The Galaxy He Wanted to Play

In 1997, a 25-year-old Danish-American with an economics degree and a theater minor released a board game about galactic civilization. It came in an enormous box. It had cardboard tokens instead of miniatures. The rulebook sprawled. A single session could devour an entire weekend.

Twilight Imperium was rough. It was also the game Christian T. Petersen had spent his entire adolescence wishing someone else would make.

Nobody had. So he made it himself — weeks after graduating from St. Olaf College, weeks after founding the company that would publish it. The game and the company were born together, twin expressions of the same ambition: to build experiences so vast they swallowed entire days and left players with war stories they’d retell for years.

That ambition would reshape the tabletop industry. But the methodology doesn’t measure industry transformation. It measures design craft. And the distance between what Christian T. Petersen built as a publisher and what he built as a designer is the central tension of this profile.

From a Danish Basement to Roseville, Minnesota

The biography reads like a designer-publisher origin myth. Born around 1972 in the United States, moved to Denmark at age four. Discovered Lord of the Rings at twelve. Fell into D&D, Warhammer, Call of Cthulhu, Avalon Hill wargames — the full baptismal immersion of a European gamer in the 1980s.

While still in high school, Petersen founded Pegasus Spil Import, selling American board games to Scandinavians from his parents’ basement. He co-founded Games Weekend, Denmark’s second gaming convention. He published a Danish-language miniatures painting zine. The entrepreneurial instinct preceded the design instinct.

At nineteen, he returned to the U.S. for college. Completed a BA in Economics with a Theatre minor in three years. The combination reads like foreshadowing: one discipline for building sustainable businesses, the other for staging unforgettable experiences.

Within weeks of graduation in 1995, he founded Fantasy Flight Publishing. The original plan was European comics — Lucky Luke, Spirou & Fantasio, Percevan. Seven publications later, the comics venture was hemorrhaging money. Petersen pivoted to what he actually knew: games.

Twilight Imperium debuted at Origins Game Fair in spring 1997. The company became Fantasy Flight Games. Twenty years later, it would sell as part of a €1.2 billion deal.

The Game That Kept Getting Better

Most designers release a game and move on. Petersen released Twilight Imperium and then spent two decades rebuilding it.

The first edition (1997) was solo-designed, handmade ambition. Cardboard tokens, sprawling rules, marathon sessions. It worked — barely — because the vision was so enormous that players forgave the rough edges.

The second edition (2000) smoothed the mechanics. The third edition (2005) introduced the strategy card system — the single most significant pure-design innovation of Petersen’s career. Players draft one of eight cards each round, selecting both a powerful ability and their turn order. The mechanic synthesizes Puerto Rico’s role selection with 4X wargaming at a scale nobody had attempted. Petersen openly credited Puerto Rico as inspiration. What was genuinely new was proving that Euro-style elegance could coexist with ten hours of galactic warfare.

The fourth edition (2017), co-designed with Corey Konieczka and Dane Beltrami, represents the culmination. Streamlined technology trees. Improved trade. Better components. Reduced play time — though “reduced” still means six to twelve hours.

Multiple outlets have called TI4 the greatest board game ever made. BoardGameGeek’s top 30. Average rating above 8.5. Seventeen factions in the base game, over thirty with expansions. Novels, an RPG supplement, a roll-and-write spinoff. Twenty-eight years of continuous development on a single architectural platform.

Each edition is demonstrably superior to its predecessor. That refinement arc — rough to polished across four iterations of the same design — is one of the clearest in the hobby.

The Format That Changed Card Gaming

In 2008, Petersen introduced something that had no precedent in the card game market.

For fifteen years, collectible card games had run on randomized booster packs. You bought sealed product, hoping for rares. The secondary market priced individual cards. Competitive play required either deep wallets or lucky pulls. Richard Garfield invented the model with Magic: The Gathering. The industry followed.

Petersen asked a simple question: what if every player got the same cards?

The Living Card Game format replaced randomized boosters with fixed, non-randomized expansion packs. Every pack contained identical card sets. Every player had equal access. The competitive advantage shifted from wallet size to deckbuilding skill.

He coined the name. Trademarked it. Applied it first to A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, then expanded it across ten product lines: Lord of the Rings, Arkham Horror, Android: Netrunner, Marvel Champions, and others.

The industry followed again — this time by copying Petersen. Because “Living Card Game” was trademarked, competitors adopted the label “Expandable Card Game.” AEG’s Doomtown: Reloaded and others built directly on the fixed-distribution model Petersen pioneered. An entire product category exists because one publisher looked at the CCG model and decided to democratize it.

Whether the LCG is a game design innovation or a business model innovation depends on where you draw the line. The methodology draws it carefully.

The Studio as Instrument

Here is the uncomfortable truth about scoring Christian T. Petersen: his greatest creation might be Fantasy Flight Games itself.

Under Petersen’s leadership, FFG proved that licensed games could be mechanically excellent — not cheap cash-ins but serious, sometimes brilliant design. Star Wars. Game of Thrones. Battlestar Galactica. Lord of the Rings. Warhammer. The stigma surrounding licensed tabletop products evaporated because FFG treated every license as an opportunity for real design work.

But most of that design work wasn’t Petersen’s.

Kevin Wilson designed Descent: Journeys in the Dark and co-designed Android. Jay Little designed Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game and the Star Wars RPG line. Corey Konieczka designed Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars: Rebellion, and Runewars. Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson designed Arkham Horror’s landmark second edition.

Petersen published all of them. He set the standard. He ran the design department alongside the entire business. But the four-pillar system measures what a designer personally created, not what they oversaw.

His actual design credits number roughly twenty-five titles. That’s a modest output for a career spanning nearly three decades. The explanation is straightforward: Petersen was primarily a CEO who also designed games, not a designer who also ran a company. When asked post-FFG whether he designs games, his response was a pained “Oooooohhhh…” — the sound of a creative ambition perpetually competing with operational demands.

The designers he nurtured — Konieczka, Lang, Wilson, French — became industry luminaries. FFG functioned as a design incubator. That legacy is real but belongs to the publisher, not the designer. The methodology separates the two.

The Design Voice

Strip away the publishing empire and examine only the games Petersen personally designed. A clear voice emerges.

Political negotiation as a core system, never an afterthought. In Twilight Imperium, the Politics phase can reshape the rules of the game mid-session. In A Game of Thrones, hidden simultaneous orders mean every move is a potential betrayal. One review captured it precisely: success in a Petersen game means being a very, very bad person.

Asymmetric factions in territorial conflict. Every major Petersen design features multiple civilizations or houses with distinct abilities competing for shared geography. TI4’s thirty-plus factions represent the extreme expression.

Multiple interlocking strategic dimensions. Military, political, economic, technological — players must simultaneously balance systems that any other designer would make a complete game from individually. Petersen stacks them.

And above all: experience over optimization. Petersen’s games are designed to generate stories. Twelve-hour sessions don’t end with a victory point tally — they end with narratives about the betrayal in round seven that still stings.

The voice is consistent across A Game of Thrones (praised by Petersen himself as his tightest mechanical achievement), StarCraft: The Board Game, and the Twilight Imperium series. The craft is real. The question is volume.

The Honest Assessment

The research articles present Petersen as one of the most consequential figures in modern tabletop gaming. The methodology agrees with the premise but reframes the conclusion. Consequential as a publisher and executive? Unquestionably. Consequential as a designer? Real, meaningful, but narrower than the full biography suggests.

Invention settles at 7. The LCG format is the flagship innovation — genuinely novel, widely adopted under different names. But it’s primarily a distribution and business model innovation rather than a game mechanism. The actual gameplay within LCG games uses conventional card game mechanics. The strategy card system in TI3 synthesized Euro-style role selection with 4X wargaming — meaningful but openly derivative of Puerto Rico. App-integrated board gaming was pioneering, though the concept was emerging across the industry. These are real innovations that shifted conversation. They were not mechanisms adopted wholesale into other designers’ systems the way worker placement or deckbuilding were.

Architecture settles at 7. The quality is undeniable. TI4 is one of the best-built systems in the hobby — modular, extensible, supporting thousands of hours of play across nearly three decades of continuous expansion. But Architecture requires both quality AND propagation. Eclipse was inspired by TI; it didn’t build on TI’s framework. Star Trek: Ascendancy positioned itself against TI, not within it. Nobody published third-party TI supplements. The system is excellent but self-contained — precisely the scenario the methodology caps at 7.

Mastery settles at 7. The refinement arc from TI1 to TI4 is one of the clearest in the hobby — each edition demonstrably superior. The design voice is recognizable and consistent. But the total output of roughly twenty-five games (many co-designed) is modest for a career this long. Heavy reliance on co-designers on flagship titles dilutes personal attribution. The CEO role consumed time that might otherwise have produced more solo work. A designer with this level of talent and this much refinement, held back by competing responsibilities, lands at “skilled professional at top of game” rather than “proven master.”

The adjustments add +7. Longevity, awards, cross-genre range, commercial success, and design propagation all trigger. Full-time career does not — game design was secondary to his executive role. Branded name does not — non-gamers recognize “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars” because of the TV show and the films, not because of Petersen’s board games. Nobody’s grandmother knows Twilight Imperium.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Christian T. Petersen is the inverse of most designers on this list.

For Greg Porter, the design legacy vastly exceeds the commercial legacy. For James Ernest, the creative philosophy outpaces the institutional footprint. Most designers are measured primarily by the games they made.

Petersen is measured primarily by the company he built.

Fantasy Flight Games didn’t just publish games — it incubated designers, legitimized licensed products, raised production standards, pioneered organized play, and created a culture where massive, ambitious, thematic games were not merely tolerated but expected. The company reshaped the hobby’s infrastructure. That achievement is enormous and real.

But the four-pillar system asks a specific set of questions: What did you invent? What did you build that others built on? Did you master the craft? And those questions measure the designer, not the executive.

Petersen the designer created Twilight Imperium — a genuine masterwork that improves with every iteration, a system that supports decades of play, and a franchise that generates stories players remember for years. He created the LCG format — an innovation that democratized competitive card gaming. He designed A Game of Thrones Board Game — mechanical theater where order tokens turn friends into enemies.

These are meaningful achievements that earn twenty-eight points honestly.

The gap between that number and what Petersen’s full biography might suggest is not a flaw in the methodology. It’s the methodology doing its job — separating the game designer from the game industry leader, measuring craft rather than consequence.

What Remains

Twilight Imperium, still growing after twenty-eight years. Still generating twelve-hour sessions that end in handshakes and grudges.

The Living Card Game format, embedded in the industry’s DNA under half a dozen different names.

A Game of Thrones Board Game, still the benchmark for how a licensed adaptation can work as a genuine game.

The designers he nurtured — Konieczka, Lang, Wilson, French — carrying the FFG design philosophy into studios across the industry.

And the proof, repeated across every edition of TI, that a game can be simultaneously too long, too complex, too expensive, and too demanding — and still be exactly what people want to play.

The performances were memorable. There just weren’t enough of them to fill the whole season.

Total: 28 points. Year: 1997.

28 points. 1997. The man who built the theater and sometimes stepped onto the stage.

The company was the masterpiece. The games were the proof he could have made more.