Designing Games
Five games in active development. The design process is where the interesting questions live.
The situation
I design board and card games. Not as a side project I tinker with occasionally; as a serious creative practice where I’m working through real design problems every week. I currently have five games in various stages of development: Breaking Ground, Ichthyomancers, Unplayable Characters, Neighborhood Crawler, and Pixel Drifters.
None of them are finished yet. And honestly, the design process is more interesting than the finished product would be on a shelf; game design is where my thinking about experience and systems is most visible.
What game design actually is
People think game design is inventing rules. It's really designing decisions. Creating a system where every choice a player makes feels meaningful, where complexity emerges from simple interactions, and where the thing that makes the game deep is invisible to someone learning it for the first time.
A great card game has layers that reveal themselves over time. Your first game, you're just playing cards and seeing what happens. Your tenth game, you're thinking three turns ahead and reading your opponent's strategy. The rules didn't change. Your experience of the system did. Designing that arc (from “this is easy” to “this is deep”) is the hardest and most interesting problem in game design.
How I think about it
Breaking Ground is a competitive game where players are developers building in a suburban town. Every player contributes to the town’s transformation. Roads widen, trees disappear, and the natural areas get replaced by the kinds of buildings nobody asked for. There is no “good guy” strategy. The system itself produces the outcome, and the board tells the story visually by the time the game ends. It started when my six-year-old said “I wish there were more trees,” and it became a design problem I couldn’t put down. The challenge is tone: make it fun to play while embedding the commentary in the mechanics, not in a lecture.
Ichthyomancers is a card game about wizards who cast fish spells. The name technically means something different (fish divination), but the image of a wizard hurling a magical bass at someone is too good to give up. Players draft and combine sea creature cards that interact in ways that click immediately but get deeper the more you play. Every creature name is a pun, because the game takes its mechanics seriously and nothing else. The whole thing lives or dies on whether every draft pick feels like a real decision; one where the right play depends on reading your opponent and working with a hand that’s never quite what you wanted.
Unplayable Characters is a party-weight competitive game where every character is terrible and that’s the whole point. You know NPCs? These are UPCs: UnPlayable Characters. Each one comes with Baggage, a janky, broken ability that makes everything harder. Your opponents draft your Baggage for you, choosing exactly the disaster they think will ruin your day. Then everyone races across a board that’s being built as you play, wrestling their broken characters toward the finish while everyone else watches them struggle.
Neighborhood Crawler captures the feeling of being a kid in a 1990s cul-de-sac, where every yard and alley felt like a world. It applies dungeon crawler sensibilities to childhood exploration. The monsters are neighborhood situations, the loot is stuff you find, and running out of daylight is the thing you’re fighting against. The design draws directly from growing up in Wilmington, and the hard part is making exploration and discovery feel meaningful in a tabletop format without the randomness feeling arbitrary.
Pixel Drifters is a 2-player tactical combat game that exists on two levels. On the surface, it’s a retro arcade-style battle: pixel heroes, power-ups, synthwave palette. Underneath, it’s summer 1987, and two kids are playing this forgotten game in a basement the night before one of them moves away. The emotional frame is embedded in the art but never stated outright. The combat has to be tight enough to stand on its own. The emotional layer reveals itself to players who notice.
Why this matters outside of games
Every interesting design problem I've encountered in any field comes down to the same questions game designers ask: What is the person experiencing? What decisions are they making? Where is the friction, and is it good friction (challenge, engagement) or bad friction (confusion, frustration)?
When I'm redesigning a workflow at a game store, I'm asking these questions. When I'm filming a wedding, same thing. When I'm building an app or watching someone struggle with a poorly designed sign; same questions.
Game design isn't my hobby. It's my design practice. Everything else is applied game design.