Please show our artists some love on their social media and Andrew's upcoming Kickstarter!
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We hope to see you at one of our upcoming events:
​Ingenuity Fest Cleveland
PAX Unplugged

We’ve nearly sold out of our first printing of Berrymandering! Did you know we are working on a second edition?

We plan on releasing two themes for our second edition: starting, of course, with our classic Strawberry vs Blueberry version and a new Bears vs Bees edition to accompany it.

Same classic “I cut, you choose” mechanics, brand new adorable artwork!

More on that, and a preview of our new art, in our next update.

Second, we especially had a blast donning stylish tinfoil hats and teaching you our upcoming game String Theory (The Conspiracy Podcasting Game)!

We have been working on String Theory for about a year and a half now and have been really excited to share it with you as we make it a reality.
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Some of you may have played an early version of it at Origins and GenCon 2024, albeit without signal optimizing tinfoil hats.

Origins 2025
​This year we brought you a new and improved version of the game including two beautiful giant boards and were absolutely blown away by everyone’s enthusiasm, reception, and tinfoil hat crafting skills. Some of you even came back to play, and show your friends multiple times! (You know who you are.)

It was wonderful to see everyone finally find out the truth about JFK’s involvement in the reptilian plots to restart project MK Ultra. Or was it MK Ultra being the real reason Paul McCartney was replaced by a double because the first was poisoned by chemtrails?
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Either way, we’ve taken all the feedback you gave us and are diligently working through it to bring an even better version of the game to GenCon 2025!

GenCon 2025
That’s right! We’ll be at GenCon this year with ProtoCLE showing all three of our games, Obelisk, Berrymandering, and String Theory. So if you didn’t get a chance to put your tinfoil hat making or berry district organization skills to good use at Origins, you can join us there.

It is important to note that much of our events have sold out; HOWEVER, if you are unable to sign up for an official seat and still would like to play, we will try to find a seat for you if possible.

We will be located in Hall A in the Blue Section. Look for the ProtoCLE Brain Dice at tables BLUE 19 to BLUE 29.

Berrymandering was created by Eliot Aretskin-Hariton and Justin Gray. We live in Ohio, one of the most gerrymandered states. Eliot is an avid board gamer. In fact, this is the second board game he’s produced — check out Obelisk.  We both have strong backgrounds in numerical optimization which let to a natural interest in “I cut, you choose” based approaches to districting.

Over the past several months, we have been working to finalize the rules for String Theory for the 3-6 player game. One of the key concerns we say coming out of Gencon was that there were not enough items on the board for players to collect. We've tried numerous ways of solving this and came up with what we think is the most straight forward solution: Once any player has reached a certain number of points, a wiki-leaks style data-drop spawns a bunch more items on the board. We've been playtesting this in November and December of 2024 and it seemed to work out well. Our goal is to have a 3-D print & play version of the game available for our fans by Origins in June of 2025.

Our artist Kaitey Pastva is hard at work putting the final touches on the Bees vs. Bears version of Berrymandering. We printed a prototype at TheGameCrafter and we're looking at doing some tweaks to the color brightness to make the colors pop more. One of the key things we wanted to explore with this new version is putting a border around the pieces so that new players didn't move the playing pieces too far away and then get confused about how they went back together. We hope that this type of "physical rules enforcement" makes the game simpler to play for all audiences. Additionally, we think the Bees vs. Bears version will appeal to a wider audience than our regular political satirists. We hope to convince Kaitey to also help us put together an updated Strawberries vs. Blueberries version of the game, as our manufacturer has told us that we can get bulk pricing even if we do runs with two different artwork designs.

 We are concerned about producing our games over the next few years. A vast majority of board games are produced overseas and the possibility of tariffs could cause serious problems for us and for our friendly local game store owners, potentially pushing up prices or making it unprofitable to manufacture games. I hope that this is a non-issue in 2025 and 2026, but if it is we may see a severe slowdown of new games coming to the US.

Signal Cleveland interviewed us about Berrymandering. Read the whole article for an extended interview.

This version turned out pretty giant. Each tile is 3.5 x 3.5 x 0.5 inches. It's great for a giant version for cons but not as practical for something you'd actually want to put on a table at home or in a boardgame bar. We're looking at sizing this down a bit and then reaching out to manufacturers to get quotes on production. I'd love to see this game in every board game bar in the US. Easy to play over a beer, nice pieces to handle. I doubt we could afford to do it as a laser cut piece. Most likely the designs would still need to be printed on top of the wood. 

Over the past year we've been working on a new competitive 4-player game that explores colonizing a new world and the resulting interplay of growing cities, industry manufacturing, resource extraction, and pollution. Players compete to be the planetary ruler in a euro-style victory point challenge. With all the games we design we try and investigate interesting things that are relevant to real world experiences. In this case, we're trying to help people understand the complexities of surviving on a planet with finite resources. The game was inspired based on the World3 computer model of Earth and it's inhabitants. With each player trying to maximize their own victory points, overall the planets final habitability score should suffer, leaving the final victor the king of the ashes. Whereas if the players worked together, they should be able to have a much more pros prosperous planet that they would actually want to live in.

The game is in a rough shape right now. I feel like there's too much information on the player boards and I need to cut that down. Players are allowed to upgrade their industries at time goes. However after upgrading all the old information is still kept on the board. From a game design perspective I don't like that very much. I want players only to see relevant information. I think that's a general challenge of all game design. We still have a ways to go on this one.