A Designer's Journey

Dan Mazur

Guard Tower Games

Some stories start with a grand plan. This one starts with a kitchen table.

In 1977 a ten year old kid wandered into a friend's house and stopped cold at the sight of a hex map covered in cardboard counters. The friend's older brother was setting up a game called Panzer Blitz, and when he looked up and asked if the kid wanted to learn, that was it. Hook, line, and sinker. The kid was me, and I never really left that table. I just kept finding new ones.

What followed was the kind of gaming education that only happens when you are young enough to have no sense of how much time you are spending. Dungeons and Dragons from the original blue box. Risk on rainy afternoons. A science fiction roleplaying game called Traveller that made the galaxy feel enormous and detailed and real. And then the game that would quietly shape everything that came after, a starship combat system so complex it came with compendiums. I loved it immediately and completely. I also could never quite get anyone to finish a full game of it.That tension, loving something deeply while watching it defeat the people you wanted to share it with, is where game designers are born.

The friends who filled those years deserve naming because they were not background figures. They were the whole point. Scott, Greg, Jack, Bob, Tim, Mike, and Tony. We played in garages and basements and on scouting weekends when we probably should have been doing something more constructive. Bob had a gift for turning his character invisible and levitating at the earliest opportunity, which tells you everything about Bob. Mike had adopted the phrase "Can you dig it?" and deployed it with a frequency that started as amusing, progressed steadily through annoying, and eventually achieved something approaching a personal philosophy. Nobody dug it. Mike did not care.

Then Dave came along and fit in like he had always been there, which is either a testament to his personality or a warning about our standards. Probably both. Dave was present for some of the more memorable episodes of that period. There was the evening I needed a plaster cast of a forearm and hand for a school art project and Dave volunteered without fully appreciating what he was agreeing to. I applied liquid latex to his hand and forearm. It started white with tinges of green and spent the next six hours getting progressively darker while Dave sat at the game table with his arm in the air trying to keep the blood moving, playing Dungeons and Dragons one handed, and letting me know exactly what he thought of the whole arrangement in terms that were colorful without being outright sinful. By the end of the evening we worked out that it was not going to dry anytime soon and Dave washed it all off. I probably should have mentioned earlier that it needed another eighteen hours to cure properly. I did not. Dave has not let me forget any of it. Nobody who was there has. I deserved all of it.

Then there was the Scott and Greg miniature incident, which they still bring up on a regular basis and show no signs of stopping… I had been to a small game shop in Poland, Ohio a few weeks earlier. If you know Poland, Ohio, you understand that getting there before GPS existed was less of a drive and more of a personal commitment. You needed directions, faith in those directions, and a willingness to seriously question both somewhere around the halfway point. But I had been there and I was absolutely certain, with the full confidence of a man who has no business being that confident, that I had seen Essex historical miniatures in quantities I had never encountered in one place before. Lines of them. Rows of them. I sent Scott and Greg with detailed directions and the kind of enthusiasm that should have been a warning sign.

They made the trip. They found the store. They came back to Emerald Games where I was behind the till, practically bouncing, ready to hear about their finds. They repeated my exact words back to me. Troves of Essex miniatures of every kind. Then Balzac hit me in the head. Then Dumas caught me in the upper body. I turned to protect myself and Etage got me in the back. The only miniatures in that entire store were those three plastic busts of French literary figures. Every Essex line I had sworn was there was gone, or had never existed, or exists today only in whatever part of my brain generates false memories of miniature inventory. I am still not sure what happened. It is possible I dreamt the entire thing. Scott and Greg have never let me forget it. I expect that when I am gone and someone comes to visit my tombstone, they will find small statues of Balzac, Dumas, and Etage waiting there. If you see them, please know it is not a tribute to my literary knowledge.

Good games start with good people at the table.

The Game That Started in the Wrong Class

In 1982 I took a part time job at a hobby shop called National Hobby. If you have never been inside a proper hobby shop from that era, picture a store where model trains shared shelf space with radio controlled planes, model rockets, dollhouse furniture, electronic kits, and somewhere in the back, games. It was the kind of place where you could spend three hours just looking. I was supposed to be working.

It was there that I properly met Dave Graham, before he became part of the circle. He was a regular customer and we fell into conversation easily, the way people do when they share an obsession. We both loved the same starship combat game. We were both defeated by its rulebook, which had grown over successive editions into something that required serious study before you could fire a single shot. The rulebook had companions. The companions had supplements. We just wanted to shoot at each other's spaceships.

The solution arrived during geometry class the following year. My teacher was working through three dimensional coordinate systems, explaining how any point in space can be identified using an X, Y, and Z axis. I should have been taking notes. Instead something clicked in my head that had nothing to do with the actual lesson. Space is not flat. Starship combat should not be flat. If I could map any point in three dimensional space using coordinates, I could give ships altitude. I could make the battlefield feel like space actually feels.

I would like to report that I then applied myself diligently for the rest of the semester. I received a D minus. It remains the lowest grade of my academic life and I earned every point of it. What I produced instead of acceptable geometry marks was something I called the Coordinate Cube, a system for tracking ship positions across three dimensions with range calculated from the actual distance formula and firing arcs that accounted for where a target sat in space relative to your weapons. I drew it by hand on the back of what would become the game sheet, next to a range gazetteer that let players look up distances quickly during play. The rest of the game fit on one and a half pages.

The front of the sheet held the rules, an Energy Allocation section where players divided a ship's available power between engines, shields, and weapons, and a damage track that ran shields first, then weapons, then engines, then hull. That sequence came directly from watching starships get torn apart on television over the years, and it felt right because it was right. Everything a player needed was on one piece of paper, front and back, with a little overflow. I typed it on a Royal manual typewriter at my parents' house. The ribbon was not in its best years. The drawings were clean because I had spent considerably more time in art classes than in geometry, and at least one of those investments paid off.

Dave had access to a Xerox machine, and that is when things got interesting. We started making copies, and I began slipping them into the bags of every customer who bought a game at National Hobby. If you purchased anything from that store in 1983 and found an unmarked photocopied starship combat ruleset in your bag, that was me. You are welcome, or I apologize, depending on your perspective.

Dave had the idea of producing a newsletter, inspired by the game magazines of the day that sometimes included playable rules alongside their articles. We put the starship game in an issue, left copies at National Hobby and dropped them at other game stores in the area. People picked them up, and some of them came back wanting to play.

Two things happened that changed the scope of what we had made. The first came through a man named Ben, connected to the Northern Ohio Wargaming Society, a regional community of serious hobbyists who ran their own events and knew people throughout the area. Ben was an intriguing character. When he encountered the rules he looked them over carefully and delivered his verdict in the particular way that was entirely his own. "Now, now Dan," he said, "these rules are awful simple for this group. These gentlemen are a bit more sophisticated in their wargaming." He enjoyed them thoroughly. The rules found their way into organized club play and regional gaming events shortly after, which was a considerably different level of distribution than stuffing bags at a hobby shop counter.

The second was Daniel Radakovich, who wandered into my life through a bulletin board posting at National Hobby where I had pinned a notice looking for players for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was running. He answered the notice. He was older than me, bearded in a way that suited his personality completely, with a gift for accents deployed at exactly the right moment. Our circle called him Wild Man, a nickname he earned repeatedly and wore without apology. In the broader wargaming and historical gaming world he went by another name, one attached to published writing and genuine community connections that stretched well beyond Northern Ohio. He traveled frequently, his family had ties to professional football that took them across the country, and when he got hold of a stack of our newsletters he took them with him. California gaming clubs. Conventions in Pennsylvania. Game shops in Colorado. He carried our one and a half page photocopied rules to places we never could have reached on our own.

Wild Man was the kind of person who believed in things and then acted on that belief, loudly and with considerable theatrical flair. A few years later he controlled Australia in a play by mail campaign game I was running and spent a memorable portion of several evenings disputing its resource situation with anyone who would listen. At one point he closed his eyes, raised his fist toward the ceiling, and declared at full volume that Australia Feeds the World. It did not, in the game, but nobody who was in that room has ever forgotten the moment.

I was friends with Daniel Radakovich from that bulletin board posting until his passing in 2019. I still see Scott, Greg, and Dave regularly. Others have moved away or drifted toward other commitments, the way life tends to arrange things, but I consider them all friends still, connected by the same thread that started in a garage with a hex map and a borrowed rulebook. The games did not create those friendships, but they created the table, and the table is where everything else happened.

The Part Where I Learn How the World Works

In the autumn of 1986 I was back in Cleveland between stints doing other things, which I will get to shortly, and I had picked up part time hours at National Hobby again. Some habits are harder to break than others, and the place felt like home in the way that only a hobby shop from that era can. One afternoon a game came through inventory from a company making a significant name for itself in the hobby world with its Star Trek titles. It looked cool. I bought it without a second thought, which is exactly the kind of decision that makes perfect sense right up until it doesn't.

I opened it at home and had one of those moments that sticks with you. The mechanics were familiar. The structure was familiar. The terminology was familiar. The energy allocation, the damage sequence, the whole shape of how a turn moved, all of it had the particular feeling of looking at your own handwriting on an old piece of paper and knowing it before you can explain how. I pulled out my old rules and sat down with a few friends to put them side by side and compare. Then I brought the published game to some of the fellows at the Northern Ohio Wargaming Society who had been playing my rules since Ben introduced them to the group, the same gentlemen who had initially found them a touch simple for their sophisticated tastes. The verdict came back the same from both groups. I was an idiot for not having published it myself. Fair enough.

My brother knew a guy named Ross Paul who lived on the next block and was either newly practicing law or close to it, and Ross was the kind of attorney who did not need much encouragement to go after somebody. He heard the story and he was ready to attack. Ah Danny, ah we can fight this and make a lot of money, ah maybe they settle if we push them. Ross was loaded and pointed. It was my dad who applied the brakes.

My dad was a retired Cleveland cop who had spent his career working double shifts and picking up part time security jobs to keep everything together, and he had a particular gift for cutting through whatever BS you are telling yourself and getting to the part that actually matters. You don't have the money to sue a company over your game, he said. Just get over it. To him the whole situation was absurd in the way that only a man who had worked that hard could find it absurd. His kid was standing there upset because somebody cheated him over a game. Now that I am roughly the age my dad was then, if I could go back and talk to that younger version of me, I know exactly what I would say to me: "You're an idiot."

So Ross did not go after them in full. Instead he sent a letter trying to reach some kind of settlement. The company sent a legal letter back. That was it. No acknowledgment, no compensation, no resolution of any kind. I would have been genuinely happy with some free merchandise at that point. A poster. A box of something. Anything that said someone on the other end of that correspondence had noticed that a kid in Ohio built something worth noticing. Instead we got a letter written in the language that legal departments use when they want to say nothing as thoroughly as possible.

I know that was a dumb thing to do if I really cared about the rules. I had shared those rules with anyone who seemed interested, stuffed them into bags, dropped them at stores, handed them to strangers, because I was more interested in people having fun with them. That just highlights my naivety about the difference between a community of people who play games together and the commercial machinery that produces and sells them. I learned that lesson. I put the whole topic on a back shelf of my mind for a long time.

The Long Road Back

The day after I graduated from high school in 1985, I left. The mid-80s were a lot like Stranger Things, minus the monsters. I don't think people who didn't live in those years can really grasp how different life was. For years, I had wanted to disappear into the wilderness and maybe stay there. I knew it was 1985, not 1885, but I was hoping for something close to that older kind of experience. I had spent much of 1984 preparing, including a summer session at Tom Brown's Tracker School in New Jersey, which sounds like a weekend camping course until you actually attend. Tom Brown Jr. had learned to read the natural world at a level most people never realize exists, and he taught those skills with an intensity that made you leave noticing things you had looked at your whole life without truly seeing. Tracking. Wilderness survival. Moving through a landscape and understanding what it is telling you. I came away far more confident in wild places than an eighteen-year-old with no real experience probably had any right to be. That was the general quality of my decision-making at the time. So, shortly after graduation, I grabbed my backpack, an M1 Carbine, a one-way ticket to Gunnison, Colorado, and no plan beyond pointing myself toward the Rocky Mountains and seeing what happened.

I lived off the land and moved through the Rockies for a good stretch of that summer with no particular destination and no timeline, which was more or less the point. At some point I walked into a controlled burn that had stopped being controlled. If you have never had that experience I will tell you that it has a way of reorganizing your priorities very quickly. Getting out of the fire I stumbled quite literally onto a park service camera crew filming the burn from what they considered a safe distance and what I considered an extremely welcome sight. They flew me out and I spent a couple of weeks at the ranger station afterward, volunteering where I could and trying to look like someone who had meant for all of that to happen. Then I made my way back east, walking to Kansas City and hitchhiking and walking the rest of the way home to Cleveland, arriving at the end of September 1985 with a good story, incredible experience, and the kind of confidence that only comes from being nineteen and not fully understanding how many things could have gone horribly wrong.

A couple of months later the phone rang. One of the rangers from that station had moved on to become district ranger at Canyonlands National Park in Utah and he was offering me a position. I said yes as soon as he finished the sentence, which was consistent with my general approach to decisions at the time. From January through June of 1986 I worked as a ranger in the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park. Canyonlands is the kind of place that stops you cold the first time you see it and does not entirely release you after that. Incredible canyon systems more vast than the Grand Canyon that drop away for hundreds of feet in every direction, red rock formations that look like someone decided to build Mars but ran out of atmosphere before they could finish, and a silence so complete it has actual weight. Photographs exist of it, but they are just not adequate.

The patrols ran both in a Jeep Scrambler and on foot across terrain that most visitors never reach, and I had a lot of time out there to do what Tom Brown had taught me to do, which was slow down and actually look at what was in front of me. The red rock of Utah holds human history in ways that are not obvious until you start knowing what to look for. South facing walls catch the winter sun and stay cooler in summer. Recesses where the rare small streams appeared from underground. Certain overhangs create natural shelter that people figured out a thousand years ago for exactly the same reasons you would figure them out today. I started finding things. Over those months I documented five Anasazi cliff dwellings that had not been previously recorded, all very remote, some with items and basketry still inside, along with a chert knapping site and lithic scatter across a couple of locations. Everything went into the log at our ranger station. I was not an archaeologist. I was a kid from Cleveland with good boots and a lot of time to walk around paying attention, which it turns out is sometimes enough to find some really cool history that nobody else has seen for hundreds and hundreds of years.

From Canyonlands I went to Canada as a canoe guide on the French River, June through September of 1986 and again June through August of 1987. There was an underwater archaeology team working somewhere along that river system during one of those seasons and I got genuinely excited about the possibility of that as a direction, which tells you something about how my brain works. I tried scuba lessons. I could not clear the pressure in my head no matter what I did. That door closed and I made my peace with it. Mostly.

It was between those two Canadian seasons, in the autumn of 1986, that I came back to Cleveland, picked up part time hours at National Hobby, bought the game, had the conversation with Ross and my dad, and put the whole business on the back shelf of my brain. Then I went back to Canada and in August of 1987 joined the Army, which added another chapter to a life that was already accumulating them faster than I could process.

When I came back from the military I went to Cleveland State University, pulled hard toward archaeology and anthropology by everything I had seen and found in Utah. My professor was Dr. Peter Dunham, who directed the Maya Mountains Archaeological Project in Belize, and through that work I ended up as a team lead for one of the expeditions before I had even graduated, which felt like exactly the direction my life was heading. Then I met my future wife Pam. We had known each other in high school without quite connecting the way you sometimes do not when you are young and oblivious, and then there she was again in college and that was that. Our wedding was set for July of 1992, which happened to land directly on top of the Belize expedition window. I chose Pam, consolidated my credits into a social studies degree with a teaching certification, and closed the archaeology door behind me. Some decisions are not actually difficult even when they look like they should be. Belize would have been incredible. Pam was far better. Our marriage resulted in two beautiful girls, Kaylee and Kristen, whom I am very proud of.

Teaching suited me in ways I had not fully anticipated. US History, World History, Government, Current Events, Geography with a lean toward Geopolitics, first at a public school and then at a private Franciscan high school. Games found their way into the classroom naturally because of course they did. I used modified strategy games to teach Geopolitics, building exercises around how threats shape policy differently than direct attacks do, and how the maneuvering at a game table mirrors the maneuvering between nations in ways that are harder to fake than an essay answer. In US History I had students design their own games set in periods they had studied during the year, because you cannot design a game about the Slave Trade or the Civil War or the Gilded Age without actually understanding the forces driving it. The design process finds out what you know. A couple of those student games were genuinely good. Playable over and over again, which is the real test and one that most adult designers do not pass on the first try.

I left teaching in 1997 and spent the nearly three decades in the working world in a mix of full time roles and executive consulting, moving through IT, business strategy, and data strategy, picking up another degree along the way from Carnegie Mellon, and eventually building and selling my own AI company before retiring. That chapter of my life was full and serious and took me places I had not anticipated, but it is a different story from the one I am telling here and we will leave it at that.

Coming Home

The gaming life changed shape during those years but never disappeared. Historical and fantasy miniature gaming filled the hours that the old basement sessions used to fill, and Warhammer Fantasy Battles pulled me in for the better part of fifteen years. The terrain work started as something I made for my own table, carving styrofoam the way I used to work with clay and plaster back in high school art class. Guard Tower Games grew from pieces sold on eBay into commissions for historically accurate battlefield displays at Yorktown Battlefield, Historic Jamestown, Fort Stanwix, Pea Ridge National Military Park, and Fort Meigs. The ranger who had once logged ruins in a station record book in Utah ended up building the landscapes that told those stories to visitors in national park visitor centers. I did not plan that arc. It just turned out that way, much like stepping stones across a stream. Sometimes forward, sometimes sideways or backwards, often including leaps of faith to the next stone and eventually, you make it across. This is how most of the best things in my life have worked.

What started as a Yahoo group focused on Warhammer Fantasy Battles slowly became something broader as people joined and started asking about other games and other interests. It became clear pretty quickly that the need was bigger than one game system or one circle of friends. I shifted the group over to Meetup and created North Coast Gamers, named for the north coast of Ohio along Lake Erie. Within a fairly short time there were several hundred members across Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown, covering everything from miniature games to board games to roleplaying games, and the gatherings that had started small were filling real venues with people who had found their way back to something they had not realized how much they missed.

The community kept growing alongside everything else, faster than I could keep up with most of the time. Chapters formed in other cities, and eventually there were nine chapters across the country and more than five thousand members. At that point the name stopped fitting and the group became the National Community of Gamers, which Alex Ford runs today. Alex was there from the early days, a game designer in his own right alongside his wife Lisa, and one of those people you want nearby when you are trying to figure out whether an idea is actually good or just feels good at two in the morning. They run some of the best homebrew games you will find at any convention.

Out of the community work grew Social Interactions Inc., a nonprofit that I founded to give the National Community of Gamers a proper organizational home alongside a couple of other programs. Writers Bloc brought kids together around collaborative storytelling, where each participant wrote a portion of a shared story, passed it to the next person, and eventually received a finished published work with their name on it as a co-author. For a kid who had never thought of themselves as a writer, holding a published book with your name on the cover does something. Outdoor Adventures took inner city kids into the natural world for hikes and historical site visits, the kinds of experiences that had shaped me at their age and that not every kid gets handed to them.

The nonprofit work scratched something in me but I kept looking for ways to push the idea of community further, to create something that was not just people gathering around a shared interest but people genuinely living inside an experience together for a little while. That impulse led to the Festival in the Forest, which started modestly as a free outdoor music event in a local park showcasing local talent. Over a few years it grew, first absorbing gaming events, then a storytelling festival, until one year I had the idea of blending all three into something entirely new.

What eventually became the DnD Fest was unlike anything else happening in the gaming world at the time. Picture a full weekend of camping, because you do not build an immersive medieval world and then send everyone to a hotel at night. Approximately one hundred players. Eighteen game masters organized into collaborative teams, each team building their own story arc across four sessions of roughly five hours each, but coordinating with the other teams so that the narrative passed from table to table and session to session like a living thing. Sixty four unique stories across the full weekend, all feeding into one overarching storyline that the players experienced from inside rather than watching from the outside. Then take that weekend and slot it into a four year campaign arc that ultimately produced over two hundred and fifty unique stories building toward a single comprehensive conclusion.

Now add Grammy award winning musical artists performing in the evenings. Eight to ten actors and actresses taking on personas and moving through the camp between sessions, interacting with players as characters in the world rather than as performers on a stage. Medieval tents. Skits. Exceptional food. The world did not stop when the dice were put away for the night. It kept going around you while you ate and talked and listened to music under the trees, and then it picked back up again the next morning when you came back to the table.

I ran the DnD Fest for ten years total, including the earlier Festival in the Forest years. Handing it to Ed Fife, who had been there as a Dungeon Master from the very first year and who understood the soul of the thing as well as anyone, was one of the better decisions I have made. Ed carries that legacy forward and I am genuinely grateful for it.

That moment came at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest gaming conventions in the country. Alex and Lisa Ford were there, as they always were, running their homebrew games with the kind of energy and creativity that makes you remember why you loved this hobby in the first place. Watching people light up around a game that someone had built from scratch, seeing that specific joy of a room full of strangers becoming a community over a shared experience, something clicked. The old starship rules had been sitting on that shelf for a long time. They deserved better than a shelf.

Getting something back off a shelf that has been sitting there for a while is not as simple as just reaching up and grabbing it. You have to go through the clutter first, the layers of other things that accumulated on top of it over the years. What pulled me in was not the starships specifically but the broader world of steampunk, which had taken hold of the cultural imagination in a way that felt like exactly the right wrapper for the kind of game I wanted to build. Airships. Empires. The collision of industrial ambition and political tension in a world powered by something nobody had ever seen before. That felt like a place worth living in.

The design work started in parallel with the final years of the DnD Fest. What I did not want to do was simply dust off the old starship rules and file off the serial numbers. The mechanics had merit, they always had, but the world needed to be built from the ground up the way I had built the world for the DnD Fest campaigns, with history and politics and factions and the kind of texture that makes a setting feel like it existed before you arrived and will keep existing after you leave.

The central design problem was one I had been thinking about since those early garage games. I never liked receiving a box of fixed ships and being told to play with what was in it. The ships were always the most interesting part, and I wanted players to have real agency over them, not just choosing from a menu but designing from the bottom up with genuine constraints that made every decision matter. An airship needs thrust and it needs lift, and lift in a world without modern aeronautics needs a physical explanation. Cellium became that explanation. A rare and remarkable substance that provides lift but also has mass and takes up space, meaning that every unit of cellium you add to a design gives you more lift while also adding weight and consuming space that could have been used for weapons, engines, or armor. Every airship is a series of tradeoffs, and cellium sits at the center of all of them. The ship a player builds before the game begins is already an expression of how they think and what they value. That felt important.

The same philosophy of agency carries into how the game is actually played. Rather than locking players into a rigid sequence of actions that everyone follows in the same prescribed order every turn, Airships and Empires gives players the freedom to choose their actions dynamically, changing what they do and when they do it based on what is actually happening on the table. Other players can react to those choices when the rules allow, which means the game stays alive and responsive rather than feeling like everyone is just executing a predetermined checklist. No two turns feel quite the same because no two situations are quite the same, and the game rewards players who can read what is happening and adapt rather than players who simply memorize a sequence.

I brought early versions of the rules to Origins Game Fair and ran them at the convention year after year, watching what worked and what did not, adjusting between conventions, letting real players in real games tell me what the rules actually did as opposed to what I thought they did. That process ran for the better part of ten years. Ten years of playtesting is a long time, but it is also how you end up with something that actually works rather than something that merely sounds like it should.

Why Any of This Matters

There is a thread running through all of it that I did not fully see until I was far enough along to look back at the whole thing at once. The kitchen table in 1977. The garage games with Scott and Greg and Bob and Mike and Tony and Dave. The newsletter stuffed into bags at National Hobby. The bulletin board posting that brought Dan Radakovich into the circle. The Northern Ohio Wargaming Society fellows who found the rules a touch simple for their sophisticated tastes and played them anyway. World Domination and fifty players arguing about resource allocation across a real world map. The classroom where students designed their own games and a couple of them were genuinely good. The terrain work that ended up in national park visitor centers. North Coast Gamers becoming something national because people needed a way back to each other. Festival in the Forest becoming the DnD Fest becoming sixty four unique stories in a weekend becoming two hundred and fifty stories across four years with Grammy winning artists and actors moving through the firelight between sessions.

The games were never really the point. They were the mechanism. The thing that gave people a reason to sit down together, to argue and laugh and make something memorable out of an ordinary weekend. I have been building tables for people to gather around since I was sixteen years old typing rules on a Royal manual typewriter with a worn ribbon, and what I did not fully appreciate at the time was that the friendships forming around those tables would turn out to be the most important thing I ever built. Scott and Greg and Dave are still in my life. Dan Radakovich was in my life from that bulletin board posting until his passing in 2019. Others have scattered the way life scatters people, but the bonds that formed over a hex map or a game table or a weekend in the woods have a particular durability that I have come to trust completely. A great life, it turns out, looks a lot like a long series of good games with people you love sitting across from you.

Airships and Empires is the latest table. It is a game of cool airships and infernal machines, of empires competing for dominance and pirates answering to no one, of hidden secrets still waiting to be uncovered by whoever is paying close enough attention. It carries the design DNA of everything that came before it, the energy allocation logic from a geometry class in 1983, the damage sequence from a television show about a starship and her crew, the hard lesson from World Domination that simplicity serves players better than complexity, and forty years of watching real people play games and learning from every single moment of it. Those airships move in three dimensions across the table, because the sky is not flat and never was, and that was true in 1983 when a teenager was failing geometry while figuring it out and it is still true today.

It is built for the player who wants a casual afternoon of tactical combat and the player who wants to build a captain over a long campaign, developing new skills, collecting victory points, and conquering territories whose outcomes ripple forward and affect every other player following the campaign rules in the same community. The airship you design from the ground up is yours. The story your captain accumulates over time is yours. And the world stays alive between games, with new infernal machines, new world events, new faction developments, and new discoveries released regularly so that the world of Airships and Empires feels like a place with a pulse whether you are at the table or not.

I like seeing people have fun. If I can build the thing that creates that fun, that has always been enough for me. And the best part of that, the part I did not fully understand when I was sixteen typing rules on a worn ribbon, is that the fun is always better when you share it with people who matter to you. I have been lucky enough to have those people in my life for a very long time, often with a game sitting between us on a table. I hope Airships and Empires gives you the same.

Airships and Empires is finally here. I hope you have fun.