This month we want to start by introducing two new artists that we will be working with to make our games pop.

​Andrew and Kaitey are working hard to get the art done for our new games so that we can get them out to you next year and we couldn't wait to introduce them to you. We hope you love their work as much as we do.

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

Our goal is to begin crowdfunding in 2026, but we’d like to meet some milestones along the way.To have the best chance of successfully funding, we’re trying to build up our following on our newsletter and our socials.

And that’s where you can help! We’re currently at a cool 1,135 followers on our newsletter with an ultimate goal of around 3,500-4,000 followers before we launch.

We are working hard to get there, but we can use your help!

How you can help:

• Tell your friends! Encourage them to sign up for our mailing list.
  Here’s a quick link you can send them to sign up: Tessellation Games Mailing List
  We promise it’s not a cult!
  
  
• Mention us on socials! Did you get any cool pictures of our games? We’d love to see them! Tag Tessellation Games and/or String Theory on your social media!
  
  and finally,
  
  
• Please review and rate us on Board Game Geek! Reviews help players who haven’t had a chance to play learn more about our games.
  (Okay, it might be a little bit of a cult.)

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.

Hello Players!We hope everyone has had a good time decompressing from last week. Origins 2025 was AMAZING!

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.

Gerrymandering is a major factor in the polarization of politics in the US. Our democracy is built on the idea that voters choose the people they feel will best represent their interests, but Gerrymandering ruins this by allowing politicians to manipulate voting districts so that many peoples’ votes stop counting at all. 
Except for the politicians who benefit from it, no one thinks Gerrymandering is a good thing. So why does it keep happening? One of the reasons is that the process of districting is not something that people think about often. Districting happens once every 10 years, and although it’s really important, it’s also complex and abstract. So, most people just ignore it and the problem continues to steadily get worse and worse. 
When we read this great article about an a fair and balanced approach to districting, we realized that Gerrymandering could be turned into a 2 player strategy game. When we tested it out, we found that it was an easy way to understand districting and Gerrymandering without all the political baggage attached. 
So we developed Berrymandering, a game where you gerrymander berries on a cake using the “I cut, you choose” approach. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we do, regardless of whether you prefer blueberries or strawberries.

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.

We have received a lot of feedback regarding adding some sort of competitive aspect to the game. Over the next few months we want to start playtesting a small expansion to Obelisk which will add the ability to play as the Queen! Generally speaking, she'll be able to effect the monsters on the board and maybe the monsters being drawn out of the bag. I'm considering making her goal to have the monsters escape, or having her trying to achieve a different goal that as an auxiliary effect helps the monsters escape. While the main set of players (the Councillors) will still be able to coordinate and talk all the want, their peril is the queen can hear everything they are saying. We will probably have her actions happen during the night time. If you are interested in being one of our alpha testers for this expansion, Contact us!

Yes it's true! We've been talking with people about crowd funding Obelisk! Our design philosophy with a crowd funded version has been to encapsulate the core of the game mechanics in a small form factor. To this end, we've been working with TheGameCrafter (TGC), to put together a crowd fundable version of our game! We received the first version back from them a week ago and we have finally had some time to take some pictures.

All in all, the process of reducing the game down has been exhausting. We've used lots of strategies and had to make lots of sacrifices. The mechanics of how to make a 5x5 map when you only have 24 tiles was one of my favorite challenges. We solved this by giving people 3 "Empty Space" tiles (formerly Mountains) and telling them that the first time they draw one, leave the space blank but shuffle the card back into the draw deck. It was really important to us to keep the same size monsters because players handle them often. So while we switched to acrylic monsters, they are as big as they could be and still get 50x of them into the box!
Let us know what you think of this version so far. We would enjoy your feedback