As a lecturer,  game designer and organiser of playtesting events it is a balancing act what to focus on. The paid job has priority of course, as other live events and responsibilities. Game design has gotten some attention, and coming year hopefully more so 🙂 (enough ideas in the works for that).

The Game Design Guild (in Dutch ‘Spellenmaakgilde’) also got some attention, by me and others.  I started doing this to support fellow designers and see what synergy could be created. Slowly but surely this is happeningIt remains work in progress, but the next small improvements are nice to mention, as they offer more structure and opportunity in our local game design habitat:

Slack

Slack is some form of chat site, similar to Discord if you know that one, and we started one for the Guild a while ago. While the group is still small, the created slack channel is a nice way to chat about ideas for the guilds and proofread game rules. Plus some local artists also pitched their art portfolio recently. So there is some engagement and I hope it will grow bigger.

Newsletter

Thanks to help of my friend Douwe the Guild (‘Spellenmaakgilde’) now has a slick mailchimp newsletter since this summer. And I have to say, after tinkering with the tool, it is quite nice to create (basic) lay-outs. And finally, after some more tinkering we now have a signup form, yay! You can subscribe here.

Spellenspektakel Convention

Last year 2 Dutch game designers, Ellis Hendriksen and Dennis Merkx worked together with the ‘Spellenspektakel‘, the biggest Dutch tabletop game convention, to offer discounted demonstration tables for local game designers. This year we took up the challenge and are facilitating demo tables. 10 tables are booked fully for the event on 10 and 11 November 2018. Visit the ‘Auteursplein’ and meet designers, buy their games and play their games in progress.

Other locations!

While we usually are present at the Ducosim conventions (a national tabletop game organisation), we have yet to have other locations were we structurally offer playtesting events. There are other of course that take initiative and Utrecht and Amsterdam have playtesting events often.

Two digital game industry professionals and board game enthousiasts, Friso Roolvink & Mitchel Bonnema, will host the first event in Leeuwarden on Friday 16th of November. We will see what the turn up will be, but the city has quite a (digital) design scene and the initial interest is there!

Future plans

What is next? We will see. One other idea I like to pursue is to interview local designers and post the conversations in Dutch and English. If you have an interest in that, certain questions you would like to have answered or perhaps you like to participate as a published designer: contact us!