The Pawns

Anthony Coffey entered game design through sculpture. During the Kickstarter campaign for Endangered Orphans of Condyle Cove in 2016, Jesse Labbé asked him to sculpt the game’s miniature pawns. Coffey was in Dallas at the time, working as Lead 2D Animator and Illustrator at Istation, an educational software company. He sculpted the figures remotely. Production work, not design work. He is not credited as designer on Endangered Orphans.

The two had met years earlier at the Art Institute of Dallas, then lost contact for approximately seven years. Reconnection came at a comic convention — fans kept telling them their art styles were so similar they should collaborate. In 2010, that collaboration produced Berona’s War, a graphic novel published by Archaia/Boom! Studios, debuting at San Diego Comic-Con. Beautiful work. But a graphic novel is not a game.

In early 2017, Coffey relocated from Dallas to Ridgeland, Mississippi, and joined Certifiable Studios full-time. His first formal co-designer credit came with Who Goes There? in 2018. Everything before that — the animation career at Istation, the product illustration at Gemmy Industries, the associate degree in computer animation — was prelude. Game design was not the original destination. It was where the lateral move landed.

The Division of Labor

The Jackson Free Press provided the clearest description of how the Labbé-Coffey partnership worked: initial ideas came from Labbé, who recorded them in his notebook and translated them onto concept paper, so that he and Coffey could then world-build and develop the game’s mechanics together. Labbé originated. Coffey co-developed.

This is not a minor distinction. In a two-person creative partnership, the person who generates the initial concept and the person who refines it play fundamentally different roles. Both are valuable. They are not the same. Labbé has three solo design credits — Cross Hares, Endangered Orphans, Stuffed. Coffey has zero. No solo-designed game exists anywhere in his catalog. No RPG, no wargame, no card game, no miniatures game carrying his name alone.

What Coffey brought was the physical dimension. His own words: “When you are one of the few people actually coming up with the idea, illustrating the idea, designing the idea, I don’t have to go to another department and ask, ‘How big should these minis be?'” He sculpted miniatures. He built prototypes with 3D printers. He created graphic design layouts. He wrote rules. He handled factory production liaison. He turned abstract concepts into objects you could hold.

Through his personal brand Dimensional Pixel, he sculpted for collectible lines — Mischievers, Brynelords, Bio-Masters, The Swampland, Onell Design. The sculpting impulse was primary. Game design was the context it happened to operate in at Certifiable Studios.

What He Co-Designed

Three games carry Coffey’s co-designer credit. Who Goes There? (2018) — the paranoia-driven semi-cooperative game with the Vulnerable infection engine. D6: Dungeons, Dudes, Dames, Danger, Dice and Dragons! (2019) — the meta-RPG where players role-play as people playing an RPG, with 100 campaign scenarios. Who Goes There? 2nd Edition (2020) — the structural overhaul that replaced player elimination with frostbite and addressed the balance criticisms of the first edition.

These are the same games evaluated under Jesse Labbé’s entry. The ratings are identical — BGG 7.64 for Who Goes There?, the same balance criticisms, the same production praise, the same structural problems requiring a second edition to fix. The question the methodology has to answer is not whether these games are good. The question is what portion of their design is attributable to Anthony Coffey specifically.

The honest answer: it cannot be determined from the available evidence. Labbé is documented as the idea originator. Brian Thompson is credited as mechanics developer. Coffey is positioned as co-developer and physical fabricator. In a three-person design process, isolating any individual’s mechanical contribution requires either detailed design diaries or explicit public attribution. Neither exists in sufficient detail.

The Honest Assessment

Zero solo design credits. Three co-designed games where the primary creative voice is documented as belonging to someone else. Approximately four years of formal game design work before the studio went silent. An entry into game design through sculpture — production work that evolved into a co-design role. A personal brand centered on illustration and sculpting rather than mechanical systems.

This is not a judgment of talent. Coffey may be a brilliant mechanical thinker whose contributions are invisible in the public record because he worked in a small partnership where only one person kept the notebook. The methodology can’t score what it can’t see. And what’s visible is a co-developer with no independent portfolio, working alongside a documented idea originator, in a studio that produced games praised more for their thematic immersion and production quality than for their mechanical rigor.

The comparison point within the methodology is clear: when a designer has no solo credits and all collaborative work is attributed to a partnership where someone else is the documented originator, the score reflects the evidence, not the possibility. Coffey’s 8 points represent what the record shows. The record may be incomplete. The score can only be what the evidence supports.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Anthony Coffey makes things real.

Not real in the abstract sense — real in the physical sense. He sculpts. He models. He animates. He builds the miniature you hold in your hand, the graphic layout that tells your eye where to look, the prototype that turns a concept paper sketch into something a playtester can sit down with. His entire career arc — product illustration, 2D animation, educational software, collectible sculpture, game fabrication — is a single thread: taking ideas that exist in someone else’s imagination and giving them a body.

In the tabletop industry, this is called production. In the methodology, it doesn’t score the same as design. The distinction isn’t about value — it’s about what the system is built to measure. The three pillars ask: did you invent something new, did you build something others built on, did you master the craft of game design? Coffey’s mastery is in fabrication, not in mechanical origination. The methodology measures one. The industry needs both.

What Remains

The miniatures. The physical presence of Certifiable Studios’ games — the reason reviewers gave component scores of 10 out of 10, the reason backers funded campaigns at 1,492% of their goals, the reason the games felt premium in a market flooded with cardboard. Coffey’s hands shaped that.

The partnership. A specific demonstration that two art-school friends who lost touch for seven years could reconnect, build a studio in Mississippi, and ship $2 million worth of games to a global audience. Coffey was half of that equation.

And the question the methodology can’t resolve: what happens when a designer’s most significant contributions are inseparable from the contributions of the person they designed with? The score reflects the evidence. The evidence is limited. The limitation is not Coffey’s fault — it’s the nature of working in a small partnership where only one person kept the notebook.

Coffey gave Certifiable Studios’ games their physical presence — the miniatures, the layouts, the prototypes that turned sketches into products. The methodology scores mechanical design. His contribution was material. In a different scoring system, the hands that built the things would count for more.

Total: 8 points. Year: 2018.

8 points. 2018. The sculptor’s credit.

He sculpted the pawns. Then he helped design the game. The record remembers the game. The pawns made it real.