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.
​
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?
​
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.