The Taxonomy

The most important thing Isaac Shalev ever made for the tabletop hobby is not a game. In 2019, CRC Press published Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms, co-authored by Shalev and Geoffrey Engelstein. The book cataloged and formalized over two hundred distinct game mechanisms with standardized terminology and a rigorous numbering system. Richard Garfield called it “a much-needed atlas for the explorer.” Eric Zimmerman compared it to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language — the foundational text that changed how architects think about design.

Then BoardGameGeek adopted it. The hobby’s central database restructured its site-wide Mechanics classification system around the Engelstein-Shalev taxonomy. This means every game on BGG is now categorized using a framework Shalev co-created. One hundred thirty-two academic citations. Over 1,800 reads on ResearchGate. A Goodreads reviewer compared it to architectural pattern language.

The Perspective

Before the book, there was Seikatsu. Co-designed with Matt Loomis and published by IDW Games in 2017, Seikatsu is a tile-laying abstract where all players share one hexagonal garden board. Birds score immediately via adjacency — place a tile matching an adjacent bird, collect points. But the real game is in the flowers. At the end, each player scores flower rows exclusively from their own pagoda’s vantage point. The same garden. Three different scoring configurations. A tile placement that builds your row might demolish someone else’s.

The fixed-perspective scoring mechanic had no clear prior art. The game shines at exactly three players. At that frequency, it’s close to perfect. Move the dial, and it loses signal.

The Nights and Weekends

Isaac Shalev is a nonprofit technology consultant by profession. He founded Sage70, Inc., serving clients including NYU and the US Golf Association. His BGP profile is explicit: “Non-profit industry guru by day, game designer by nights and weekends.” This is the defining structural fact of his design career. Nine published games across roughly a decade, and the nights-and-weekends constraint explains both the modest volume and the analytical precision.

What Remains

The taxonomy. Two hundred mechanisms with standardized names and numbers, adopted by the hobby’s central database, cited in a hundred and thirty-two academic papers. This will outlast every game Shalev ever designed or will design. It is infrastructure.

Seikatsu. A twenty-minute abstract that is virtually perfect at three players — a game about flowers and birds and the simple, devastating fact that you are not sitting where I am sitting. Over 69,000 games played on Board Game Arena.

And the perspective itself. The recurring insight that a shared reality evaluated through personal lenses produces richer experiences than either a purely shared game or a purely individual one. Shalev designed the way he analyzed — systematically, elegantly, from the constraint outward.

Total: 16 points. Year: 2015.