Finding Lost & Found: Designer's Notes from the Process of Creating a Jewish Game for Learning

Lost & Found is a cooperative-competitive strategy game, later paired with a party-game companion, designed to teach medieval Jewish law, specifically Maimonides' laws of lost property in the Mishneh Torah (1180) and related Talmudic sources such as Sanhedrin 17b and Kiddushin 29a. Developed by Owen Gottlieb through ConverJent at CLAL beginning in 2011, the project treats game design as a dual process in which engaging mechanics must be balanced against educational goals. The account is grounded in more than three years of internal meeting notes, prototypes, and playtesting rather than formal human-subjects research, and the designers pursued a modular structure intended to eventually incorporate Islamic legal texts.

The central design challenge was reconciling the law's tension between communal obligation and protection of individuals from undue burden. The team judged existing cooperative and "coopetition" models, including Pandemic and Shadows Over Camelot, insufficient for this purpose. Their solutions included win conditions requiring the cooperative construction of communal goals alongside individual family goals, hidden progress tracks, multiple win states including an all-lose outcome, and a redefinition of winning as "living a good life," expressed through secret "Acts of Meaning." A chance-driven "Heshbon" deck was used to model legal risk and prosocial behavior, and early resource-management systems were deliberately reduced so that event-driven trade-offs carried the gameplay. The designers argue this approach avoids the common Eurogame problem of theme disconnected from mechanics.

The notes also situate the work within related scholarship and design practice, citing Phelps et al. (2016) on sacrifice choices in Troubled Lands and the suggestion of "Legacy" games as a model for permanent state change across play sessions. The prototype was playtested roughly weekly from January 2015 until the design was locked in December 2015.