The board games most of us grew up with aren't very good. Risk is sloppy, minimalistic, chance based, and it takes too long, Monopoly makes you a slave to dice rolls and outsized punitive nonsense. Battleship is an exercise in profound randomness—less a game than a way for time to structurally dribble away. The modern, mass-produced versions of these games are products of a design-by-committee process that emphasizes easy entry over anything else. A minute to learn, a lifetime to be dissatisfied by.

Since the mid-’60s, designers in Europe have been making games that tend to be more intricate, more concerned with resource management than direct conflict, and rooted in gameplay mechanics based on history and economics. For a long time, this ethic was foreign to the American player, stuck rutting in the gutter of Parker Brothers garbage. 

But in mid-’00s the proliferation of German powerhouse Settler of Catan and other big Eurogames such as Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Dominion changed the way board games were designed in America. The easy, benign ethic was out on its ass, and the personalized, boutique ethic was in. European games tend to be designed by one or two people working from a personal vision. This makes the experience of playing them more particular: A Eurogame puts you in conversation with your opponents the way Monopoly does, but also with the designer’s idea about how the game is supposed to make you think and feel.

Today, this ethos is alive in the Pacific Northwest, where working designers pursue their own personal visions to design games that transport you and your friends to a different world.

Red Castle Games, a lovely sun lit tabletop game store deep in Southeast Portland, hosted their first ever Locals Only Game Expo on a recent Sunday in February. Game designers from all over the Pacific Northwest came to the store to show off and test their highly idiosyncratic, personalized creations. Some games were complete and ready for purchase that very day. Others were a few ticks shy of a hundred percent, waiting for Kickstarter funding—printed paper affixed to particle board instead of something we recognize as a complete game. For a whopping eight hours, these designers sat at a table and presented, one after another, brief, fifteen minute explanations of the rules of their games and guided players of all ages through a brief demo of their product. To promote their work, they were repeatedly subjecting themselves to the worst part of playing a board game: explaining the rules. 

Jordan Mishra-Johnson was demoing Drawn Hungry— a “cozy culinary card game” where players draw ingredient cards and use them to structure a meal that other players judge, Top Chef-style. It’s a light, social, Apples to Apples-type of game which inspires chatter more than competition, but every inch of it is struck through with the threads of Mishra-Johnson’s life. Mishra-Johnson is an illustrator with a background in restaurant PR whose work portrays the lives of food industry types—chefs, farmers, and bartenders—by depicting them as Beatrix Potter-style rabbits. Looking for a use for this aesthetic, she conjured up this hospitality-themed game. It is a communion with the creator, even as you use it to commune with friends. 

Cat Drayer, the designer of Bubble Net, described what happens to her when inspiration strikes. “I  see a moment,” she said. “A picture of something, a bit of video, an interaction between things, and that moment makes me think, ‘That feels like a game.’” For the creation of Bubble Net, it was watching videos of humpback whales creating dynamic bubble prisons to capture prey. “A spiraling motion—plus the effect of drawing those fish inward, and together—it was a combination of a thematic and mechanical thing that told me this is a potential game.”

Douglas Beyers, a designer from Seattle, was there to demo For All Mankind, a dense, German-style space exploration game that involves resource management, a constantly shifting map, and a robust trading mechanic. It was, far and away, the crunchiest product on display at the Expo. 

“I started because I was reading The Expanse novels,” Beyers said, “and in those books it matters a lot where the planets are relative to each other, and I thought it would be cool if there was a game where that mattered. Everything came out of that idea, a solar system with moving planets.”

Beyers’ wife, Julia Drachman, was his “very reluctant” co-designer for the game. “She helped me with the graphic design stuff,” he said. “Julia was the person who told me ‘You have to make this thing fucking shorter, man.’ She was right… it took three and a half hours to play. ‘We must slash everything that slows it down.’” 

From here, Beyers moved onto playtesting, getting the game in front of people and watching them play it.

“It’s my favorite thing,” he said. “I get to do anthropology, experimental observation, product development, collect feedback, watch the data, see what’s fun, see what’s not fun. We’ve collected feedback forms from 800 people at this point. It’s really painful at first, because people are telling you your thing sucks… like a lot.” 

But over the years of work, Beyers learned to see past what people were saying at face value, and go deeper into his own vision for the game. 

“Everyone will tell you the solution they think will work, but it’s usually not the thing that will actually make it work,” Beyers said. “You kind of have to look behind it for the deeper path.”

Playtesting sits near the center of game development as a necessity because, unlike other art, a game doesn’t really exist if someone isn’t playing it. Plus it can be nearly impossible to see the functional flaws when you’re so deep in the game systems. 

When asked if she worried that this practice encouraged game designers into a middle, less challenging path, Drayer said, “The important thing when you’re playtesting a game is to hold on to your vision. You need to listen to the people who are testing your game, because they’re telling you the experience they’re having and you need to find out if this experience aligns with YOUR vision.” 

Even though testing is so deeply engrained in the process of making a game, designers recognize that great art isn’t achieved by committee, but rather the pursuit of a personal vision—one that sees through the barrage of feedback, and sits at the center of good design.  

“What you’re listening for is feedback that aligns with what you’re actually trying to do,” Drayer said. “You want people to feel a particular way… you want them to have these highs and lows, that tension, that arc. And if you’re not hearing those things coming back? That’s on you. Their job is to tell you what they’re feeling. Your job is to make that feeling match what you want.”