You designed Calico and Tumble Town.
Tell me a bit about them, and how do you came up with the ideas?
Okay, so Calico is a puzzly tile-laying game that uses hexes where you're making a quilt,
and trying to attract cats to your quilt.
Tumble Town is a dice-rolling, Western town-building game.
For each of those, they were a little different.
Tumble Town, I started with cubes; just stacking cubes as an idea, and they started looking like little buildings.
From there, I realized that they could be dice.
Once I found that out, it was a natural progression to use different colours and different numbers.
Since I travel around the West a lot, that was a design space that I wanted to go into.
For Calico, I was working with the idea of hexes going around in a circle,
and having the centre be some type of goal that you're trying to get.
I was working with different patterns on tiles, and different colours,
and just came up with the idea of you need two/three of a colour or pattern... that type of of stuff.
You're also a photographer.
Tell me a bit about that.
Yeah, so I have been doing photography... let's see... since 2004,
and nature photography specifically since about 2012.
I travel quite a bit.
I moved into a vehicle in 2012 just so I could be traveling as much as possible, and just be out in nature.
Yeah, so, let's see... about 10 months out of the year,
I'm out on the road in national forests and national parks taking pictures of landscape and wildlife,
and things like that.
Where exactly was your favourite place to visit?
I think the Eastern Sierras in California.
The ruggedness of the granite, and the dry, desert rugged mountains are probably my favourite thing to do.
So we're here right now at Dice Tower West 2020.
Could you explain it to those who have never been here?
Yeah, so Dice Tower West.
I think this is their second official Dice Tower West, and it's a five-day-long convention.
It goes Wednesday to Sunday, it's in a casino, and it's just a big open gaming room with a small exhibitor hall.
It's a lot of fun.
The library's open 24 hours, and it's a good time.
What was your favourite game to play here?
That's hard.
I've been playing a lot of prototypes.
Some of my friends here are designers too, so we've just been workshopping a lot of different games.
Right.
Thank you so much for doing this interview with me.
It was an honour.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
