tabletopgaming.co.uk 63for the game to work,” he says. “I avoided
releasing Fog of War for a number of years
because it needed 28 identical tanks with
rotating turrets per game.”
While being able to invest in improved tools
and technology has let Birnbaum increase
both the quality and quantity of his games, one
thing hasn’t changed over the years: Samuel is
still his “number one playtester”.
EASING DOES IT
In late 2016, Birnbaum released his latest project:
Q.E. Short for Quantitative Easing, a real-life
event where banks introduce more money into
an economy, the game applied a clever twist
to the auction format: players could bid any
amount of money they wanted to acquire
companies up for sale, but the person
who spent the most money at the end
of the game would be eliminated.
“I followed the 2007 nancial
crash closely; I read a lot on [ nance blog]
Zero Hedge and watched a lot on YouTube.
I learned what governments and banks do
to create money,” Birnbaum recalls. “What I
learned was eye-opening.
“I thought about the game Monopoly and all the
other money-collecting games where more money
is a good thing. en I thought about quantitative
easing and how it is a bad thing. en I thought:
‘What if the most money is a bad thing?’”
Q.E.’s sheer originality quickly helped it gather a
cult following and plaudits. Birnbaum reacted
by crowdfunding the money to create more copies
- all by hand – but stopped a second Kickstarter
early as the game’s popularity began to overwhelm
his ability to craft the number of sets required.
In early 2018, one fan of the game, Chad
DeShon, contacted Birnbaum about mass-
producing a non-wooden version of Q.E.
e new edition raised almost $60,000 on
Kickstarter from nearly 1,700 backers last year,
featuring cardboard pieces in place of the
original wood and a revised set of rules.
“Some changes will appear but none were
necessary,” Birnbaum says. “Chad wanted to
streamline the setup so that play gets going
quickly. We chatted and agreed that this was
possible. I have yet to see the nal ruleset.”
While Birnbaum re ects positively on
the experience of having Q.E. reimagined
and opens up to the possibility of his other
games being made more widely available –
“If someone else wants to make any of my
designs in some other way they just have to
ask,” he suggests – he is perfectly contentproducing small numbers of his games by
hand for the time being.
“My interest lies in making wooden games
in my workshop.”CUBIKO-GO
Birnbaum is already hard at work on his games
for 2019, having Kickstarted a tenth anniversary
edition of Cubiko last summer. After those
sets are in the hands of the 101 backers of that
campaign, he says, he has plans for a second
run of dexterity game Carreau, followed by the
release of combine-harvesting game MakeHay
in the middle of the year.
“I’ve designed more games than I could
ever have imagined and I will easily be able
to release a new game every year through the
2020s,” he predicts.
Even with some of his other games becoming
more notable – as well as Q.E., the designer
considers dice- icking game JamSumo his best-
known release – Birnbaum remains fond of the
game that started it all, ten years ago.
“I’m proud of all my games and it is di cult to
choose between them,” he says. “Cubiko is special
to me as it was my rst design, it won an award,
it has a fan club in Spain – and if it wasn’t
for Cubiko none of my other designs
would have seen the light of day.”release of combine-harvesting game
in the middle of the year.Even with some of his other games becoming
more notable – as well as
considers dice- icking game
known release – Birnbaum remains fond of the
game that started it all, ten years ago.
“I’m proud of all my games and it is di cult to
choose between them,” he says. “
to me as it was my rst design, it won an award,Cubikoboth the quality and quantity of his games, one
In late 2016, Birnbaum released his latest project:
Quantitative EasingQuantitative EasingQuantitative Easing, a real-life , a real-life
event where banks introduce more money into
an economy, the game applied a clever twist
to the auction format: players could bid any
amount of money they wanted to acquire
companies up for sale, but the person
who spent the most money at the end
of the game would be eliminated.
MonopolyMonopolyMonopoly and all the and all the
other money-collecting games where more money
is a good thing. en I thought about quantitative
How on
Earth do you
design a game?
Basically, I hope
that I get an idea.
If I do I drop
everything.
Birnbaum started out
by making games on his
kitchen table – he still
handcrafts them today, but
in a self-built workshop