Hello everyone! I've been here a while, but I've never really told you guys who I am. I'm a student at Vanderbilt University that has been interesting in video game design for a long time but never had sufficient technical know-how to actually build any video games. Last November, just under a year ago, I got my first board game idea and I've been very interested in board game design since, now having ~10 different designs at various stages of development (with three "main" designs seeing the bulk of my playtesting). Huge advantage of board game design: No coding know-how required.
Last Spring I founded a student org for board game design, Vanderbilt Gamecraft ("Don't get board. Make Games.") and starting up that organization is what brought me here. My current avatar is the org's logo.
Gamecraft is focused on helping its members throughout the design process, with the ultimate goal of getting games published. We've been running brainstorming activities, helping iron out rules, using our funding to buy game components for members' games, and playtesting the games with members and other students on campus. We currently have ~6 members regularly attending our weekly meetings, most of them with their own game idea at an early stage of development.
One of the really interesting parts of the organization for me is that we have one game idea that we're all collectively working on. It started off as a group brainstorming session of trying to design a war game that uses a single pawn (alongside other components). It's developed into a simultaneous-turn-taking game where players move poker chip units around a hex board while a unit-annihilating god pawn moves around destroying armies based on the collective prayers and human sacrifices of each player. It's still early in development, but I really enjoy working with the other members to design a game that we all collectively own.
I value the social fun and community building of getting a group of people together around a table and engaging each other through games, and I'm striving to make this organization the best it can be and to generally nurture a bigger board gaming community on my campus. I'm hoping to run bigger playtesting events, get some Vanderbilt Gamecraft games published, and (though we're not quite big enough for this yet) invite guest speakers in the industry to talk at Vanderbilt. I'd really like to do game design professionally, and I'm hoping that we can build this club up into a position where it can network interested members up into the industry. Those are long term goals we still need to figure out, and I'd deeply appreciate help and advise on how to get there.
