I do think it’s odd that the only female designers on my radar are both trans women, and one of them retired already. Otherwise it’s all guys.
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I did similar the other day and came away with 15 of 188 games (counting multiple versions of games - like EXIT and SH:CD - only once).
Only 3 of them are solely by female designers (Irish Guage, Tussie Mussie, and Consentacle). Hell, there are more games where the female designer is related to one of the other designers.
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Yeah, there’s a giant warehouse around the corner from where I saw them. I often see them in bunches, but hadn’t seen a river that long before.
The proximity of the warehouse, and the income profile of the surrounding area means there are at least six overlapping four hour delivery windows for same and next day delivery. I had a package delivered (per email timing) at 5:40 this morning, which was ordered at 10:30 last night.
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I only follow two female designers: Amabel Holland and Sophia Wagner.
I had a look at my collection and it looks like I have a few games with female (co-)designers.
- Claudia Hely for Santiago
- Aya Taguchi for Little Town
- Brigitte Ditt for Bites
- Bowen Simmons for Napoleon’s Triumph
- Erin Escobedo for Meltwater
- Molly Glover for Battle for Rokugan
- Rosanna Leocata for Terra Nova
- Suzanne Goldberg for Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series
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This was one of the points that came up during our discussion at lunch today. So once again existing inequalities are perpetuated…
I also think the number of people who make a living as boardgame authors is extremely small–compared to so many other markets. One might have thought a decade+ of growth and crowfunding might change things but despite everything this is still a very niche market with a very limited number of opportunities/jobs most of those “taken” by the people who have worked in the industry for 20+ years.
Admittedly, I have not been following many channels recently where I might have noticed if someone were making an effort to change things. For a while, when I was more actively trying to write, I saw a lot of calls from agents for books from groups that were not well represented among SFF authors for example… and I have read quite a few books that came to be through that and thought the genre became the richer for it.
Sadly, it feels to me as if boardgames lag behind the progress that other areas of popculture have enjoyed. But than maybe a comparison with books is a bit unfair. The audience for books is huge and each book a significantly smaller investment of time and money than a boardgame. So the risk of trying someone unknown is smaller. I should know–my willingness to risk a game of unknown provenance has declined with every game I have sold again.
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Sadly, I could think that being a smaller industry than others, it might suffer more from it.
Thanks for bringing this up, from your post I take that I like games with female designers, I love Battle for Rokugan and Cryptid. I must admit that from the top of my head, I can only think of a game in my collection with a woman as a designer (co-designer) with Townsfolk Tussle, and it has not reached me yet. And not in my collection, I can only think of Wingspan and Mariposas…
Thanks, by bringing it up you’ve made me more aware of this, and that is always a good thing. I know I will be checking my collection later on to see if I have any others.
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I’ve seen a lot of effort over the last few years to get game art and content away from “appeals to adolescent boys” (at my first Essen in 2012 there were a lot more improbably-endowed women on game covers for example), so it’s a shame this hasn’t followed.
(And yes “but Wingspan!”, but one Elizabeth Hargrave doesn’t make a summer.)
Looking at my own collection:
- Cats’ Mansion (1/2)
- Gladius (1/2)
- Shogunate
So that’s basically one fully female-designed game, plus two female co-designers, out of 160-odd games.
I’m more willing to take a chance on a small cheap game (which is why I have Gladius even though it’s the first game for basically everyone involved) than on the sort of huge expensive kickstarter that’s more likely to have the advertising budget to come to my attention.
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I just had a scroll through my games on BGG to look at this, and the results are very depressing. I make it ~2% female-named designers/co-designers.
Tangentially I noted that there were a lot of female artists credited though. I didn’t keep a tally, but it felt maybe around 50% of the games had a female-named artist.
I find it interesting that there appears to be part of the creative process of producing a board game that is more open, and one that is skewing to a very uneven ratio (based on admittedly very little evidence and a rather cursory assessment).
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Same here, I had a look during breakfast break, and out of about 55 games I own plus a few pre-ordered through crowdfunding, only 5 had female designers, and only one was female only, Flipology. There is definitely a lot more female artists as @Scribbs mentioned, which is good, but I am not sure if the rate is close to 50% on my list. I’d say over a third for sure, and on many occasions paired or grouped with at least a male name, if not more.
So plenty of room for improvement.
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Definitely, art has got better and there are now more female artists and illustrators at least. Beth Sobel has done some fantastic stuff just recently. Railroad Ink, Petrichor, Oceans, Honeybuzz & Welcome To, Flourish, Sub Terra all have female artists. A lot of the boardgametables titles have women working on them. Roxley apparently has a female inhouse designer or so it feels when looking at Lina Cossette’s profile. A lot of Dixit cards were apparently illustrated by one female illustrator that one could consider–given the importance of the art in those games–it co-designed by a woman. There are definitely a lot more examples here. This is a nice development.
It may be easier to get into the illustration side of things. There may also just be more women already doing illustrations and art anyway and so it is easier to try and “also” do some stuff for boardgames.
I just think that every once in a while it’s good to pay a little attention. (I read an article related to this. I didn’t like the article much but at least it got me thinking)
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Remember the fish flinging incident? Well, it’s ongoing. Apparently since early last summer at least, and everyone living nearby is aware of the problem. The fish flinger has been accosted on numerous occasions, and fled, and the switch to drive-by flinging is a result of that. One neighbour gave me a photo of his car, and a description of the driver. I noticed several “don’t feed cats here” signs around the neighborhood.
The police were useless. Apparently it can’t be considered littering, and our city, specifically, has no laws against feeding stray cats, regardless of mess and leftovers. Other cities do have such laws. The police offered to try and find the guy to warn him, but that was probably just to get rid of me. The only thing we can do is record him in the act, and try to sue for stress and damages, but that’s a long and potentially expensive process, and we aren’t going to catch him in the act any time soon.
So, we continue to clean up fish and bloodied fish heads when we find them.
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The goal should be to intercept fish bits and toss them into the open window of his car.
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I’d swear there was an old Nintendo handheld videogame in the 80s that followed that concept to a degree…
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Okay everyone. We had a good run, but it’s all coming to an end. 2022 is trying to outdo the past two years.
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Yeah, I didn’t have “Poisonous rock breaks releasing 1000 year old 7-tailed kitsune” on my bingo card for 2022 but here we are.
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Well, yeah, that’s obvious. But if you had a Nine-tailed one, you win!
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Doh, I did of course mean 9-tailed 
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I heard a good one the other day: “2022 it’s been the best one in the trilogy so far…”
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Huh. Just did the latest BGG contest (Marvel Legendary: Doctor Strange and the Shadows of Nightmare). Couldn’t get the Upper Deck site to work on my fairly paranoid browser setup, so I answered at random (except for looking up the release year of the base game). 5/5.
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Meh, being blindfold in the dark is cheatin’.
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