2024 in Game Design

Well, 2024 was a busy year for me, as evidenced by the (ir)regularity of blog post updates and progress on personal projects. I’m trying to be positive that I managed to publish two whole articles in 2024, which is better than can be said for my languishing my Warhammer Fantasy army.

But it was a big year for three of my professional projects, and I’ll give a brief rundown on each of them. Along with each synopsis, I’ll discuss some musings that I took from each of these very different design experiences, which I’ll boil down to a question to guide my future projects.

Star Trek: Into the Unknown Released!

Star Trek: Into the Unknown is a game that Michael Gernes and I designed for WizKids. It’s available now, but we started all the way back in 2021 (how long ago that feels). For a bit of background, Michael and I have known each other since 2011, and have worked together on miniatures games for the better part of a decade. We’re also both lifelong Star Trek fans, which made this project especially exciting. This project also gave us the chance to work with familiar faces like Alex Davy (during his tenure at WizKids) and John Shaffer. So we had a ton of game design experience behind us as we set about crafting a deeply thematic, story-driven Star Trek miniatures game experience.

“Engage!”

One of the most interesting considerations of Into the Unknown was the design spec: WizKids asked for a game that felt truly distinct from Attack Wing (their last venture into Star Trek fleet games) and other existing miniatures games about starships. After a great deal of discussion, Michael and I came up with a direction: a game that focused on emulates the feel of an episode of Star Trek rather than focusing exclusively on battles in the Star Trek setting. Of course, battle would still be part of the game, but we set our course for a game that would encompass more than just armed conflict. This led to a few of game’s key innovations: its added focus on officers as a principle agent of actions in the game, the use of directive cards to reflect each factions ethos and rules of engagement, and a two-act structure for each game with a midpoint complication that can change the terms of the mission.

Designing the mission system for Into the Unknown lead me back to the drawing board when it comes to deciding what player incentives should look like. Michael and I spent a lot of time discussing how incentives should help the player immerse themself in the Star Trek experience and I’m very proud how we aligned gameplay with the themes of Star Trek. This exploration also left me with the question: If I’m not adapting a universe but instead creating my own, what do I want to ask players to care about?

Stonesaga Approaches Completion

Speaking of fully original stories, Stonesaga is chugging along. Well, maybe trudging along? Prehistoric people didn’t have trains. The team is in the midst of final file review as I write. As the game gets more and more realized, it’s amazing to think about all of the hard work the team has done to elevate the project, from art to graphic design to sculpting to box and tray design.

Core set and expansion miniature proofs for Stonesaga.

I’ve written a bit about the Stonesaga process over the last few years, although less than I’d originally hoped I would. I had aspirations to document a lot more of the process in real time with blog posts. But it turns out that writing over 60,000 words of story outcomes to go into a board game saps a lot of my energy to blog about the process of writing those entries. Who could have imagined that there’s a limit to how much someone can productively accomplish in a single day?

Image unrelated, probably.

Stonesaga sits in a very different place on the creative spectrum. Open Owl Studios head Brendan McCaskell had a clear concept (“a prehistoric fantasy board game where you draw on the inside of the box”), but development of the setting and mechanics were in large part left to myself, co-designer Luke Eddy, and others on the project. As someone who has predominantly worked on licensed (or at least preexisting) settings, this was a new experience.

It was also a very different creative pipeline than I’d experienced before. For most prior projects I’d managed or been involved in, going all the way back to my days as an RPG producer at FFG, there were clear steps for each creative task. When I needed to commission a map for an adventure, I had to get a brief for that map off to the Art Department long before the writer delivered the final manuscript. The structure didn’t really allow for a step where all contributors got into a room to brainstorm what would be the coolest things both narratively and visually. A siloed structure like this is, realistically, necessary for a studio juggling dozens of projects.

In contrast, Stonesaga was a small team, collaborating closely at all steps. Art often directly influenced flavor and game mechanics. This back-and-forth iteration across disciplines during the whole process isn’t necessarily scalable, but it also made a lot of the coolest parts of Stonesaga possible. For example, art-informed gameplay elements like the Foraging cards and the hidden omens wouldn’t have evolved in a siloed environment. So for future projects, I want to ask: What design assumptions of mine about what is possible to accomplish are wrapped up the most familiar process? And how might the structure of each individual project create opportunities I have overlooked?

Consulting on Cosmere RPG

And on the topic of large, collaborative creative teams, I was lucky enough to be a consulting designer for the Cosmere RPG by Brotherwise Games. The largest tabletops games Kickstarter to date hardly needs an introduction, but what is a consulting designer, anyway?

This isn’t an embedded video, I just wanted a picture of that funding number.

I don’t have a hard-and-fast definition of consulting designer. But I do have a clear goal for when I take on work as a consulting designer: my job isn’t designing the game, it’s making sure the designer(s) are able to do the best design work possible. This means acting as a sounding board for brainstorming, an interrogator of ideas, a guardrail against things getting too out of hand, and a font of ideas when creativity runs dry. It’s a lot like what anyone sitting in the RPG or Minis room would do for our coworkers at FFG between our own tasks, but with a bit more procedural rigor.

I came onto the project early, meeting with Johnny O’Neal in late 2022 to discuss his concept. In essence, Johnny wanted to draw upon my expertise as he worked through the basic game profile and concept, and then wanted my voice in the room throughout the project to maintain a degree of continuity during the design process. At this stage, being a consulting designer meant contributing to the vision and product design as Johnny solidified the direction of the game.

As Andrew Fischer took on the role of Lead Designer and the project matured, the role of consulting designer shifted, too. I was on the RPG team with Andrew Fischer while he designed Only War (and then Age of Rebellion, then End of the World), and we worked closely on these projects. As I mentioned above, one of the best features of FFG’s RPG team was the way that everyone would pitch in on major projects, lending their practical expertise to specific aspects of the project. I spent a lot of my time at this stage focused on the interaction between Heroic and Invested paths, a similar balancing act to the one I’d previously managed in games like Legend of the Five Rings.

Now that the project is well into maturity, my role as a consulting designer has evolved yet again. System design is largely finished, but content design continues! Maintaining continuity between the system design and the content design that builds upon it is one of my major tasks at this stage. Expanding a system without overwhelming it is a delicate process, and one where collaboration and discussion are key to success.

The thing about Brotherwise’s ambitious Cosmere project that got me thinking the most, though, is the way Brotherwise approaches working with Dragonsteel. From the preliminary meeting in Utah to the Cosmere RPG’s incredible presence at this year’s DragonsteelCon, the amount of partnership engagement I’ve seen really sets the bar. This leaves me wondering: What are the ways games can be more than just adaptations of other media, but truly complimentary experiences? How can integration with wider stories make games better, and how can games enhance stories in other mediums?

And that about rounds out the announced major projects I worked on in 2024. I do have a couple of other things in the wings that aren’t ready for the public quite yet… but check back later in the year!