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International indie success, 'Armello', is the result of League of Geeks' quest to make the best digital board game ever made; a game built upon millennia of tabletop design, whilst leveraging the power of video games. League of Geeks directors, Blake Mizzi and Trent Kusters, will step participants through the design process and decisions that guided League of Geeks through their almost five year journey bringing tabletop adventure to life; from the eight month paper prototyping phase, through the creation of a new IP, and the unique challenges it all presented.

'Pandemic Legacy' was an experiment to push the boundaries of what a board game could do. The game incorporates stickers, object permanence, a carefully sorted deck, five evil advent calendars, writing on the board, torn cards, and an 18-game connected narrative usually found only in video games or role-playing games. In this talk, 'Pandemic Legacy' creators Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau will walk through the thought process of creating this game, looking at the design challenges (and solutions), where the team behind Pandemic went right and where they went wrong. (NOTE: there are mild spoilers in the talk. Because somehow a board game can have spoilers now.)

In this talk, 'Burgle Bros' creator Tim Fowers goes in-depth into his acclaimed co-operative board game. It was designed to capture the fantasy of the heist: allowing players to experience the tension of planning, pushing your luck, and adapting when things go south. Fowers will talk about how to recreate these moments using key game choices instead of theatrical presentation. He will discuss how games are ultimately a test of character and how he used rogue-like mechanics to drive players to critical choices that create emotion and tell unique emergent stories.

Loss aversion is a core effect in human psychology. Simply stated, losses make people feel worse than gains make them feel better. In other words, the negative emotions from losing $100 are stronger than the positive emotions from gaining $100; about twice as strong according to a variety of experiments. The fundamental aspect of loss aversion to human psychology is very deep, and touches a wide variety of phenomenon, most of which are directly relevant to game design. This talk from veteran tabletop game designer Geoff Engelstein ('Space Cadets') examines board games and other relevant game-like experiences to explore framing, regret, competence, and other effects, and their relation to players' relationship with the game experience.

The card game 'Secret Hitler' has been a massive success on Kickstarter, with nearly 35,000 backers. It is a hidden role, social deduction game which requires players to take on the roles of German parliamentarians in the 1930s Weimar Republic. The German government system is simulated in a very abstract way to create tension and suspicion as all players are aware that "fascists" have secretly infiltrated their ranks, but none of the "liberal" players know where the other players' loyalties lie. This design postmortem from 'Secret Hitler' co-designer Mike Boxleiter will go over the initial design process, pitfalls and dead ends which were avoided in the iteration process and the final marketing push on Kickstarter.

'Puzzle Strike' is a tabletop deck-building game in the vein of 'Dominion', based on an unusual comeback mechanism found in the video game 'Puzzle Fighter'. This session covers the design process behind 'Puzzle Strike'. What were its design goals? How did it go about achieving them? 'Puzzle Strike' tackled problems such as eliminating lame duck (players still in the game who can't win anymore), reducing pre-game collusion of doubling up on opponents, building exciting moments into the system, and more. It was unusually difficult to balance, even as asymmetric games go, because its systems are so overlapping and interconnected. It took years to discover some changes that were needed for its core systems, but you can learn all that in just 30 minutes

Susan McKinley Ross is an award-winning toy and game designer best known for designing the board game, 'Qwirkle'. Her personal design epiphanies range from the simple to the specific and they've helped her through the design process for numerous products, including 12 board games. Susan will discuss the design epiphanies that have most influenced her work and she'll give examples of how these insights affected the final versions of her games, including 'Qwirkle'.