Greg Lam is another designer that I first bumped into in the Board Game Designers Forum web community (he posts there as “slam“).  He’s from Boston and self-publishes his games via his company, Pair-of-Dice Games.  

He co-founded the company with a couple of friends in 2001 and has run it independently since 2004.  While their first hits were Knockabout and Warp 6, my eye was drawn to the game called Chopstick Dexterity MegaChallenge 3000 (it really is as fun as it look).  I was able to play a few games of that at last year’s Protospiel get-together, where I also played a game of Greg’s Rock, Scissors, Paper (not the traditional hand-gesture game) and watched people play Restaurant Row.  

The BoardGameGeek page for Pair-of-Dice does a nice job summarizing the published games and history for the company, along with a link to a very interesting list where Greg has written up the details behind each of the games.  So, instead of rehashing the things you can find there, I wanted to find out a bit more about how Greg goes about designing games and what his influences are. Read more

When preparing for my last “Fellow Designers” post about David Whitcher, I asked David who he thought would be good designers to put on my list to interview … he pointed me to Scott & Carl of Dogtown Games.

I first became aware of Scott Starkey in the early days at the Board Game Designers Forum (probably 3 or 4 different wiki software changes ago for that site) as a smart designer who also was a good artist.  He was just releasing “The Mother Lode of Sticky Gulch” at that time.

I met Carl Klutzke for the first time at last year’s Protospiel in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I was impressed with the clarity and directness of Carl’s feedback on the designs during that get-together.  And I had a very good time dying very quickly in a futuristic group robot-piloting game.  (Beware the vermin — they will destory your machinery!)  Carl’s “StoryCards“ is the other main product available from Dogtown.

I sent Scott & Carl a list of the same questions via e-mail and received responses from each of them.  Here is how that exchange turned out … Read more

My first “Fellow Designer” post is about David Whitcher, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based designer behind PyroMyth Games.

I’ve known David over the internet for at least a decade, but only finally met him face-to-face at last summer’s Protospiel in Ann Arbor.

Once I had my website updated and planned on running a series of posts about other indy board game designers and computer game developers, it seemed an easy thing to start with David … and I e-mailed him a bit of a Q&A. Read more