The Game Design Round Table

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. The group also discusses the Zenobia Award itself, as well as another design Will is working on: the dice manipulation game PaleoVet, where players help dinosaurs recover from illnesses.

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. Additionally, Soren discusses his relationship with the 4x genre—starting out working on the Civilization series and eventually returning to the genre to make Old World. And finally, the trio briefly talks about the future of 4x games.

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—from the question of how to incorporate combat to the question of how to adapt the genre while avoiding the horror author’s problematic ideas.