When Ian Zang (in blue shirt) was a teacher, he saw his students “building out their social skills through play. At a certain point, I wondered if I could design new concepts on my own.” He’s since published five games and helped develop several dozen more. | J. Adrian Wylie
But these aren’t old favorites like Monopoly. These are board games invented by some of those in attendance. Their creators brought them to Sylvan Factory, a hobby store in Westgate, to have others test them out.
Sam Marcus is getting feedback on Green Thumbs, a cooperative game where players work together to solve a positional puzzle and transform a dirt- and crabgrass-filled lot into an herb garden. Marcus’s eleven-year-old child, Avery, who helped develop many of the cards, is playing it with Bruce Bielawa.
A quality assurance engineer from Dexter, Bielawa has several board game prototypes of his own in development, including Slow Motion Collapse, whose players send drones to an underground compound to rescue materials from a research facility. Today, though, he’s a “play tester.” He observes that one card in Green Thumbs may not play the way the Marcuses intend and may need to be removed or expanded.
“It’s very invigorating to have new insights on your own idea that you wouldn’t necessarily see sitting in a room by yourself,” says Bielawa, who organized today’s Michigame Design Lab. “It takes actually trying it out with other people. It’s kind of magical.”
“Game design is a very greedy hobby,” says Marcus, whose day job is in medical records. “If you have ten hours, it will happily take twelve.” He’s also the chief organizer of Protospiel Michigan, a gamer gathering that drew eighty attendees to its July 2025 event.
Ian Zang got involved when he was a teacher and saw the power games had for his students, particularly those who were more introspective. “I saw a lot of success with them building out their social skills through play,” he says. “At a certain point, I wondered if I could design new concepts on my own.”
Now working remotely as a corporate trainer at a Maryland technology company, Zang has five published games and has helped develop several dozen more. But he says you generally won’t get rich developing games—he typically makes several thousand dollars per year, and sometimes nothing at all.
“We game designers do this for the love of the process,” he says. “Getting to see people have fun with your games is worth its weight in gold.”
Zang also appreciates the community around the hobby. “The great thing about being a board game designer is that we’re not really competing against each other, because the people who want to play board games want a variety of things, and the more cool things that we can make collaboratively, the better off we’re all going to be. So it’s a very collaborative space that I just fell in love with.”
But Marcus sees a fundamental problem: “It’s a white dude field,” he says.
Elizabeth Hargrave, who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, is the most renowned woman in the board game industry, and game development is her full-time job. She traces the dearth of women back to the male-centric culture of Dungeons & Dragons and a professional tournament scene that was “super unfriendly to women.”
In Hargrave’s game Wingspan, players compete to attract a diverse array of birds to their wildlife preserve. Its pastel aesthetics are “coded in a way that’s inviting,” she says. It’s sold two million copies since it was published in 2019. “It takes just a couple of women coming to design groups and not walking away because they’re the only ones,” she says.
Another challenge is that many game parts are designed in China. The Trump tariffs are hurting the industry, Bielawa says, and some publishers are going out of business. “It’s really dicey now,” he adds, perhaps not recognizing the pun, and “a lot will be on hold.”
One of the most-published designers to work with the Michigame Design Lab is Christopher Chan, an art director who was a regular from 2022 until he moved to Toronto this past February. Chan sold his first game, The Night Cage, in 2019. Barnes and Noble agreed to carry it, and it’s now in its fourth printing.
Chan says that splitting the royalties with his codesigners, Chris McMahon and Rosswell Saunders, he has earned roughly $40,000. But it’s not about the money for him.
“Everything about it is thrilling,” Chan says. “Seeing it in Barnes & Noble never gets old.”