From the Team
If you are still following along with our monthly updates, thanks! This is our third newsletter, and I (Jon) am still trying to get a feel for how casual I should be. (Most of my writing tends to be heavy, footnote-laden historical treatises, so freeform monthly letters are both nice and a bit terrifying.) As usual, there’s a lot of ground to cover in this edition. It’s good to have you with us along the way!
Updates – A Lot of Them!
First, crowdfunding! If you read last month’s updates, you know that we had a crowdfunding campaign for Making History and Witch Hunt 1649 start July 8th on BackerKit. If this is news to you, check it out here. You can follow the link to pledge, too! As I write this newsletter, over 140 people have already pledged to support this project…and we are over 75% of the way towards achieving our goal!
Second, we have a new video for Making History! Filmed back in May and produced on campus at CMU, its aim is to teach you how to play the game while concealing its interesting twists. You can find that video on our YouTube channel here.
Third, I bring some developments and news from travels! A few weeks ago, I was in Minnesota for some family functions and had the chance to run Five Hundred Year Old Vampire at The Source Comic and Games. It was a fun run with a great group of people. I also had a surprise visit from Damon Stone, who happened to be in the area. (If you don’t know Damon’s work, you should check him out and his recently released DC Forever game!)
I also had the opportunity to drop off a copy of an original copy of Witch Hunt 1649 with Liz Davidson while I was there. Our prototype of the revised edition has been delayed, so we used the original for a How to Play video. This was less than ideal, but we needed to figure out how to show supporters the gameplay and stick to our deadline for launching the crowdfunding campaign. Liz did an amazing job with the video, especially considering how busy she is at Leder Games currently!
Other miscellaneous updates:
- June saw progress on the Art and System: Games for Expanded Play series, which will begin crowdfunding in October. You can find that announcement here.
- Tracy and Kyla attended Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio, and had a great time with our Dungeon Dragon, Eugenia. For pictures, check out our Facebook page!
- To continue our Dungeon office theme, our new storage area in the basement of Anspach got dubbed the Lair. After all, it does hold our horde of games. (Thank you for the idea, Veronica!)
- We held a wildly successful Break Our Games event at Modern Explorer’s Guild in Midland, MI. We will not be hosting this event in July. Look for announcements about the upcoming August session!
- We worked on recruiting incoming CMU students to the Game Design Thinking Minor during orientation days on campus.
- We continued work on a museum exhibit on the history of games with the CMU Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
That might be everything. . . oh wait, no, there are other things. I just can’t talk about them yet. 🙂
Suffice it to say, it has been a busy June!
Plans for July
July also aims to be busy, between the crowdfunding campaign, preparations for Gen Con, and hosting our first-ever game-design jam on Beaver Island. The game jam is small this year to see how it works. (It is an event prototype, if you will.)
For those who are unfamiliar with Beaver Island, it is the largest island in Lake Michigan and one of the most remote places in the U.S. It has a pretty fascinating history, too! CMU has a biological research station on the island, which they are letting us occupy for a week. It is a beautiful, rustic setting. (Did I mention rustic? I kid you not, people have signs up warning that the mosquitoes may carry you away if you aren’t careful.) The space is truly gorgeous and will give all the designers-in-residence a week to design and playtest with each other while enjoying an absolutely beautiful beach and hiking opportunities. We will make sure no mosquitos carry them (or their games) away.
Our July is designing at Beaver Island, continuing the crowdfunding campaign (go follow!), and prepping for Gen Con. For the more interesting part of this update, I pass the talking stick to Liv, who did a profile piece on Veronica this month.
July Spotlight: Veronica Gregory
By Liv O’Toole, CMich Press
If you ever find yourself floating around the basement of Anspach when meetings, proofreads, and playtests are somehow all happening at once, chances are you’re in Veronica’s orbit. She moves through her role as Coordinator of Outreach for the CLGS with the kind of grounded enthusiasm that makes you feel like everything is under control, even in the moments where life is doing what life does best. She’s the eldest of six siblings, which means she grew up with built-in players for every game, a full party for every quest. “I have fond memories of playing with all of them as we grew up,” she said. “And this undoubtedly led me to the career I have today.”
Play, for Veronica, isn’t just an interest or a field of study. It’s the pulse beneath everything she does. Her job title at the Center for Learning through Games and Simulations is Coordinator of Outreach, but that’s a narrow label for someone whose role requires agility, insight, patience, and good humor. She moves between proofreading, playtesting, social media production, and crowdfunding for CMich Press with a calm that belies the chaos. And she makes time to talk to people. Not just pitch, not just promote, but talk. “One of my favorite parts of my job is reaching out and making connections with partners on campus and beyond,” she said. “Right now, we have a couple of initiatives in development which will lead to some exciting events this fall semester!”
Veronica is an alum of CMU twice over, having passed through both the undergraduate and graduate history programs, with a sideline in enhancing every space she touched. As a student, she helped design an escape room on campus. As a historical interpreter at Colonial Michilimackinac, she noticed that what visitors really wanted was to play, so she built a scavenger hunt, “giving the historic site a new ‘skin’ to help visiting students and families learn about the American Revolution in an active way.”
The phrase “a new skin” gets at something essential in Veronica’s approach: her ability to reframe the familiar, to find the structure underneath the surface. History is not just something we inherit, it’s something we can inhabit. Veronica knows this instinctively. She’s a believer in scaffolding, both literal and metaphorical, saying, “In my work, I have always come back to the idea of play and the unique opportunities for learning through storytelling and games.”
She is now a volunteer with PoWeR! Book Bags, a Michigan nonprofit that creates literacy kits for low-income families, but as a multimedia designer contractor, she helped develop a bilingual storytelling card game designed to support early childhood development. “Play is an essential part of life. . .whether that looks like someone babbling with a baby to practice their language skills, toddlers acting out stories with finger puppets, or a child stacking blocks to represent a whole new world growing in their mind,” she said.
This is a throughline in every story she tells: That people learn best when they’re invited to participate. “Humans learn through stories and are hardwired to play,” she said. “And I love that both of these ideas are inherent in my work with the CLGS.”
It takes a particular kind of brain to manage outreach at a center like CLGS; one foot in the academic, one foot in the imaginative, and perpetually elbow-deep in a Canva file. Veronica fits the mold not by contorting herself to it, but by reshaping it altogether. That’s what makes her such a natural fit at the CLGS. She brings a taste for what makes people feel welcome and a knack for making complex ideas accessible. You’ll find her always with her eye on what makes a game click, not just in mechanics, but in meaning. Her love of role-playing games and social deduction has translated into a genuine appreciation for collaboration over competition. To her, every good game is just a story looking for someone to co-author it.
Her own favorite games reflect this preference for participation. She gravitates toward social deduction and role-playing titles; murder mystery dinners, anything where strategy and storytelling bleed together. “I like to boast that I am actually a very good ‘loser’ of games,” she said. “Choosing collaboration over competition and preferring to soak up some good storytelling over winning.”
It’s not a surprising sentiment, but it’s a revealing one. Veronica is here to connect. To help people find their way into the material. “Talking about games sometimes feels like a ‘cheat code’ towards becoming acquainted and finding a space to start having a real conversation with someone,” she explained. “In some cases, talking about games seems to bring out a secret, playful part of a person which they might think has to be hidden in their adult lives.”
Her work makes space for that secret self. And she does it not just through the outward-facing parts of the job, but also through the work that shapes the final product. “Players require clear, well-written rules to understand how to play the game and have a good gameplay experience,” she said. “Likewise, they need to be able to digest these rules when they are combined with an engaging graphic design.” Her eye for detail and her background in visual and textual editing help bridge the gap between intention and execution. In a field where a single unclear phrase can derail a playtest, this matters. A lot.
What stands out most about Veronica, though, is not the breadth of her skills, but the intentionality behind them. She is aware of the stakes of this work, not just its utility, but its emotional and social resonance. In every project she touches, there’s an undercurrent of care: “I am elated to be in the perfect place to continue educating through the experience of games and play.” It shows.