The earliest game I remember making–there were probably some earlier attempts I’ve forgotten–was a game where I gave my Castle Lego minifigures simple stats and made them fight.
In middle school, for career day, I researched being a tabletop game designer. I wrote to the one game designer I knew by name, Steve Jackson (the US one) to ask about the job. I also sent him a game I made: a simple hex-based asymmetrical wargamein which many fast-moving cat-people battled a few strong lumbering elephant-people. He essentially said, “That doesn’t look like it would be a lot of fun.” And he was right!
Around 2004 or 2005, I came up with a board game about building a medieval cathedral. It was a worker placement game before that was a genre. (I remember reading about Caylus prior to its European release and worrying that it was going to be my game but with a castle… Of course it totally wasn’t.) It combines worker placement with action selection basically stolen from Puerto Rico (a big game at the time). What’s kind of unique about it is that instead of placing a few workers one at a time, you divide ten workers up to different stations around the board. And you can train workers to be experts, which work twice as efficiently but have to stay at a board location for the rest of the game.
Here’s what my game prototype looks like:
And a peek at the rules, because I know it makes Tom all hot and bothered.
Out of the blue a few years back I also had an idea for how to model volleyball in game mechanics. You have two players on each side, so I guess it’s beach volleyball? A pretty light two-player game. Right now it just uses a board, playing cards, and some coins:
And I have started on a few video game prototypes. Only one has (slowly) gotten very far, and I’ve shared it here before. As always, if anyone wants to give it a try, I can send you an itch.io key!
