where one person wins and the other loses—it’s a co-op game. When you shift the conversation away from rigid positions and demands toward underlying interests, you stop fighting over slices and start expanding the size of the pie so everybody walks away winning.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Luke Peterschmidt — Designing for Massive Fandoms, Eliminating Obstacles, and Exploiting Your Superpowers (#107)

    Luke Peterschmidt — Designing for Massive Fandoms, Eliminating Obstacles, and Exploiting Your Superpowers (#107)
    Jul 16 2026

    About Luke Peterschmidt

    Luke Peterschmidt is a brilliant leader in the tabletop gaming industry who currently serves as the Head of Active Category Management at Asmodee. In this uniquely structured role, Luke has been managing the legendary The Lord of the Rings™ portfolio. Right now, I am incredibly lucky to be working directly with him as we partner up to launch The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ on Gamefound this July 14th, 2026. Luke and I have a long history of debating, discussing, and collaborating on projects across the industry, such as Bakugan. In this episode, we unpack the massive operational challenges of stewarding a world as foundational as Middle-earth, how to lead high-performing teams by getting completely out of their way, and how our creative roles must evolve as we scale up our careers. Plus, if you are catching this as it drops, Luke and I are hitting the stage together for a couple of panels at San Diego Comic-Con 2026!

    Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways

    * The Pressure of Caring a Lot: Nobody wants to be the designer who goes down in history as the one who botched a legendary world like The Lord of the Rings™. Every single designer who touches an intellectual property of this magnitude feels that exact same weight. Creating inside a universe you personally worship is an unbelievable mix of intense excitement and raw terror, and it leads to a lot of sleepless nights trying to make something great. At the same time, that fear is a feature, not a bug. You want to hunt for the specific creative projects that scare you just enough to force you out of your comfort zone and push you to build a masterpiece.

    * Strategy is Saying No to Easy Money: True corporate or creative strategy has absolutely nothing to do with hitting a random quarterly budget number; it’s about having the discipline to turn down fast cash if it derails your ultimate vision. You have to define a strategic roadmap so crystal-clear that anyone on your team can look you in the eye, throw your own words back in your face, and tell you “no” and you have to completely agree with them. If a quick, short-term win pulls your focus away from your long-term destination, you have to let it go.

    * Look for Strengths, Not Weaknesses: We waste way too much mental energy trying to patch up our minor flaws instead of ruthlessly exploiting our core superpowers. In game design, a product with a few visible imperfections but a mind-blowing, uniquely memorable hook is infinitely better than a perfectly polished, completely smooth pearl that has absolutely nothing special to say. The exact same rule applies to your life. Stop agonizing over your baseline weaknesses, and instead just build a killer team or find the right tools to handle them, and pour 100% of your focus into what makes you exceptional.



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 3 mins