GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Tabletop Summit: Early-Access Tabletop: How Adapting Digital-Game Methods Built Arcs
Cole Wehrle (Creative Director, Leder Games, Wehrlegig Games)
Josh Yearsley (Editor and Game Developer, Leder Games)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Design
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
Over the past decade, Leder Games has been developing a new "early access" approach to tabletop game design. This method has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful games in the hobby tabletop market. In this presentation, creative director Cole Wehrle and editor and game developer Josh Yearsley talk about the studio's history with this approach and how it transformed the games we make. We'll start with a general overview of the unique role of crowdfunding in tabletop and how it built on and professionalized a tradition of community-driven design work. We'll briefly cover the creation of Root and its expansions, then discuss how we scaled up those processes during the development of Oath and how we put these methods to the test with our most ambitious project yet, the newly released science fiction game Arcs.
Takeaway
Board games require players to understand the rules. In adapting "early access" processes to tabletop design, we have begun to articulate a new set of rules for game development. Attendees will learn some of the hard-won lessons of this process and how they can be applied to their own work.
Intended Audience
This talk is aimed at tabletop game creators who are interested in increasing their playtesting base or are interested in tackling large-scale projects that would benefit from multi-year development cycles. It is also aimed at digital game developers who rely on "early access" game development.
