Once, in a group of other game designers working to get our first designs signed by publishers (i.e.: unpublished designers), someone asked “what do you all call yourselves, since you’re not published? I’m struggling with what to call myself when people ask.”
Ever the smartass, I quipped “I think all of us who design games should go with ‘Game Designer’. But once I’m published, I’ll transition to ‘Published Game Designer’, and hopefully soon after to ‘Prolific Game Designer’ ;)”
In that vein, I’m excited to belatedly announce, with tongue firmly in cheek, that I’m officially an “Award Winning Game Designer”
A while back, Atlas Games ran a design contest for games that used their Letter Head deck. It’s a quite clever deck of alphabet cards, with a cryptographic (English) frequency distribution of letter counts of cards and their point values. The effect of this is that almost any 5- or 7- card hand is almost guaranteed to have an English word in it. It’s a pretty fun effect when dealing out test hands. So I did some brainstorming and threw my hat in the ring.
I came up with a little ditty about Shakespearean wordplay, which I called Draw! Beat Down Their Weapons! And it turns out the contest judges liked it! I was one of the winners, and D! BDTW! is included in the downloadable content for customers who have bought Letter Head decks!
Cool!
You can read about the contest, Letter Head, and access the PDF with all the winning designs here!