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Think Like A Game Designer

Think Like A Game Designer

Yazan: Justin Gary
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Özet
 In Think Like a Game Designer, award-winning designer and Stone Blade Entertainment CEO Justin Gary speaks with world-class game designers and creative experts from various industries. Each episode deconstructs the creative process, offering insights into the art of game design and the broader cultural, technological, and business influences shaping a myriad of creative mediums. Join us for actionable advice and unique perspectives that will enrich your understanding of what it means to be creative in and out of the gaming world.

justingarydesign.substack.comJustin Gary Art
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  • Eric Hautemont — The Pixar Model of Publishing, the Secrets of Ticket to Ride, and the Future of Game Design (#114)

    Eric Hautemont — The Pixar Model of Publishing, the Secrets of Ticket to Ride, and the Future of Game Design (#114)
    5 Nov 2026
    About Eric HautemontEric Hautemont is a legendary tech pioneer and tabletop publishing titan whose career sits at the direct intersection of software, graphics, and play. In the late 1980s, Eric co-founded RayDream, a 3D graphics trailblazer that competed with Pixar at the dawn of ray tracing, before building it into a successful public company. In 2002, he co-founded Days of Wonder, completely transforming the tabletop industry by publishing global megahits like Ticket to Ride, Memoir ‘44, Small World, and Shadows over Camelot. Under his leadership, Days of Wonder pioneered the physical/digital hybrid model, setting a new industry standard for component quality, graphic design, and elegant gameplay before its acquisition by Asmodee in 2014. After a decade-long hiatus racing cars and angel investing, Eric has returned to the board game world with his latest venture, The Board Game Lab: a cutting-edge platform using AI to help game designers prototype, playtest, and refine their games faster than ever before. In this exclusive episode, Eric and I dive into the “Pixar model” of extreme curation, standing firm on product value, and how AI can act as a sandbox enabler for human design.* You can find Eric on linkedinAh-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Product is Your Marketing: If you dedicate your energy to making a game that delights players, when it comes to marketing word-of-mouth can do the heavy lifting for you. Days of Wonder kept its marketing budget under 2% of total revenue because they knew that getting players to sit down in person and experience a great game creates an growing sales loop that no ad campaign can buy.* The Pixar Model of Extreme Focus: Don’t flood the market with dozens of games a year hoping something sticks. Eric intentionally capped Days of Wonder to just one or two releases per year, forcing his team to curate relentlessly and say no to plenty of good ideas. By narrowing their focus, they poured every ounce of energy and care into making sure every single release was an absolute hit.* Digital Is an Accelerator, Not a Competitor: Releasing high-quality digital apps on iPad and iPhone supercharged the physical sales of Days of Wonder! The benifits of digital versions of your games is that they teach players the rules fast and strip away the intimidation of learning something new. Since nothing can replace the physical magic of sitting around a table with friends, digital players eventually make the leap to buy the tabletop version.Show Notes“Remove parts until, until you can’t remove one.” (00:37:50)Elegance in design comes from ruthless subtraction. Alan Moon spent two decades refining the mechanics behind Ticket to Ride until it was impossible to remove another leaving players with three simple action choices on a turn. As a game designer, you want to reach for elegance by stripping away every ounce of fluff until taking away one more rule will break the game.“He’s like a world-class tennis man that doesn’t understand anything about acceleration and physics and so on from a math standpoint but he will always be there ahead of the ball, right?” (00:45:25)When designing tactical masterpieces like Memoir ‘44, legendary designer Richard Borg doesn’t rely on complex mathematical spreadsheets or probability curves. He uses decades of experience playing thousands of games, all of which gave him an intuitive, organic feel for game flow. While math is certianly important, never underestimate the power of sheer playtesting reps to build an intuitive understanding of the player experience.“So we win the Spiel des Jahres, and people are like, ‘How much are you going to drop the price?’ And our answer was zero. And they’re like, ‘Oh no, you’re not. We are big distributors. If you don’t drop your price, we’re not going to carry your product.’ And we said, ‘That’s fine.’” (00:47:55)Eric shares a masterclass in pricing confidence and standing your ground. When Ticket to Ride won board gaming’s highest honor, traditional European distributors expected Days of Wonder to discount the game for mass retail. Coming from Silicon Valley, Eric knew that winning a major award proved the product was worth more, not less. When you build something truly extraordinary, don’t let middlemen dictate your margins, be confident in your product’s value and call their bluff.“What’s going to be fun I think is the move 37 equivalent in game design... [AI] made a completely non-human move that surprised everybody... But the key there is what you said very early on, it’s taste, and AI has no taste, okay?” (01:14:25)Machine intelligence is an incredible sandbox for running thousands of simulations or discovering wild, non-human mechanical twists, but an algorithm has zero built-in sense of fun or human connection. AI can throw raw possibilities at you all day long, but games are all about fun. To that extent, AI is no match for real human experience; it doesn...
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    1 sa. ve 23 dk.
  • Amabel Holland — Games as Political Art, Print-on-Demand Freedoms, and the Architecture of Systems (#113)

    Amabel Holland — Games as Political Art, Print-on-Demand Freedoms, and the Architecture of Systems (#113)
    22 Oct 2026
    About Amabel HollandAmabel Holland is a prolific board game designer, developer, and publisher who, as co-founder of Hollandspiele, has been responsible for over a hundred board games and expansions. Much of her deeply experimental work explores the potential of tabletop games as political art, how rule systems create cultural meaning, and the nature of games as living artifacts. In a profile by The New Yorker, she was cited as “widely considered one of today’s most innovative game designers” a title she remains humble about, but graciously accepts. A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Amabel also creates documentaries exploring uncredited 20th-century designers in her free time. In this episode, we unpack how she built a self-publishing model where “even her flops are successful,” how game mechanics can model real-world systems of oppression, and how her evolving personal journey shifted her design focus from processing pain to crafting pure joy.* Find Amabel on Youtube and Hollandspiele.comAh-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Even My Flops Are Successful: Build a business model that protects your creative freedom instead of trapping you under a mountain of inventory debt. By using print-on-demand for Hollandspiele, Amabel bypasses massive manufacturing and warehouse costs, so even her smallest, weirdest games turn a profit. Once you take away that financial risk, you give yourself total permission to take wild design swings on niche ideas traditional publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.* Pain Makes Good Art, But Not Happy Artists: Channeling personal rage, grief, and societal injustice can yield profound, critically acclaimed masterpieces like This Guilty Land or Doubt Is Our Product. At the same time, marinating in heavy, painful subject matter for years takes a real mental toll on the creator. As Amabel worked through personal grief and found genuine daily happiness, her design work naturally transitioned toward joyful, fun experiences like Dragon Pizza. It’s a good reminder that while pain can fuel powerful art, your long-term happiness and mental health as a human being should always come first.Show Notes“Taking a move in a board game is not as intuitive as moving in a video game. It’s not as immersive as watching a film. And you can use that distance to try to have people think about what the game is representing, think about systems.” (00:09:50)Unlike movies or video games, board games have a built-in superpower: physical distance. Because players have to manually flip through rulebooks and move pieces around, they aren't just zoning out in total immersion. You can use that deliberate friction to get players to pause, look under the hood, and actually think about the real-world systems you’re modeling.“It’s a game presented as a, an alien artifact with a rule book written in a iconographic language that you have to translate, and I will not answer questions about whether you got it right or not.” (00:13:00)Never underestimate how hungry players are for mystery. Amabel assumed City of Six Moons, which is a game with no text and an undeciphered alien rulebook, would only appeal to a tiny niche, but it became her biggest hit. When you take a risk and build something completely uncompromising, players may step up, form communities, and invest deeply to decode your vision.“The margins for print on demand are not are not gonna let you have a full-time living in New York City generally, right?” (00:27:50)High overhead can destroy creative freedom. By keeping her living costs low and operating out of an affordable spot like Detroit, Amabel built a real fortress around her lifestyle. When you strip away huge monthly bills, you never have to sell out your artistic vision or chase generic trends just to keep the lights on.“For me, the worst thing would be a game where you do bad things, and the game wags its finger at you.” (00:51:25)If your game forces a player to inhabit a villain or navigate heavy moral compromises, don’t lecture them through your mechanics. Shaming a player for executing the exact actions your game instructed them to take completely breaks player trust. Use abstract presentation and thoughtful mechanical distance so players can analyze the system objectively rather than feeling cheapened by preachy moralizing.P.S. If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.You can find Think Like a Game Designer on these platforms: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 sa. ve 5 dk.
  • Elizabeth Hargrave — Distilling Wingspan Pocket, AI Ethics in Tabletop, and Building Equity for Designers (#112)

    Elizabeth Hargrave — Distilling Wingspan Pocket, AI Ethics in Tabletop, and Building Equity for Designers (#112)
    8 Oct 2026
    About Elizabeth HargraveElizabeth Hargrave is an award-winning board game designer best known for her runaway smash hit Wingspan, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019 and has sold over two million copies worldwide. Her diverse body of work, including Tussie-Mussie, Mariposas, The Fox Experiment, Undergrove, and Sanibel, explores rich corners of the natural world. Elizabeth recently released Wingspan Pocket, an absolute masterclass in distilling the core of Wingspan into an accessible, 30-minute, small-box game. Beyond design, she is a co-founder of the Tabletop Game Designers Association (TTGDA), where she champions a games industry that embraces diverse voices and respects the labor, creativity, and intellectual property of designers. In this returning episode, Elizabeth and I break down the mechanics of condensing big games into small boxes, the mission behind the TTGDA, and an honest, nuanced debate about generative AI, human intent, and the ethics of art.Connect with Elizabeth:* Elizabeth’s Website* Wingspan Pocket* bluesky: @elizhargrave Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* Don’t Fall Asleep at the Wheel with AI: As machine tools get faster and more accurate, there’s a real danger of falling asleep at the wheel. Even if a model seems 95% or 99% reliable, never trust the machine over real human playtesting and lived player experience. Stay actively engaged in your process, verify your data, and remember that an algorithm can never replace the authentic human feedback loop.* Elegance is Deep Decisions with Fewer Rules: True game design elegance comes from the depth of player decisions while drastically stripping back the rules and components. Wingspan Pocket is a perfect execution of this exact principle. By shrinking setup friction and focusing on pure decision-making, it proves you don’t need a massive box or tons of tokens to deliver a rich, weighty experience.* Contract Details Matter (Even for Pros): Every single detail in a publisher contract matters, and you should never just blindly sign away your hard work. Look, I literally went to law school before I became a full-time game designer, and I still hire a lawyer to review my contracts! That’s why the work Elizabeth is doing with the TTGDA is so vital—giving emerging designers the tools and guidance they need to negotiate better deals.Show Notes“What would (Wingspan) look like to have a smaller version a more accessible version?” (00:05:40)Mass market retail doesn’t always require dumbing down your initial design. Wingspan proved that mainstream audiences at Target were eager to embrace a heavier hobby game, and iterating a pocket-sized, highly accessible version opens up a massive second wave of players who want that same engine-building magic without the setup footprint or intimidation factor.“But the actual ideas I don’t want to outsource. There’s a thing I’m trying to say.” (00:32:00)Elizabeth hits the philosophical heart of why we design games. Even as technology evolves to automate statistics, spreadsheets, or playtest simulations, the fundamental creative spark, the specific human perspective you want to express about the world, cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Games matter because they connect one person’s lived experience to another’s around the table.“We put out a little position paper recently. When you talk about games, don’t just say who it’s published by, name the designer.” (00:54:40)How the industry uses language dictates how it values creators. Shifting public habits from “published by X” to prominently crediting the individual designer isn’t just about ego; it treats game design with the exact same authorial respect we give to novelists, directors, and playwrights. Normalizing designer attribution builds long-term equity for every creator in the space.“Because I feel like that’s there’s a whisper network. You hear about publishers that you don’t wanna work with, but if you’re a brand new designer and you don’t have the connections to hear those things, then you could end up working with people that you would rather not work with. I love being able to get that information to people who need it.” (00:56:30)Industry protection shouldn’t depend on who you happen to know at the bar. By creating peer-driven support networks through the TTGDA and formalizing contract reviews, Elizabeth is turning insider knowledge into a public resource, ensuring new designers are armed with real data before signing away their IP. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 sa.
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