This biographical article is written like a résumé .(November 2020) |
Rob Daviau is an American game designer known for creating legacy board gaming.
He has guest lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and New York University on game design and has been a visiting professor of game design at Hampshire College. [1] In 1998, Daviau joined Hasbro as a writer for text-heavy games like Trivial Pursuit and Taboo. [2]
Daviau is a co-founder of Restoration Games which "specializes in resurrecting older games and giving them new life". [3]
Games that Rob Daviau has designed or co-designed include the following:
Dragonlance is a shared universe created by Laura and Tracy Hickman, and expanded by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis under the direction of TSR, Inc. into a series of fantasy novels. The Hickmans conceived Dragonlance while driving in their car on the way to TSR for a job interview. Tracy Hickman met his future writing partner Margaret Weis at TSR, and they gathered a group of associates to play the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The adventures during that game inspired a series of gaming modules, a series of novels, licensed products such as board games, and lead miniature figures.
Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) was a wargame and role-playing game publisher from 1973 to 1996. Many of their games are now carried by other publishers.
Keith Baker is a game designer and fantasy novel author. In addition to working with Wizards of the Coast on the creation of Eberron, he has also contributed material for Goodman Games, Paizo Publishing and Green Ronin Publishing. In 2014, Baker and Jennifer Ellis co-founded the indie tabletop game company Twogether Studios.
Days of Wonder is a board game publisher founded in 2002 and owned by Asmodee Group since 2014. Days of Wonder distributes its games to 25 countries. It specializes in German-style board games and has branched out to include some online games. Days of Wonder has published games in several languages including English, Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Greek. Days of Wonder was co-founded by Eric Hautemont, Mark Kaufmann and Yann Corno.
SPQR is a board wargame designed by Richard Berg and Mark Herman, and released in 1992 by GMT Games, as part of the Great Battles of History (GBoH) series of games on ancient warfare. SPQR deals with battles fought by the Roman Republic, and is designed to showcase the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman manipular legion.
The Charles S. Roberts Awards is an annual award for excellence in the historical wargaming hobby. It was named in honor of Charles S. Roberts the "Father of Wargaming" who founded Avalon Hill. The award is informally called a "Charlie" and officially called a "Charles S. Roberts Award". The Wargamer magazine called it "very prestigious". The Award is managed by the Charles S. Roberts Award Committee which has no commercial sponsorship, made up of designers, writers and hobbyists. It is a "people's award" with winners chosen through votes submitted by fans.
BoardGameGeek (BGG) is an online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 125,600 different tabletop games, including European-style board games, wargames, and card games. In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games.
Cooperative board games are board games in which players work together to achieve a common goal rather than competing against each other. Either the players win the game by reaching a pre-determined objective, or all players lose the game, often by not reaching the objective before a certain event ends the game.
Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game published by Avalon Hill in 2004, designed by Bruce Glassco and developed by Rob Daviau, Bill McQuillan, Mike Selinker, and Teeuwynn Woodruff. Players all begin as allies exploring a haunted house filled with dangers, traps, items, and omens. As players journey to new parts of the mansion, room tiles are chosen at random and placed on the game board; this means that the game is different each session. Eventually the "haunt" begins, with the nature and plot of this session's ghost story revealed; one player usually "betrays" the others and takes the side of the ghosts, monsters, or other enemies, while the remaining players collaborate to defeat them.
Douglas Niles is a fantasy author and game designer. Niles was one of the creators of the Dragonlance world and the author of the first three Forgotten Realms novels, the Star Frontiers space opera setting and the Top Secret S/I espionage role-playing game.
Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. is a games publisher located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, United States and founded in 2004 after Margaret Weis and Don Perrin, the two founders of Sovereign Press, divorced.
Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945–1989 is a board game for two players, published by GMT Games in 2005. Players are the United States and Soviet Union contesting each other's influence on the world map by using cards that correspond to historical events. The first game designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, they intended it to be a quick-playing alternative to more complex card-driven wargames.
Commands & Colors: Ancients is a board wargame designed by Richard Borg, Pat Kurivial, and Roy Grider, and published by GMT Games in 2006. It is based on Borg's Commands & Colors system using some elements similar to his other games such as Commands & Colours: Napoleonics, The Great War, Memoir '44 and Battle Cry designed to simulate the "fog of war" and uncertainty encountered on real battlefields.
Pandemic is a cooperative board game designed by Matt Leacock and first published by Z-Man Games in the United States in 2008. Pandemic is based on the premise that four diseases have broken out in the world, each threatening to wipe out a region. The game accommodates two to four players, each playing one of seven possible roles: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations expert, contingency planner, or quarantine specialist. Through the combined effort of all the players, the goal is to discover all four cures before any of several game-losing conditions are reached.
Matt Leacock is an American board game designer, most known for cooperative games such as Pandemic, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert.
SeaFall is a board game designed by Rob Daviau and published in 2016 by Plaid Hat Games. SeaFall is a game of colonial era exploration which uses a legacy format, meaning the board and components change during each game, creating a different game each time and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The game is played by 3–5 players, each of whom takes on the role of a province taking to the seas after a long dark age. Players explore the game board with their ships, revealing islands and other surprises. The game contains 430 entries in a Captain's Booke, a journal which is read in sections when players trigger in-game events called milestones. The story contains about 15 games' worth of content, with each game taking about two hours to play.
Mayday is a 1978 board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop. Mayday was part of a series produced by GDW called "Series 120" – games with 120 pieces that were designed to be learned and played in 120 minutes. It was the second boardgame to be published for Traveller. A second edition was published in 1980. It was republished in 2004 as part of Far Future Enterprises Traveller: The Classic Games, Games 1-6+.
A legacy game is a variant of tabletop board games in which the game itself is designed, through various mechanics, to change permanently over the course of a series of sessions.
Deathwing is an expansion set published by Games Workshop (GW) in 1990 for the board game Space Hulk.
Mice and Mystics is a fantasy-themed dungeon crawling cooperative board game designed by Jerry Hawthorne and published by Plaid Hat Games in 2012. In the games, the players represent fantasy characters transformed into anthropomorphic mice, on a quest to defeat an evil witch. The game has been praised for its original theme, with player's characters using buttons and needles instead of shields and swords, and fighting rat warriors and cats instead of goblins and dragons.