26/03/25

What we learnt at GDC 2025 as tabletop designers 🧠🃏

Now I’ve had some time to digest the dizzying sensory overload that was GDC (combined with jet lag) I’ve put together my thoughts and main takeaways. My hope that this is an interesting read to people considering going to GDC or for the anyone who wants to know what they might be missing out on…

To begin, it should be said that GDC is definitely a video game based conference. Cole, cofounder of Minty Noodles Ltd is a full time video game developer at Cole Powered Games and found the conference to be very useful for his practice. This blog is purely about GDC from a the board game perspective.

There were a few tabletop talks available. A lot of them were focussed on specific games and/or games that had crossover into the video game world. I was able to go to a few talks and missed one talk on writing a rule book due to scheduling issues. I will watch that on ‘the vault’ recordings of the talks made available after the event.

Here are the high level take away of the talks I did manage to go to:

Tabletop Summit: Timeless Design Lessons from 25 Years of ‘Duel Masters’ TCG

The importance of being true to your ‘North Stars’ (guiding principles) throughout the game design. Identifying a set of ‘North Stars’ can help you have something to measure ideas and developments against. If the ideas stray away from the north star it might be best to let it go.
A good rule of thumb is that 7 pieces of information can be retained at a time, give or take 2. This should be considered during gameplay.

Tabletop Summit: ‘Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread’

Beautiful, innovative components.
There is a consumer need for resettable games, even in legacy games – they referred to it as ‘green’ legacy games.
FAQs on cards are an elegant way to reduce rule book referencing.
Comeback mechanics to help build player suspense.

Video Games and Crowdfunding: Best Practices from Successful Campaigns , by Thomas Bidaux

Follower conversion rate of 10-12% at launch, buy the end of the campaign increases to 18-20%.
Cross-promotion with other creators can be successful.
Creating innovative ways to create community engagement. For example, monetising a pain au chocolate debate among french backers during the campaign for The Witches Bakery (backers could vote on what the ‘proper’ name for that particular pastry is by buying add ons).
Use small stretch goals to encourage celebration within the community.

These talks were interesting, well structured and delivered in an engaging way. The Kickstarter talk felt the most relevant to my everyday practice and the Andreya talk tickled my nerdy material and processes brain. I loved seeing all the different components and hearing about the design decisions behind the final product. I resonated with some of the design decisions because of the legacy nature of the game not being dissimilar to the escape room genre.

Roundtables were another style of talk offered at GDC. These sessions aren’t recorded and invite the attendees to contribute to the sessions with questions and answers. I loved this format. Getting to hear directly from industry professionals was interesting and people often gave practice based advice. Which felt much more grounded than theory.

The one roundtable I managed to get to was for leadership. Minty Noodles is a very small company and I (Harriet) lead a tiny team that consists mostly of freelancers. However, I’m looking to expand my skills in the leadership role and this talk was extremely useful. Here are my top takeaways:

Art Leadership Roundtable

To be clear is to be kind
Toxic situations in the workplace happen but catching it early and eliminating the ‘talented jerk’ can significantly benefit projects.
Friendships within management roles can muddy the waters, but creating open communication and opportunities for feedback can help navigate the situation.
When things go bad, the team goes quiet.
Document things, make things sterile.
Be clear and concise about the expected solution as well as the problem.
Trust is lost when issues aren’t responded to.
Radical Candor by Kim Scott (Book recommendation).
Surrounded by idiots by Thomas Erikson (Book recommendation).

Cardboard Lounge:

The cardboard lounge was a gaming area set up/sponsored by shut up & sit down. This was an area of tables where you could play a good selection of games. I was also invited to do a little bit of playtesting in the lounge which got really positive feedback.

It was lovely to see Kelp there—a fellow boardgameprotohyper. I was so pleased to see that game be so successful and have such an excellent table presence.

I also managed to play a game there (insert game name and images). This was a great, fun, easy to learn game that fell foul of a few cultural differences (a rainy day is much more appealing to an American audience than a British person apparently). These points of discussion made it all the more interesting and was a networking/introduction game.

It’s worth mentioning here Lexa who went above and beyond to make me feel comfortable in the lounge and talked me through my imposter syndrome fears around the playtesting sessions. Meeting them was a highlight for me. Such immense positive energy.

Playtesting:

Firstly, thank you to Unpub for organising the playtesting sessions, making sure we always had a steady stream of players and being lovely to talk to to boot.

Playtesting for the first time with a mainly American audience was interesting. The game didn’t seem to suffer from any cultural differences, but rather, the number of game developers playing led to a tendency to overthink puzzles with some pretty interesting outcomes.

The lighting conditions in the playtesting hall where difficult. A blue tinted light make the hidden numbers difficult to see. This caused a lot of confusion but highlighted the importance of testing in a range of scenarios.

Finally, the game was well received across the board, with back to back players with enthusiastic comments and high overall scores. There was so much enthusiasm and love for the game that it felt confusing that it did not translate to an increase in kickstarter followers. This is leading me to reconsider signposting to the kickstarter and focussing on the collection of emails.

Playtesting is something I am getting very practised at. As a single play through game, Interstellar Adventures has some unusual playtesting challenges. Stay tuned for a full playtesting blog.

Networking:

GDC has been a great opportunity to network and have interesting conversations with interesting people. It is one of the core benefits of being at GDC. Personally, I don’t think I made the most of the networking time and opportunities. If I were to go again, it would be something I would be more intentional about. For instance, finding the right afterparties to go to and setting up meetings between sessions. However, I think this would be most useful for video game creatives and harder for the tabletop lot.

In conclusion:

I loved my experience at GDC
I loved San Francisco
GDC was definitely much more useful for video game developers.
Some of the talks might be worth accessing on the vault.
GDC is too expensive to be accessible for most indie developers.
However, this high price point does mean that the people who do go are generally committed and professional.

GDC was wild and our brains are full!! We can’t wait to meet more board game lovers as the year goes on as we prepare to launch our KickStarter later this year!

For now follow our prelaunch page and sign up to the mailing-list below 🚀💌