The Automa Architect

Dávid Turczi designs board games. He also designs the opponents you play them against when nobody else is at the table. With seventy-plus credits spanning heavy euros, wargames, real-time cooperative games, dice hybrids, card-driven civilization builders, and licensed IP — plus forty-plus solo AI systems built for other designers’ games — he is one of the most prolific and mechanically diverse designers working today.

Born in Hungary, now based in Leiden, Netherlands, Turczi entered the hobby by helping a friend realize a game concept around 2011. He connected with the founders of Mindclash Games through Hungarian gaming circles circa 2013. After Anachrony’s success in 2017 — a worker-placement game that landed in the BGG top 50 — he became a full-time designer and hasn’t looked back. His output since has been remarkable in both volume and range.

The Solo Revolution

Before Turczi, solo modes in board games were often afterthoughts — simple flowcharts, random card draws, or beat-your-own-score puzzles bolted onto multiplayer designs. Turczi built something different: conditional-logic automa systems that simulate human decision-making. His solo opponents read the board state, prioritize objectives, and adjust difficulty across multiple levels. They don’t play randomly. They play strategically.

The methodology propagated. Automa Factory, Awaken Realms, and multiple independent designers now follow patterns Turczi established. His solo systems for Terraforming Mars (with Nick Shaw), Kanban EV, Teotihuacan, Undaunted (with David Digby), and Trickerion became reference implementations. The 1 Player Guild on BoardGameGeek — the hobby’s largest solo gaming community — treats his work as a benchmark. He mentored and collaborated with rising solo designers including Nick Shaw, David Digby, and Radek Ignatów, building a pipeline of practitioners who carry the methodology forward.

Turczi himself doesn’t play solo modes for fun. He designs them through rigorous playtesting and feedback loops, treating solo AI as a design discipline with its own principles — not a feature request to be satisfied but a system to be engineered.

The Design Range

The breadth of Turczi’s portfolio is unusual among modern designers. Anachrony (2017) is a heavy worker-placement euro with time-travel mechanics, sitting in the BGG top 50. Kitchen Rush (2017, with Vangelis Bagiartakis) is a real-time cooperative game using sand timers as workers — nominated for the 2020 Spiel des Jahres. Days of Ire: Budapest 1956 (2016) is a card-driven political game about the Hungarian uprising. Nights of Fire (2019, with Brian Train) is a block wargame. Dice Settlers (2018) invented a dice-deckbuilding hybrid. Tawantinsuyu (2020) is one of the most decision-dense worker-placement designs in the hobby. The Imperium trilogy (2021–2024, with Nigel Buckle) builds card-driven civilization across three standalone boxes. Voidfall (2023, with Nigel Buckle) translates 4X space gaming into a euro framework, raising €1.46 million on Kickstarter.

He has also co-designed with Daniele Tascini (Tekhenu, Venice), worked with licensed IP (Star Trek: Captain’s Chair, 2024), and continues publishing new titles (Keyside and Thebai, both 2025). The mechanical vocabulary spans worker placement, deck building, dice building, bag building, area control, real-time mechanics, asymmetric design, and card-driven systems.

What the Scoring Sees

Invention captures genuine craft innovation rather than genre creation. The automa methodology is Turczi’s most original contribution — a systematic approach to solo AI design that other designers and publishers independently adopted. Dice Settlers’ dice-deckbuilding hybrid, Kitchen Rush’s real-time worker placement, and Excavation Earth’s dynamic valuation system are novel combinations of existing concepts. But none of these created a new genre. Turczi elevates and combines existing mechanical families; he doesn’t build new ones from nothing.

Architecture reflects consistently well-constructed systems across an enormous range. Anachrony is tight enough for the BGG top 50. The automa systems scale across genres. Kitchen Rush’s real-time chassis works under pressure. Voidfall handles 4X complexity within euro constraints. This isn’t one good engine — it’s dozens of functional, interlocking systems across radically different design spaces.

Mastery captures seventy-plus credits across fifteen years with visible growth. The progression from Days of Ire (2016) through Anachrony (2017) through Voidfall (2023) shows a designer who keeps reaching for more complex design challenges and meeting them. The range across mechanical vocabularies — worker placement, real-time, wargame, civilization, dice hybrid — is exceptional. He masters each grammar rather than repeating one.

The Scoring Case

Total: 27 points. Year: ~2011.

The Hidden Pattern

Turczi’s deepest innovation isn’t any single game — it’s the idea that solo play deserves its own design methodology. Before him, solo modes were afterthoughts. He treated the absent opponent as a design problem requiring conditional logic, difficulty scaling, and behavioral simulation. The methodology propagated because it answered a question no one had formalized.

The range is the second pattern. Heavy euros, real-time cooperative games, wargames, dice hybrids, card-driven civilization builders, licensed IP. Most prolific designers repeat their grammar. Turczi learns a new one for each project. The polyglot who speaks every mechanical language fluently.

What Remains

The automa methodology. Adopted by Automa Factory, Awaken Realms, and independent designers worldwide. A generation of solo players who expect strategic AI opponents because Turczi proved they were possible. The 1 Player Guild treats his work as the benchmark.

Seventy-plus games across more mechanical vocabularies than most designers attempt in a lifetime. Anachrony in the BGG top 50. Kitchen Rush nominated for the Spiel des Jahres. Voidfall raising €1.46 million. The output hasn’t slowed.

27 points. ~2011. The automa architect.

He taught games to play themselves. Seventy-plus credits, forty-plus solo AI systems, and a methodology the industry adopted as standard. The man who made the empty chair a design challenge worth solving.

The solo player sits down, shuffles the automa deck, and plays against a system that reads the board and adjusts. Someone had to prove that was possible. Turczi did, and then he did it forty more times.