The Engineer’s Crossing

Before Fabio Lopiano designed a board game, he wrote code for three of the most valuable companies on earth. Google in Zurich. Facebook in London. DeepMind, the artificial intelligence laboratory that taught machines to play Go. His gateway games were Puerto Rico and St. Petersburg, discovered around 2006 during his Zurich years. Seven years later he walked into a Playtest UK session in London and started testing other people’s prototypes.

The first version of what became Calimala was, by his own admission, very bad.

Two years of iteration at Playtest UK fixed that. The prototype won the Hippodice competition in 2015—one of the oldest and most respected design contests in Europe. ADC Blackfire published the game in 2017. Lopiano kept his engineering job. He designed Ragusa and Merv while working at DeepMind. Somewhere around 2022, he took time off from software to dedicate himself to games full-time. He never went back.

He now designs from Malta. Ten base game designs published or announced across eight years. Four solo-authored. Six co-designed. All of them Euro-style strategy games. Every single one.

The Mechanism Between

Every Lopiano game runs on the same thesis: the most interesting moment in a board game is when your move helps your opponent.

In Calimala, players place discs at intersections on a grid connecting pairs of actions. Place a disc, take both actions. But every disc already stacked at that intersection reactivates—its owner takes those actions again, for free. The busiest intersections become the most powerful and the most dangerous. You need Florence’s wool guilds to cooperate, which means you need your opponents to benefit. The question isn’t whether to help them. It’s how much you can afford to.

In Ragusa, houses sit on hex vertices where three hexes meet. Build a house, activate all three hexes. Every other player with a house bordering those hexes also activates. Nine to twelve total placements per game. Each one ripples outward.

In Merv, a meeple circles the outside of a 5×5 grid. Pick a row or column, activate a building. Every building you own in that line produces. But opponents’ buildings produce too—and visiting their sites feeds them resources.

Lopiano calls this “entangled decision-making.” The term is precise. In each game, a different mechanism creates the same condition: your choices and your opponents’ outcomes are bound together. You cannot optimize in isolation. The multiplayer solitaire that defined mid-2010s Euro design is structurally impossible in these games.

The concept was not without precedent. Spyrium (2013) placed workers between cards for a cost mechanism. Keyflower (2012) used hex intersection placement. Targi (2012) had grid-based selection. What Lopiano added was the cumulative reactivation—the idea that placing your piece gives other players free actions, and that this forced generosity is the game’s central tension. The ingredients were circulating. The recipe was his.

The Sixteen Turns

Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road is the high-water mark.

Sixteen turns. That’s all you get. A 5×5 grid of randomly assigned building tiles. A peripheral meeple that changes your perspective on the grid every round. Courtier tracks, a mosque, a library, a palace, a wall that must be maintained against Mongol invasion—and every scoring path is woven into every other. Build a caravansary to trade, but the caravansary also contributes to wall defense. Advance in the mosque for endgame points, but the mosque also produces resources that fuel your market engine.

The weight is 3.39 on BoardGameGeek. The play time is ninety minutes. The ratio of strategic depth to time invested is Lopiano’s signature achievement. One reviewer called it “a bit of a masterpiece.” Another said it was a game you finish and immediately want to replay with a different approach.

Known weaknesses: the iconography is dense. The Mongol invasion mechanism can feel punitive to new players who neglect the wall. The game’s tight integration means that falling behind on one track cascades into falling behind on several. These are the costs of the architecture’s elegance—every gear meshes, so a slipped gear grinds the whole machine.

The Collaborative Phase

Starting in 2022, Lopiano’s catalog shifts. Four solo-authored games in five years (2017–2022). Then six co-designed games in three years (2022–2025). The partnership with Nestore Mangone—who bridges to the Simone Luciani design circle through their collaborations on Newton and Darwin’s Journey—produced Autobahn, Shackleton Base, and Baghdad. The partnership with Mandela Fernandez-Grandon—who sought Lopiano out after playing Calimala at SPIEL 2017—produced Sankoré and Ayar.

The division of labor is documented. With Mangone: “Nestore often has good ideas for new mechanisms, while I try to adapt them to the theme.” Mangone originates mechanisms; Lopiano builds the system around them. With Fernandez-Grandon: the co-designer provides conceptual frameworks that Lopiano strips to essentials, producing “a stripped-back and greatly improved version.”

This matters for attribution. The four solo games—Calimala, Ragusa, Merv, Zapotec—are unambiguously Lopiano’s. They contain his most acclaimed work and his clearest design voice. The co-designed games are shared credit, and the evidence suggests Lopiano functions as architect and refiner rather than mechanism originator in these partnerships.

The quality curve is uneven. Autobahn drew the sharpest criticism of his career. One prominent reviewer called it “a frustrating herky-jerky hodgepodge” with too many mechanics competing for attention. Sankoré, at BGG weight 4.0, was called “baggy and dissociative” by some critics. Shackleton Base recovered ground with its modular corporation system—named Punchboard’s Best Complex Game of 2024—and Ayar was praised as “some of his most efficient work.” The pattern suggests a designer who pushed too hard into complexity, got burned, and course-corrected. That’s learning. It’s also inconsistency.

The Honest Assessment

Lopiano solved a real problem. Mid-2010s Euro games were drowning in multiplayer solitaire—parallel engine-building where players rarely interacted. His cascading shared-action systems force genuine engagement with the humans at the table. Critics noticed. Peers admired it. The Board Game Design Lab podcast used his work as a case study for teaching interaction design.

But admiration is not adoption. No designer outside Lopiano’s direct collaborators has publicly cited his mechanisms as inspiration for a published game. His innovations have not spawned recognizable imitators. The Venice connection—where Turczi and Novac built a “spiritual successor” to Ragusa—is the closest case, but Turczi was already Ragusa’s developer and it was the same publisher extending a series. That’s continuation, not propagation.

He works exclusively in one format. Medium-to-heavy Euro board games. No RPGs, no wargames, no party games, no card games as a distinct format. The weight range spans 2.6 to 4.0, but the center of gravity sits at 3.0–3.5. This is a specialist, not a polymath. Cross-genre credit does not apply.

The commercial picture is boutique. Total Kickstarter revenue across four campaigns: approximately £452,000. Osprey Games, Board&Dice, Sorry We Are French—these are respected publishers, not mass-market distributors. No single title approaches the commercial success threshold. The games sell to their audience. That audience is not enormous.

Eight years of published output. Full-time for roughly three of them. The body of work is solid but still accumulating. The longevity trigger is two years away from firing. The story is mid-sentence.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Lopiano is a systems thinker who builds social machines.

The engineering career is not incidental. A software architect at DeepMind thinks in interconnected systems—inputs cascade through layers, outputs feed back as inputs, and the interesting behavior emerges from the interactions, not the individual components. Lopiano’s games work the same way. A single placement in Calimala propagates through a stack. A single house in Ragusa ripples across three hexes. A single building selection in Merv triggers production across an entire row. The design philosophy mirrors the engineering discipline: build simple components with complex connections.

His stated design process—alternating phases of expansion and contraction, adding features then stripping ruthlessly—is iterative optimization. It’s how you refine a codebase. It’s how you refine a game. The Playtest UK community gave him the feedback loops. The engineering background gave him the instinct to trust the process.

What makes it distinctive is where the complexity lives. In a Rosenberg game, complexity lives in the economy. In a Feld game, it lives in the scoring matrix. In a Lopiano game, it lives in the social space between players. The mechanisms are relatively simple. The consequences are not. That gap—between the simplicity of the action and the complexity of its social ripple—is the entanglement.

What Remains

Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road—sixteen turns that pack the strategic density of a game three times its length. Calimala—a stacking mechanism that proved Euro games could be built around forced cooperation rather than parallel isolation. A design voice that insists the most interesting variable in any board game is the person sitting across from you.

And a career still accelerating. Ten games in eight years, with the output rate increasing and the critical reception trending upward after a mid-career stumble.

A DeepMind engineer who taught board games to think in cascades. The methodology measures what the cascades have built so far. The number has room to move—longevity is two years from firing, the propagation window is still open, and the best version of his collaborative work may not yet exist. For now, the score captures what’s documented: a distinctive voice solving a real problem in a single format, still mid-sentence.

Total: 20 points. Year: 2017.

Total: 20 points. Year: 2017.

A DeepMind engineer who taught board games to think in cascades. The methodology measures what the cascades have built so far. The number has room to move—longevity is two years from firing, the propagation window is still open, and the best version of his collaborative work may not yet exist. For now, the score captures what’s documented: a distinctive voice solving a real problem in a single format, still mid-sentence.