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Matt Leacock | |
|---|---|
 Matt Leacock at Lucca Comics & Games 2018 | |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Game designer |
| Notable work | Pandemic, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert |
| Website | http://www.leacock.com/ |
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. [1] [2]
Leacock grew up in Long Lake, Minnesota. [3] He studied visual communication at Northern Illinois University. [4]
Matt designed Pandemic, published in 2008 by Z-Man Games. [5] Leacock had previously worked as a developer of social media [6] and as a user experience designer, primarily in community and communications products [7] for AOL and Yahoo. [8] He switched to designing board games full time in July 2014.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, which Leacock co-designed with Rob Daviau, has been rated very highly among board gamers and by the website Board Game Geek on its board game rankings. [9] [10] His latest games are Pandemic Fall of Rome and Forbidden Sky (both released in 2018).
Leacock is developing a tabletop game about climate change, Daybreak . [11]
According to Leacock, 5% of his design royalty for Pandemic products is donated directly to Medecins Sans Frontieres. [7] [12]
Klaus Teuber was a German board game designer best known as the creator of Catan. Originally working as a dental technician, he began designing games first as a hobby then as a full-time career.
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.
Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, often called the Essen Game Fair after the city where it is held, is an annual four-day boardgame trade fair which is also open to the public held in October at the Messe Essen exhibition centre in Essen, Germany. It began in 1983. With 1 021 exhibitors from 50 nations in 2016, SPIEL is the biggest fair for board games in the world. Many new games are released at the fair each year, especially European-style board games.
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.
Loren Keith Wiseman was an American wargame and role-playing game designer, game developer and editor.
Ted Alspach is an American game designer and CEO of Bezier Games, Inc. He is best known as the designer of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Suburbia, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Ultimate Werewolf, and Werewords. Alspach is also one of the world's leading experts on Adobe Illustrator. He served as its Group Product Manager for several releases and published 18 books on it over the course of 20 years.
Z-Man Games is an American board game company, incorporated in 1999. It was named after its founder, Zev Shlasinger. The company is known for their Pandemic series of board games, as well as being the sole publisher for the English editions of popular Eurogames, such as Carcassonne and Terra Mystica.
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.
Bézier Games, Inc. is a privately owned American tabletop game publisher, known by hobby gamers for Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Suburbia, and known to casual gamers for the One Night Ultimate Werewolf series, Werewords, the Silver series, and Ultimate Werewolf. It was founded in San Jose, California in 2006 by Ted Alspach upon publication of Start Player. In 2013, the company was renamed Bézier Games, Inc. when it incorporated. The company moved to Louisville, Tennessee in 2016 run by Ted & Toni Alspach.
Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary is a 2012 documentary about the American adoption of German-style board games, and includes coverage of the 2009 board game event Spiel in Essen, Germany, as well as interviews with many prominent game designers. The film was written, directed and produced by Lorien Green, who was introduced to board gaming by her husband. It was financed through the crowd funding service Kickstarter.
Forbidden Island is a cooperative board game developed by Matt Leacock and published by Gamewright Games in 2010. Two to four players take the roles of different adventurers, moving around a mysterious island and looking for hidden treasures as the island sinks around them. All players win if they find all the hidden treasures and they all make it back to the helicopter and fly away, and they all lose if they cannot.
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.
Scythe is a board game for one to five players designed by Jamey Stegmaier and published by Stonemaier Games in 2016. Set in an alternative history version of 1920s Europe, players control factions that produce resources, develop economic infrastructure, and use dieselpunk combat mechs to engage in combat and control territories. Players take up to two actions per turn using individual player boards, and the game proceeds until one player has earned six achievements. At this point, the players receive coins for the achievements they have attained and the territories they control, and the player with the most coins is declared the winner.
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.
Gloomhaven is a cooperative board game for one to four players designed by Isaac Childres and published by Cephalofair Games in 2017. It is a campaign-based dungeon crawl game including a narrative campaign, 95 unique playable scenarios, and 17 playable classes. Since its introduction the game has been acclaimed by reviewers, and has been described as one of the best board games ever made.
Rob Daviau is an American game designer known for creating legacy board gaming.
Return to Dark Tower is a board game for one to four players, designed and published by Restoration Games. The game is a sequel to the 1981 board game Dark Tower, by Milton Bradley Company. Return to Dark Tower has players cooperate or compete as they rule over kingdoms surrounding the titular Tower, with their chosen "heroes" gathering resources, defeating monsters and enhancing their strength. As the game progresses, the Tower dispenses corruption across the land, which players must cleanse, while also looking to identify the foe inhabiting the Tower, so that they may defeat it, to win the game. Return to Dark Tower features a circular mat that is sectioned into quarters, to represent the kingdoms, with a Bluetooth-powered Tower at the center, which is connected to an app that runs the game.
Daybreak is an upcoming cooperative board game that models the technological and political response to climate change. It is designed by Pandemic creator Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, and will be published by CMYK. It has no set release date.
Leder Games is a board game developer owned by Patrick Leder and based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is best known for publishing asymmetric games such as Root and Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, which were both designed by Cole Wehrle. As of 2023, board games released by the company have usually been illustrated by Kyle Ferrin.
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