As a freelance game designer I started organising tabletop testing nights for the design community two years ago. By now the turnup is steady and multiple games are playtested during an evening. These days I am a lecturer at the major Game Design of the Hanze Applied university. Even though the focus of the study is on … Continue reading Test & Chill – playtesting for students

Making a new game feels like exploring space, seeing what is out there, which direction is fruitful and which are not. And steering is done with hindsight bias: some initial direction might be clear from the start, but often only after trying out different versions of the game it becomes clear what works and what did not. … Continue reading Design Space: to boldly go where no one has gone before

Each year in January the Global Game Jam is organised. In a weekend (48 hours) teams cooperate to make a game loosely based on the theme of that year. In 2017 the keyword was 'waves'. Games can be digital or analogue (tabletop). They asked me to judge, especially for potential tabletop games. There weren none, but … Continue reading Global Game Jam 2017

This week I shared a contest with our Game Design students, the GDWC 2017. This is focussed on digital games, but tabletop games are explicitly welcome. If they get enough 'analogue' submissions they might open a category for them. Designers: you might feel hesitant to participate. I did, even though it was a local event, it … Continue reading On Game design Contests

A few months ago Aerjen Tamminga (link to info on his game Pleasant Dreams) and I wrote this article on testing your game concepts. It was published in the magazine 'Spel!', which is the magazine of the national game association Ducosim: A pdf of the article: spel-magazine-over-speltesten

The latest tabletop testing night of the guild was visited by the Dutch newspaper 'Dagblad van het Noorden' and they posted a small article in the Saturday newspaper 😀