Analogue Co-Design: Opportunities, Challenges and Other Nuances

This article brings together a roundtable discussion among analogue board game designers, namely the sibling-style partnerships of Inka and Markus Brand and Isra and Shei of Llama Dice, to examine co-design as a creative practice. Its central argument is that collaboration, rather than solitary authorship, produces stronger games through negotiation, debate, and the introduction of fresh perspectives. Both teams report that co-design has been their only mode of working, and both reject gender as a meaningful factor in how ideas are weighed, insisting that contributions are judged on merit. The designers also raise a recurring frustration: outside audiences often misattribute credit to the male partner in each duo.

The discussion offers practical findings that frame co-design as a sustainable professional strategy. Designers advise playing widely, persevering through long development timelines, and relying on teamwork, since publishers seek one strong core idea and co-designers provide valuable testing capacity and iteration. Markus and Inka recount roughly seven years before their first publication, and the participants identify marketing as the most demanding challenge given the volume of releases each year. Being a design couple is described as beneficial for publisher relations and workload sharing, while the designers distinguish between helpers who serve a designer's vision and true co-designers who shape the core concept.

The scope of the discussion is centered on independent analogue game designers working in the contemporary tabletop industry, with commentary drawn from published roundtable exchanges. The designers prioritize work they personally enjoy over publisher briefs, favoring passion-driven and flexible schedules over commercial pressure, and most declined to design war games. The article situates these reflections within co-design, participatory research, and serious game scholarship.