I want to talk about tabletop game designers because I don’t think we appreciate them enough and it’s bothering me.

Think about what a video game developer does. They write code. They test it. They find bugs. They patch it. They update it. They can push a fix at 2 AM and by the time you wake up the broken thing is unbroken. It’s still incredibly hard work — I’m not diminishing it — but there is a safety net. The product is alive. It can evolve.

Now think about what a tabletop game designer does. They hand you cardboard, some dice, and a rulebook, and then they walk away. That’s it. That’s the product. If the balance is off, if a rule is ambiguous, if one strategy dominates every other strategy — tough. It’s printed. It’s in a box. It’s on your shelf. There is no patch. There is no hotfix. There is no server-side update that quietly rebalances your dice odds while you sleep. They had to get it right before it left their hands.

That is insane to me.

Take Blood Bowl. Someone — a team of someones — sat down and figured out how to make a football game played by orcs and halflings and undead skeletons feel balanced and fun and replayable. They had to account for the fact that different teams have wildly different abilities and somehow make it so that a team of halflings can theoretically compete with a team of chaos warriors. They did this with dice and a grid and stat lines on a piece of paper. No physics engine. No AI opponents adjusting difficulty. Just math and playtesting and an unholy amount of “what if.”

And then there are the solo RPGs. This is where my brain really starts to melt.

I recently found Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop — a solo journaling RPG where you play as a bookseller running a floating bookshop along a river. You sell books to animal characters. You travel between towns. There are five seasons, each with their own holidays and weather patterns. You use playing cards to determine the weather each morning, which affects how many customers show up. There’s a fishing mini-game. The rulebook is 226 pages.

Two hundred and twenty-six pages. For a game you play alone. With cards and dice and a journal.

Someone built an entire world — towns, customs, holidays, weather systems, character generation — and then figured out how to make all of it work through a deck of playing cards and a couple of dice. They had to design systems that generate meaningful, surprising, emotionally resonant experiences using nothing but randomization and prompts. No screen. No soundtrack. No scripted cutscenes. Just you, the mechanics, and your imagination doing the rest.

I think about the testing alone and my head hurts. How many times do you play your own game before you know it works? Hundreds? Thousands? How do you balance something that relies on randomness and player choice and narrative prompts all interacting at once? How do you write a system that’s structured enough to feel like a game but open enough to feel like a story? How do you do all of that and then also make it cozy?

The creativity required to look at a standard deck of playing cards and think “this could be a weather system for a floating bookshop” is the kind of lateral thinking that I genuinely believe doesn’t get enough recognition. These designers are taking the most basic components — dice, cards, tokens, paper — and building entire universes out of them. No billion-dollar engine. No render farm. Just the raw mechanics of probability and imagination, carefully tuned until they sing.

Every time I sit down to play a tabletop game, I’m going to try to remember that someone spent months or years of their life making sure this specific moment — this dice roll, this card flip, this ridiculous halfling touchdown — would feel exactly right. They tested it until their eyes bled and their friends stopped returning their calls and their dining room table was permanently covered in prototype cards.

And they did it with cardboard and a dream.

That rules.