At CONvergence 2025, the Talking Cardboard channel hosted a 45-minute panel with four working tabletop game designers: Jeremy and his collaborators from Sophisticated Cardboard, the studio behind horror game Stifling Dark; Liz, a designer and former public school teacher whose games include Night Witches and Queen of Spies; Adam, a former Fantasy Flight and Asmodee art director who now runs his own studio and designs games built around unusual components; and a fourth panelist who came to design through podcasting and game criticism before joining publisher Leder Games. The conversation covers how they got started, how rulebooks get made and broken, the self-publish versus publisher decision, diversity in the industry, and what mechanics are catching their attention right now.
How designers actually get started
The paths described in the panel cover most of the routes that exist into professional board game design. One team simply asked themselves what was stopping them from making a game and concluded the answer was nothing. Another panelist spent years insisting she would never design, then found a concept — Soviet female bombers flying night missions against Nazi forces in World War II — too compelling to leave alone. A third came at it from software development, found digital iteration slow and isolating, and switched to physical games specifically because you could see people’s faces when they played. The fourth came through a corporate route: marketing at Fantasy Flight, then graphic design on actual games, then management, then eventually his own studio.
What these routes share is that none of them began with a formal plan to become a game designer. They began with being present in gaming culture long enough that design became the natural next step. This pattern appears consistently in how creative industries actually work — the transition from audience to maker tends to happen through accumulated proximity rather than a single decision.
The rulebook problem
The panel’s discussion of rulebooks is one of its most practically useful sections, and the core insight is straightforward: you cannot edit your own rulebook effectively because you are no longer capable of reading it as a new player would. You have played the game through too many iterations. You autocorrect in your head. You know what you meant. Someone else has to look at it.
Blind playtesting — giving the game to someone with only the rulebook and no access to the designer — is the most reliable test of whether a rulebook actually works. The designer is not present to answer questions, clarify ambiguities, or course-correct. If the game cannot be played from the document alone, the document has failed regardless of how good the underlying game is.
One panelist offered a contrarian position worth taking seriously: the best-designed games are fun even when played with the wrong rules. Azul was cited as an example — a game her parents have played differently on every visit, and which remains enjoyable regardless of which version of the rules they happen to be using that day. The implication is that genuine design robustness is a deeper standard than rulebook clarity. A game that requires perfect rule transmission to be enjoyable is more fragile than one that works in spite of minor misreadings.
The visual design of rules received specific attention. Rules presented as dense paragraphs with no diagrams, no visual hierarchy, and no examples are harder to internalize regardless of how accurate they are. One panelist referenced old Avalon Hill games from the 1980s as examples of games that probably have correct rules presented in a format that makes them genuinely difficult to absorb. A sticker instruction sheet for a child’s toy was offered as a counter-example: no words required, just a numbered diagram, and anyone could follow it immediately.
Research on instructional design supports this. People learn procedural tasks more effectively from a combination of text and visuals than from text alone, and the order in which information is presented matters as much as its accuracy. Rulebook design is not an afterthought — it is part of the game design, and friction in the rules often signals friction in the design itself.
Self-publishing versus finding a publisher
The panel’s treatment of this question is useful because it reframes the decision around personal temperament rather than abstract advantage. Self-publishing is not primarily a creative choice — it is a business choice. The moment you self-publish, you are running a company. You are handling manufacturing, warehousing, fulfilment, taxes across multiple countries, customer service, and social media alongside whatever game design you were hoping to do. One panelist noted that his primary job at this point is running the business, with actual game design largely handed off to his collaborators because there simply is not enough time for both.
The panelist who works exclusively with publishers framed her position plainly: she does not have the skill set for self-publishing and does not want to acquire it. Her interest is in designing games. Finding a publisher who treats the game well and handles everything else is not a compromise — it is the arrangement that lets her keep doing the work she actually wants to do. The analogy offered was authors who want to write books but have no interest in running their own marketing campaigns and social media presence.
Control is the genuine argument for self-publishing. One studio was approached by publishers for their game Stifling Dark and declined because they wanted to keep it exactly as they had designed it. That kind of creative autonomy is only available if you own the whole process. The tradeoff is that you also own all the problems.
The board game crowdfunding landscape that makes self-publishing viable has changed significantly since the early Kickstarter era. Platforms including Kickstarter, Gamefound, and BackerKit have between them funded thousands of independent titles that would not have found traditional publisher support, and the infrastructure around manufacturing, fulfilment, and distribution has matured to accommodate smaller runs. The financial model the panel describes — crowdfunding to cover manufacturing, then distribution to retailers at roughly 40% of MSRP and direct retail at roughly 50% of MSRP — is now well-established enough that first-time designers can access it, though the margins leave limited room for error.
Who gets to design games
The panel’s exchange on women in board game design is the section that generated the most energy in the room, and the most substantive argument came from the designer who said she resents being framed as a female game designer rather than simply a game designer. The distinction matters to her because the framing reduces her work to a demographic category rather than evaluating it on its own terms.
Her actual answer to the question of how to bring more women into design is structural rather than targeted. Designers come from players. If women are not present in gaming communities — at conventions, in game stores, at home game nights — then there is no pipeline from which female designers emerge. The work of diversifying the design community therefore begins at the community level, not at the industry level. It begins with how existing members of gaming communities treat newcomers: whether their opinions are taken seriously, whether they are condescended to, whether they are assumed to be buying games for someone else.
The examples she offered were specific. A game store employee who assumed her sleeve purchase was for the wrong game. Retail staff who assume a woman buying a PlayStation game is buying it for her partner. These are individually small interactions, but collectively they communicate who the hobby considers its default audience, and that communication has consequences for who feels enough sense of belonging to eventually make something of their own.
The Zenobia Award, which she mentioned as work she is proud of, offers one structural response to this: a historical game design award that mentors designers from underrepresented groups and specifically encourages games that tell stories from those groups’ perspectives. The approach is worth knowing about for anyone interested in where new voices in tabletop design are coming from.
The broader data supports the panel’s framing. Women now make up close to half the board game player base in most major markets, and the gap between who plays and who designs reflects industry culture rather than interest or capability. The conversion rate from player to designer is the variable that matters, and that rate is shaped by whether people feel their participation in gaming culture is genuinely welcome rather than merely tolerated.
Components as design starting points
One of the more unusual design perspectives in the panel came from Adam, whose studio has made a signature of games built around novel physical components. Planet Unknown uses a rotating Lazy Susan component representing simultaneous play across multiple planets. Sword Crafters uses components that are similarly distinctive. A game currently in development uses a card tray that doubles as a round table when flipped upside down — a pun on the game’s Knights of the Round Table theme that only works as a physical object.
The manufacturing question behind these components is not trivial. The Lazy Susan in Planet Unknown has nine parts and required a $20,000 capital investment to develop and tool. Getting from a 3D-printed prototype to a manufacturable component involves understanding vacuum moulding, material combinations, print tolerances, and factory processes — knowledge that comes from walking factory floors and taking existing components apart to understand how they were made.
This component-first design approach is a minority position in the industry, where most games begin with mechanics or theme. But it raises a genuine design question: what does a physical object that can only exist as a physical object add to a game that a digital version cannot replicate? The answer, when it works, is something that draws people to a table in a way that a screen cannot — the Stifling Dark flashlight component was specifically cited as the thing people at conventions walk up to and ask about before they know anything else about the game.
Mechanics worth watching
The panel’s discussion of innovative mechanics was brief but pointed toward a genuine trend. Hidden information in cooperative games was cited as an underexplored solution to the quarterbacking problem — the tendency in fully open cooperative games for one experienced player to direct everyone else’s decisions, reducing other players to passive participants. When players do not have access to each other’s full information, the game distributes decision-making authority more evenly and creates the individual moments of tension and surprise that make cooperative play feel genuinely collaborative rather than managed.
Hanabi, a cooperative card game where players can see everyone’s cards except their own, is the most widely known example of this approach. More recent designs have applied the principle in different ways. The semi-cooperative genre, where players are working together against a shared threat but are also competing among themselves for the best outcome, was also discussed — specifically how it keeps players invested even when their individual chances of winning are low, because there is always some possibility of a surprising result.
Both trends point toward the same underlying design problem: how do you keep every player at the table genuinely engaged from the first turn to the last, regardless of their skill level, experience, or current position in the game? That problem does not have a single solution, which is part of why it keeps generating new design responses.
The full panel is available on the Talking Cardboard YouTube channel. CONvergence is an annual science fiction and fantasy convention held in Minneapolis.