I love games that leave you with stories. It might be the re-telling of an epic adventure, or the decisive moment when your brilliant strategy paid off (or failed), but I believe great games leave you with a story to tell, and that's the kind of game I love.

My enjoyment of board games ranges from family classics like Cludeo to social deduction games like Avalon. Across to deep euros like Powergrid and CCGs like Magic the Gathering, then back out the other side to party games like Telestrations and Codenames. I love board games so much I opened my own board game café (unfortunately now closed), became a Magic the Gathering Judge, and have worked on demo stands and managed open gaming areas at several conventions.

Role-Playing is one of my favorite tabletop experiences and these have been with me since I was a child. When I first opened The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and found a type of story that wasn't fixed and complete but evolved based on the decisions I made, I was excited. I devoured every choose-your-own adventure book I could find, and it wasn't long before I stumbled across the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG. I discovered it was possible to tell stories born not just out of my own decisions but shared with a group of friends and from then I was hooked.

Since then I've played and run dozens of different systems from the traditional like Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Legend of the Five Rings, RuneQuest, Warhammer Fantasy, and Champions, to Indie classics such as Fate, Lasers & Feelings, Dread, and Dead of Night. Added to that are all the marvelous one-shot systems like Family Affair, Penny for My Thoughts, Cthulhu Dark, and Lady Blackbird as well as various home-brewed systems.

Making Stories

Stories about games get created at the intersection of three factors and this is the philosophy I bring to the games I create:

Engaging

Something about the game has to engage you, be it the charm of the theme or how smart the mechanisms are, and if these two aspects are working together so much the better. Games that don't engage are games we soon forget and engagement is typically created as a side effect of a creator's passion.

Choice

Be it railroaded role-playing or traditional roll-and-move games, if you don't make any choices you rarely create stories. You need to be at the heart of the action driving the result, then your stories include your personal take on the game and how you changed the outcome.

Chance

Without any chance, where the outcome is known and clear from the start, a game falls flat. The same is true at the other end of the spectrum where too much chance leaves a game feeling random. The best games, like the best stories, involve the element of surprise created by the injection of chance.