Today we’d like to introduce you to Clarence Simpson.
Hi Clarence, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Games and game design have always been an important part of my life. I grew up in the 1980’s playing all the classic board and card games with my dad – Chess, Monopoly, Life, Scrabble, and Uno, to name a few. Later, I expanded out into some of the more niche corners of tabletop gaming at the time – Dungeons & Dragons, Axis and Allies, and even tried to get into a hex-and-counter wargame or two.
In middle-school I got my first itch to actually design games. I tried being a Game Master for a D&D game for the first time. I designed dungeons for my dad to adventure through, stocking them with monsters, traps, puzzles, and treasure. Around that same time, I also created my own dungeon-crawling board game. I scribbled rules, stats, descriptions, and sketches for a whole slew of weapons, items, and monsters onto a stack of loose-leaf papers that I remember being obsessed with for a time.
In college I studied Computer Science and my focus shifted entirely to video games, launching a decades-long career in video game development at various local game developers. But there was always something that kept drawing me back to the tabletop. There’s a certain magic to the human social interactions and tactile play in tabletop games that video games just can’t replicate.
In 2009, I discovered The Game Crafter, a new company that was offering print-on-demand board games. Suddenly, anyone could become a board game designer by just uploading some images and ordering a printed product. That spurred me to try and create my own board game for the first time in 15 years. But I had no community or industry connections and my one design never went anywhere, though it was fun to toy with for a time.
Then, in 2019, at a local board game convention, I met some people from the Game Designers of North Carolina. That’s when I learned that local designers met together just minutes from my house in weekly public meetings, and some of their designs were on store shelves around the country. Suddenly, I’m thinking that if these people can do it, surely I can too! That chance meeting became the start of my most recent and most serious journey into tabletop game design.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Breaking into the world of tabletop game design is very difficult. There are far more designers pitching games than there are publishers looking to license games from designers.
For my first published game, Merchants of Magick, I pitched it to almost 50 publishers before finally getting a contract offer. In the years since then, I’ve become a little more well-known in the industry, and it’s become easier to pitch to publishers, but 95% of my pitches still end in rejection. This is an industry where it’s a numbers game. You just have to get used to those rejections, not take it personally, and keep trying until you find a match.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I love designing a wide variety of styles and genres of tabletop games, and I love to never do the same thing twice. I’ve designed everything from simple party games that can be taught in 60 seconds flat, to complex 90-minute strategy games with many intertwined mechanical systems.
I’m most well-known for designing Merchants of Magick, The Wolves, Chomp, A Message From the Stars, Beasts, and VNTYPL8S. My biggest success has been The Wolves, which was localized into 15 different languages and sold many thousands of copies around the world, including being named the 2023 Dutch Game of the Year.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
My designs are published under a licensing agreement where I earn royalties from every sale. So, buying any of my games from their various publishers helps support my work as a game designer.
I’ve now worked professionally with many different board game publishers as a game designer, game developer, and rules editor. I am always looking to work with other board game publishers and even companies outside of the board game industry that might want to commission a custom board game for various reasons.
Pricing:
- Commissioned Board Game Design
- Board Game Development
- Board Game Consulting
- (contact for pricing)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/131052/clarence-simpson
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarence-simpson-5291145/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stoichamster
- Other: https://gdofnc.herokuapp.com/users/clarence-simpson
