Tabletop games are a different beast from browser games. A browser game has much more trouble existing in an unfinished state in a meaningful way. A tabletop game is much better at leaving a lot of documentation even for an abandoned project. On this page, I’ve provided some of the documentation for my projects across the years, finished or no.
Clearing – BoardGameGeek page
It still feels awkward to say that I’m an award-winning game developer, but here we are.
Clearing originated as a solitaire game that I envisioned as being playable as-is or using an optional set of storytelling rules to build out characters for the face cards and story beats for the obstacles you encounter and clear. It was my entry for the BGG 2021 54-Card Game Design Contest, and it was awarded Best Game Using a Standard Playing Card Deck. It was a design that was conceived for and designed entirely for entry in the contest, and it’s a game I still play in my spare time to this day. The link above is to the BoardGameGeek page for the game, where both the core rules and the storytelling rules can be found in PDF.
Status: Functionally complete
Top of the Heap – Design doc, game rules doc
Top of the Heap originated in a conversation around 2019 with my wife: what if I made a game about being a raccoon and eating trash? Naturally, it spiraled into a game where each player is trying to gather trash that is most interesting or useful to them, and the whole game takes place in a persistent neighborhood with pets and broken fences and a variety of other randomized hazards.
The game was prototyped and playtested in both paper and in TTS and it took entirely too long. The game was too ambitious for the original concept and the project is currently on indefinite hiatus.
Status: Playable but not fun
Makeout – Game rules doc
In 2023 or so, I wrote a set completion card game for Pride called Makeout. In 2025, I decided that I’d have the rules printed onto a poster as a fundraiser for my local Pride events. The poster printer I opted for is meaningful in this case: No-Notes Posters out of Marfa, TX offers cheap printing where you provide the copy and have no say in the final layout. This was not only fun to design and test as a game, but it was very satisfying as an exercise in how much I could condense the rules without sacrificing the players’ ability to understand them.
Status: Complete
A Taste of Home – Game rules doc
A game about making jam. The primary mechanics of AToH revolve around players taking one action at a time in turn, one of which can be to secure their place in the next round’s turn order. This one has game assets and a printed playtest copy exists, but it needs work. After playtesting, the planting mechanics feel disjointed and will probably be replaced, and the order cards need more balancing.
Status: Playable, on hold at the moment
PUNISHED – Game design doc
A solitaire game about wishing for oblivion. PUNISHED is a very dark game about being a miserable ichor-thing in a hellish world and trying to survive to cast yourself into the void. The resource system uses multiple types of materials you can integrate into your body (like MAW, ICHOR, and BONE) that interact in different ways to help you resolve encounters across 3 different areas as you approach a final boss fight.
This game does not have a concrete set of stable rules, but the gameplay is relatively simple as outlined in the design doc. It has been playtested and is VERY MUCH a work in progress
Status: Strictly a work in progress
Inseparable – project link
A one-page RPG. (Front and back. Two pages? I could format it smaller.)
Inseparable is a game I wrote and ran for my siblings during lockdown. The core action resolution mechanic involves a full set of polyhedral dice that you have to stack in a tower after rolling them, removing them from your dice pool. The success and failure ranges for the dice are static, regardless of the die, which means that as you get to the smaller dice, your possible successes get smaller and smaller until you get to the d4, whose options are “dramatic failure”, “failure”, and “partial success”. I think there’s room for refinement but it’s fun to play and not too complicated.
Status: Functionally complete
Mistywell – Game rules doc, Print & play materials
Mistywell is an act of pure hubris and it’s one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on. It’s a game that sprang from the intersection of multiple design considerations and blossomed. At the most basic level, it came from my desire to fill a niche that I see few entries in: 3-player co-op board games.
Mistywell is a 3-player asymmetric cooperative territory control/worker placement game where you each play as a different person living on the fringes of the titular city, Mistywell. The object of the game is to make inroads with the community to foster unity among your neighbors before the Temple of the Golden Covenant can sow enough fear across the city to drive you away.
I started working on Mistywell with my co-creator Nick during lockdown, and the game has been playtested through multiple iterations resulting in the alteration or addition of major mechanics on multiple occasions. The playtest assets are publicly available and a Tabletop Simulator implementation exists. The game still needs some work, but the core rules are locked in and our primary concern at this point is balance.
Status: Playable, PnP materials available