How Important Are Designers?

Would you swap, say, Peter Hawes, for David and Phil Harding?

2026-03-19, by DrFriendless features

A couple of weeks ago I modified the downloader to resume gathering designers data, i.e. who designed each game. When I say resume, this particular implementation never did that, but the old one did. And now the new one does as well.

So since then I’ve been thinking what I might like to use that data for, and indeed what you might like to use that data for. Well one thing that has struck me since I’ve been AWOL from the hobby for a few years is that OMG Uwe Rosenberg must never sleep! He just keeps churning out games. The most recent game of his I had played until recently was Glass Road, and he has released 28 more since then. So what I would like would be:

Of course for the second I can go to BGG, but actually a list of my favourite designers is harder to make. Some are obvious: Knizia, Faidutti, the legends, but are there others whose games I play without really realising it?

It turns out there are. Who the heck is Frederic Henry? He designed The Builders, and Timeline - small box games which I’ve played quite a bit of. And Nate French? He designs card games based on franchises, e.g. “The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game”, and Marvel and Warhammer and Game of Thrones, etc. So he is very successful, I’m sure.

So with some sort of vague idea that I wanted to find out more of what I’m missing out on, I started designing the Designers page. It’s live now, and has replaced Updates under the Geek (rainbow) menu. Updates has gone to live under the Users menu with the other boring stuff.

Well anyway, enough blogging, I have to go check out about 200 games. And I’ve had another idea for a feature which has got me very excited, so I will be hard at work on that when Finances Friday is over.