Think Like A Game Designer

About Luke Peterschmidt
Luke Peterschmidt is a brilliant leader in the tabletop gaming industry who currently serves as the Head of Active Category Management at Asmodee. In this uniquely structured role, Luke has been managing the legendary The Lord of the Rings™ portfolio. Right now, I am incredibly lucky to be working directly with him as we partner up to launch The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ on Gamefound this July 14th, 2026. Luke and I have a long history of debating, discussing, and collaborating on projects across the industry, such as Bakugan. In this episode, we unpack the massive operational challenges of stewarding a world as foundational as Middle-earth, how to lead high-performing teams by getting completely out of their way, and how our creative roles must evolve as we scale up our careers. Plus, if you are catching this as it drops, Luke and I are hitting the stage together for a couple of panels at San Diego Comic-Con 2026!
Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways
* The Pressure of Caring a Lot: Nobody wants to be the designer who goes down in history as the one who botched a legendary world like The Lord of the Rings™. Every single designer who touches an intellectual property of this magnitude feels that exact same weight. Creating inside a universe you personally worship is an unbelievable mix of intense excitement and raw terror, and it leads to a lot of sleepless nights trying to make something great. At the same time, that fear is a feature, not a bug. You want to hunt for the specific creative projects that scare you just enough to force you out of your comfort zone and push you to build a masterpiece.
* Strategy is Saying No to Easy Money: True corporate or creative strategy has absolutely nothing to do with hitting a random quarterly budget number; it’s about having the discipline to turn down fast cash if it derails your ultimate vision. You have to define a strategic roadmap so crystal-clear that anyone on your team can look you in the eye, throw your own words back in your face, and tell you “no” and you have to completely agree with them. If a quick, short-term win pulls your focus away from your long-term destination, you have to let it go.
* Look for Strengths, Not Weaknesses: We waste way too much mental energy trying to patch up our minor flaws instead of ruthlessly exploiting our core superpowers. In game design, a product with a few visible imperfections but a mind-blowing, uniquely memorable hook is infinitely better than a perfectly polished, completely smooth pearl that has absolutely nothing special to say. The exact same rule applies to your life. Stop agonizing over your baseline weaknesses, and instead just build a killer team or find the right tools to handle them, and pour 100% of your focus into what makes you exceptional.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

About Ben Seck
Ben Seck is an absolute titan of global game development and competitive play whose career path is an masterclass in strategic execution. Ben and I go back nearly 30 years to our early days on the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour circuit, where he won a Grand Prix in Cape Town and scored a legendary Pro Tour top eight. Unlike most of our old-school peers, Ben is still actively crushing tournaments competitively today. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the R&D trenches at Upper Deck Entertainment during the wild-west era of the Versus System card game, both eventually shifting from pure game design into brand and product management . While I left to bootstrap Stone Blade, Ben strategically expanded his toolkit by jumping into the digital free-to-play explosion at Zynga. Since then, he has served as a senior leader and executive at some of the biggest entertainment powerhouses on earth (including Walt Disney, King, and Scopely) and is currently the Head of New Games at Gram Games in London. He has managed teams of hundreds and launched massive digital projects played by tens of millions of users globally. In this episode, we break down how to treat your creative career like a game you intend to win, the massive structural differences between tabletop and digital monetization, and what real leadership looks like when you’re managing massive teams across corporate environments.
If you are interested in working with me directly on your project, and learning from my mistakes rather than making your own, you can join my Think Like a Game Designer: Design Lab.
Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways
* How to "Game" Your Career: To game your career, you have to be completely at peace with the fact that games are a commercial art form where understanding how to sell your product is a vital piece of the puzzle. Don't let yourself get stuck in a comfortable routine . Push your boundaries by chasing high-growth markets, and whenever you hit a gap in your knowledge, relentlessly ask questions and learn on someone else's dime. Ben and I took completely different paths (him in corporate mobile and me bootstrapping an indie studio) but we both used calculated risks to minimize dead draws and massively increase our surface area for positive luck. Ultimately, the true metric of success isn't a fancy corporate title; it's whether you effortlessly get out of bed because you're genuinely excited about the work you get to do.
* The Lifespan and Cadence of Digital Complexity: A massive misconception in tabletop circles is that free-to-play mobile titles are inherently “simple” games. The reality is that digital titles don’t have less complexity; they just allocate their complexity points across a much longer timeline. Up front, your onboarding funnel is brutally tight, and if you don’t hook a casual player in the first two minutes, they delete the app forever. That said, once a user is plays regularly after a month or two, their tolerance for systemic depth sky-rockets. The secret is using universal themes and recognizable cultural tropes as an anchor so players get systems for free, allowing you to steadily layer in immense complexity over years without alienating your audience.
* Culture Over Hierarchy: Leading teams at scale, whether it’s an intimate indie squad or a studio of 170 people, means abandoning rigid, top-down corporate hierarchies. Especially in a hybrid work environment, a leader’s primary job is to intentionally construct a culture that keeps people from hiding in their silos. You want to explicitly carve out unstructured whiteboarding spaces on Zoom or over office lunches to protect that organic, big-brain creative spark which calendars can kill. Your team needs to see through your consistent, daily actions that you will fiercely advocate for their interests and back them up when decisions are made behind closed doors.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

About Ivan Van Norman
Ivan Van Norman is a true powerhouse of indie tabletop publishing and media innovation, bringing over 15 years of deep industry expertise to the table. Our paths cross all the way back to the very first year Gen Con introduced Entrepreneur’s Alley, where our tiny 10x10 booths were literally shoved into the back corner of the convention hall, facing a wall right next to the food court. While I was out there hawking the first print run of Ascension, Ivan was launching Hunters Entertainment. Since then, Ivan has carved out an incredible track record, serving as an executive producer and host at Geek & Sundry during the wild dawn of the web-streaming boom, helping lay the early foundational blocks for massive cultural phenomena like Critical Role, and co-owning Hunters Entertainment. He’s the publisher behind brilliant, boundary-pushing projects like the silent, text-messaging RPG Alice Is Missing. In this episode, we discuss the brutal realities of transitioning from a broke creator to a successful studio owner, how shifting mediums completely transform the mechanics of storytelling, and why your graveyard of discarded ideas is secretly your greatest design asset.
Ah-ha! Justin’s Takeaways
* Everybody Prepares You for Failure, Nobody Prepares You for Success: When you’re broke and just starting out, you are completely free to take massive risks because you have absolutely nothing to lose. However, the moment an indie project hits it big, the landscape completely flips. Ivan shares a wild reality check about running his first hit Kickstarter as a sole proprietor and suddenly getting hit with a massive personal tax bill he didn’t see coming. Success brings structural obligations to payroll, to investors, and to an audience that wants you to repeat your tricks.
* The Medium is the Mechanic: If you want your creative stories to break through the modern cultural noise, you have to design explicitly for the technology where your audience actually lives. Felicia Day and Geek & Sundry did it by leveraging the wild west of early YouTube and Twitch to unlock long-form TTRPG streaming. Alice Is Missing did it by turning a standard smartphone group text into an intensely emotional narrative engine. During our chat, Ivan’s insights actually inspired me start work on a brand-new design concept right at the table: how to build an ultra-short-form video RPG engineered entirely for Shorts, Reels, and Twitch.
* Less Money Equals More Radical Execution: Starting out broke right out of college gives you a massive, counterintuitive edge, because without a cash cushion, you are forced into a level of radical execution you just can't fake. Ivan and I launched right in a brutal recession, building display tables out of inventory boxes and dragging ammo cans down the hot streets of Indianapolis. That said, the real secret to surviving over the long haul as a serial entrepreneur is a beautiful touch of amnesia. We are naturally wired to avoid pain, and if you perfectly remembered the bone-deep exhaustion and near-failures of a launch, you'd never take a big risk again. You need that selective memory loss to trick yourself into thinking "this next launch will be smooth" just to find the sheer audacity to stand at the starting line again. It acts as a psychological shock absorber, wiping away the baggage of past failures so you can always approach a blank sheet of paper with total confidence.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

About Zvi
My history with Zvi Mowshowitz goes back over 20 years to our days as teammates on the Magic Pro Tour, where we won a Grand Prix and top-8ed a Pro Tour together. After his competitive gaming career and a stint designing games at Wizards of the Coast and heading up a Cyberpunk TCG design team in Denver, Zvi took his unique systems-thinking mind into high-stakes finance. He managed risk as a professional bookmaker in sports betting, traded crypto for a hedge fund, and worked quantitative trading desks at firms like Jane Street. Today, he’s focused his incredible intellect on the world of artificial intelligence, writing five times a week at his blog, Don’t Worry About the Vase, tracking the breakneck evolution of large language models and the critical safety challenge of AI alignment. In this episode, we dive deep into the math of pattern recognition, our wild days on the Pro Tour, the high-stress realities of trading, and how to navigate the massive societal shifts coming with AI. Zvi delivers insights on rationality and adaptability that will resonate with anyone trying to think clearly in a rapidly changing world.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

About Nate Heiss
Nate Heiss is a true game design chameleon. His 25-plus year career spans from competitive Magic: The Gathering play to designing iconic cards like Goblin Guide at Wizards of the Coast. He then took those skills into the AAA video game world, working as a designer and creative director at studios like LucasArts and PopCap on massive mobile hits like Plants vs. Zombies Heroes. Nate and I have been geeking out about game design since we met on the Magic Pro Tour in the late 90s, and now we’re finally teaming up on Gundam Assemble, an upcoming tabletop skirmish miniatures game. In this episode, we dive deep into the differences between physical and digital design, the ethics and realities of free-to-play business models, and how to capture the elusive magic of discovery in an internet age. Nate delivers profound insights that will resonate with anyone building games or trying to navigate a creative career.
Justin’s Ah-Ha! Moments
* The Shift From Player to Designer Mindset: Nate and I discuss a classic trap many pro players fall into when they start designing: trying to "beat" the players. It's easy to bring a competitive ego into R&D and focus on squashing dominant strategies to prove how smart you are. But great design isn't about winning; it's about crafting a fun experience. Once you soften that competitive edge, you realize your true goal is to empower players to make their own discoveries.
* The Economics of Free-to-Play Dictate Design: We tackle the controversial topic of free-to-play games. Nate points out that companies succeeding in this space aren't necessarily making "better" games; they are mastering live service and content costs. If a studio can "turn the crank" and produce engaging content at a fraction of the cost, they gain a massive competitive advantage. It shifts the design problem from just making an great game (which is table stakes) to efficiently delivering ongoing value over time.
* Roguelikes are the Modern Gold Rush: I've always wanted to recreate the feeling of opening an early Magic pack—when nobody knew the optimal strategies and everything felt like an untamed frontier. Nate brilliantly identifies that roguelikes are where this feeling lives today. By taking a core loop and exploding it into a massive, randomized possibility space on every run, roguelikes force players to adapt and experiment, capturing that communal feeling of discovery over and over again.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe