Chaosium Inc. is a publisher of tabletop role-playing games established by Greg Stafford in 1975. Chaosium's major titles include Call of Cthulhu, based on the horror fiction stories of H. P. Lovecraft, RuneQuest Glorantha, Pendragon, based on Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and 7th Sea, "swashbuckling and sorcery" set in a fantasy 17th century Europe.
Steve Jackson Games (SJGames) is a game company, founded in 1980 by Steve Jackson, that creates and publishes role-playing, board, and card games, and the gaming magazine Pyramid.
BioWare is a Canadian video game developer based in Edmonton, Alberta. It was founded in 1995 by newly graduated medical doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, alongside Trent Oster, Brent Oster, and Marcel Zeschuk. Since 2007, the company has been owned by American publisher Electronic Arts.
Monte Cook is an American professional tabletop role-playing game designer and writer, best known for his work on Dungeons & Dragons.
Frank Brian Fargo is an American video game designer, producer, programmer and executive, and founder of Interplay Entertainment, inXile Entertainment and Robot Cache.
Jane Jensen is an American video game designer and author. She is mostly known as the creator of the Gabriel Knight series of adventure games, and also co-founded Oberon Media and Pinkerton Road video game development companies. Jensen also writes under the name Eli Easton.
Steve Jackson is an American game designer. His notable creations include the role-playing game GURPS and the card game Munchkin.
Santorini is an abstract strategy board game for 2-4 players designed and released in 2004 by Gordon Hamilton and republished via Kickstarter in 2016 by Roxley Games. Inspired by the architecture of cliffside villages on Santorini Island in Greece, and primarily designed for two players, the game is played on a grid where each turn players build a town by placing building pieces up to three levels high. To win the game, players must move one of their two characters to the third level of the town.
Brass is a board game set in Lancashire, England during the Industrial Revolution. It was developed by Martin Wallace. The object is to build mines, cotton factories, ports, canals and rail links, and establish trade routes, all of which will be used to score points. The game is divided into two historical periods: the canal period and the rail period. Victory points are scored at the end of each. Depending on the card the players draw, they will be limited in their choices.
Torment: Tides of Numenera is a role-playing video game developed by inXile Entertainment and published by Techland Publishing for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is a spiritual successor to 1999's Planescape: Torment.
Mike Elliott is a Seattle-based board game, card game and mobile game designer whose titles include Magic: The Gathering, Thunderstone, and Battle Spirits Trading Card Game. Magic head designer Mark Rosewater called him "one of the most prolific Magic designers in the history of the game." He was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame at the 2017 Origins Game Fair.
Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) is a tabletop role playing game design framework developed by Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker for the 2010 game Apocalypse World and later used for Dungeon World, Monsterhearts and numerous other RPGs.
Emily Care Boss is an indie roleplaying game designer, theorist and publisher. She was a foundational member of The Forge, an early leader in the indie role-playing game movement and is considered the creator of the American Freeform genre of roleplaying games, which combine indie RPG principles and mechanics with Nordic freeform and American chamber live action role-playing techniques. Her game, Under My Skin was winner of the Audience Choice Award at Fastaval 2009. She has been referred to as the "Dean" of the North American school of structured freeform game design.
Armello is a digital role-playing strategy board game developed by Australian independent game studio League of Geeks as their debut project. Announced as an iPad title in September 2012, the game has been in development since mid-2011, with music by composers Lisa Gerrard and Michael Allen. Between April and May 2014, a successful Kickstarter campaign was started to help fund a port to Steam and GOG.com, as well as stretch goals to bring the game to Android and Windows tablets. The game was chosen to receive additional support from governmental funding agencies Screen Australia and Film Victoria.
The Castles of Burgundy is a board game for two to four players, set in Medieval Burgundy. It was designed by Stefan Feld and illustrated by Julien Delval and Harald Lieske, and was published in 2011 by Ravensburger/alea. It is considered a classic of the Eurogame genre, and is cited as one of the most influential board games of the last decade. It uses dice rolling and dice placement, a modular setup, and set collection as its mechanics. The dice and the ability to change them give players a wide range of options.
Yooka-Laylee is a platform game published by Team17 in 2017 for Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Developed by Playtonic Games, a group of former key personnel from Rare, Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor to the Banjo-Kazooie series released for the Nintendo 64 nearly 20 years prior. After years of planning to develop a new game, Playtonic Games initiated a Kickstarter campaign that attracted significant media coverage and raised a record-breaking sum of over GB£2 million. The game follows chameleon Yooka and bat Laylee on their quest to retrieve a magical book from an evil corporation.
Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of is a sword and sorcery pen-and-paper role-playing game set in the world of Conan the Barbarian, the fictional Hyborian Age. Both the character and the setting were first imagined by author Robert E. Howard. Howard's original literary work has since spawned a vast franchise of novels, comic books, films, video games, board games, role-playing games, etc. Following this tradition, Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of is the third officially licensed Conan role-playing game. The two precedent games were Conan Role-Playing Game (1985-1988) and Conan: The Roleplaying Game (2004-2010), although there also had been supplements for independent generic systems, like GURPS Conan (1988-1989).
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 1 to 4 players designed by Isaac Childres and published by Cephalofair Games in 2017. It is a campaign-based dungeon crawl game with a branching narrative campaign, 95 unique playable scenarios, 17 playable classes, and more than 1,500 cards in a box which weighs almost 10 kilograms (22 lb). Since its introduction the game has been consistently praised by reviewers, and has been described as one of the best board games made to date.
Jennifer Brandes Hepler is a video game developer, author, and scriptwriter. She is known for her time at Edmonton, Alberta-located game developer BioWare where she worked as a senior writer for eight years, with much of her work centered on the Dragon Age fantasy role-playing video game franchise. Hepler's notable work after she left BioWare in 2013 include the mobile strategy video game Game of Thrones Ascent, and the 2018 point-and-click adventure game Unavowed.
