Introduction

I decided to start this blog to do a daily (days I work on games, not every day) recap or my efforts at all things related to board game design. I do this in hopes it will help me to stay motivated, and perhaps help others with similar aspirations.

I’ll start with a brief introduction. My name is Jared Brautigam, and I am a board game designer. A title, which still feels a bit strange to me, since I have only been at this for less than a year.

I’ve been a gamer since as long as I can remember. I was born the same year the Nintendo Entertainment System came to the USA, and it wasn’t long before I had a controller in my hand. Now, some 35ish years later, I’m still an avid gamer. However, my tastes have more recently expanded into tabletop.

It must have been about 5 or 6 years ago, when a family member brought Pandemic to our family Thanksgiving gathering. I hadn’t realized that there were other board games than Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, etc. I was immediately hooked.

Before long, I started toying with the idea of creating my own games, which led me to the Board Game Design Lab podcast, The Game Crafter, and all the other staples of the hobby. My first design is called The Rap Game. It is a competitive party game that has you building a rap empire by dropping albums to expand your influence, while defeating your opponents in rap battles and murdering their rappers. My second and third designs were created to be entered into The Game Crafter’s Mint Tin Challenge. Tin Men is a 1-4 player co-op dice rolling and resource gathering game set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk, where the Tin Men enter your bunker home to steal your supplies. Cramped Space is a head-to-head strategy game with a dexterity mechanism, which has you trying to reach the final destination with more crew, creds, and influence than your opponent.

Now I’m working on a large game with the working title Shifting Seas, an 4x civ building legacy game with a procedurally generated map. I’m also working on a smaller game called PhởSome, which I may develop into a series of games I’m going to call Cook King.

Well, my brief introduction is becoming not so brief, so I’ll stop it here.

Be sure to add yourself to my mailing list below if you want to be updated about the major going-ons with my designs, and check back here if you want to see daily updates on my projects. You can also find me on Facebook if you want to have a chat.