Sunday, July 13, 2025 - 12:30pm to 3:30pm
For this 4-part series of workshops, we will explore tabletop game design! These are no-experience-required workshops that introduce attendees to making games with cards, dice, tokens, boards, or in the mind with plenty of rules!
Part 4: Writing Game Rules and Designing Game Books
Our last workshop of the series is a writing and drafting session, where we’ll explore the finite language of game rules and rulesets.
We’ll look at some of the simplest and hardest tabletop games and their rules, with some examples of available open licenses for game rules. We’ll workshop writing our own game rules with the vocabulary we’ve collected over the course of the series.
This writing workshop will be about the game elements we have already explored and about special game elements that are found in rulebooks, such as examples, options, and roleplaying tools.
Finally, we’ll end by covering additional design concepts for typography and book-making like kerning, tracking, special characters, and spreads for making drafts in Word or Adobe InCopy, with some introduction to Adobe InDesign.
Participants will leave with a workshopped booklet of game rules!
Please register for each workshop separately. Other workshops in the series
Instructor: Victor, Digital Media Lab intern
We recommend that participants remember their email logins or bring in flash drives to store files over the course of the series.
Iowa City Public Library Iowa City Public Library America/Chicago public +Digital Media Lab
For this 4-part series of workshops, we will explore tabletop game design! These are no-experience-required workshops that introduce attendees to making games with cards, dice, tokens, boards, or in the mind with plenty of rules!
Part 4: Writing Game Rules and Designing Game Books
Our last workshop of the series is a writing and drafting session, where we’ll explore the finite language of game rules and rulesets.
We’ll look at some of the simplest and hardest tabletop games and their rules, with some examples of available open licenses for game rules. We’ll workshop writing our own game rules with the vocabulary we’ve collected over the course of the series.
This writing workshop will be about the game elements we have already explored and about special game elements that are found in rulebooks, such as examples, options, and roleplaying tools.
Finally, we’ll end by covering additional design concepts for typography and book-making like kerning, tracking, special characters, and spreads for making drafts in Word or Adobe InCopy, with some introduction to Adobe InDesign.
Participants will leave with a workshopped booklet of game rules!
Please register for each workshop separately. Other workshops in the series
Instructor: Victor, Digital Media Lab intern
We recommend that participants remember their email logins or bring in flash drives to store files over the course of the series.
If you need disability-related accommodations in order to participate in this event, please contact the Library.
This event is open to the public.
The Digital Media Lab is not available during this event.
