(18/41: 1985) JEFF SIADEK (1964–)
The Garage and the Galaxy
Jeff Siadek has been designing games since 1985 and shipping them from his garage in Hawthorne, California since 2004. He has never made a full-time living from game design. He has supported himself as a substitute teacher, climbing guide, lifeguard, water polo coach, congressional page, restaurant manager, bus driver, bowling alley mechanic, and nanny. He has published twenty-two games across board games, card games, and RPGs. He has funded fifteen Kickstarter campaigns—every single one successful—totaling over $539,000. Richard Garfield, Peter Adkison, and Ken St. Andre have all contributed guest missions to his flagship game.
And he still ships the boxes himself.
This is what forty years of indie game design looks like: not a trajectory, but a persistence. Siadek is the archetype of the designer who stays in the arena long after the economics say to leave.
The AD&D Kid from Texas
Born in 1964 in Texas, Siadek learned card games from his parents at four and played GI Joes with his older brother Jack. The pivot came at fourteen, when the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook—which he calls the most influential book of his life—rewired his sense of what play could be. Not competition. Not victory. Stepping into other worlds.
His first published design was Mass Murderer, a card-driven board game released under his girlfriend’s name because he still had political aspirations. He later disowned it. The first game under his own name was 9th Generation (1985), a tongue-in-cheek post-apocalyptic RPG printed at his girlfriend’s father’s chemical company. He ran out of printing plates, so the covers were photocopied.
Before that, he’d submitted over a hundred items to Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars. Five were accepted and published in Uncle Albert’s 2085 Catalogue. That ratio—a hundred submissions for five acceptances—tells you something about his approach. Volume. Tenacity. Keep throwing.
In 1992 he founded Gamesmiths, Inc., which published Total War, Pantheon, RoboTanks, Caesar, Monster Derby, and Throwing Stones before going bust. He designed Lifeboat around 2000; Fat Messiah Games published it to a sellout, then the fulfillment house went bankrupt without paying him. He founded Gorilla Games in 2004 to publish Battlestations himself, and has operated the imprint as sole proprietor ever since.
Every indie designer has a story about getting burned by a partner, a publisher, a distributor. Siadek’s response was to stop trusting the supply chain and become the supply chain.
Battlestations: The Life’s Work
Battlestations is the game Siadek was born to make. Co-designed with his brother Jason Siadek, it represents sixteen years of development at the time the second edition launched in 2017.
The central innovation is a simultaneous dual-scale action system. Players control individual crew members moving room-to-room on modular ship tiles—manning engineering, piloting, weapons, and science stations—while simultaneously managing ship-to-ship combat on a separate hex grid. A single player’s action at the personal scale (rerouting power, firing a cannon, repairing a hull breach) has immediate tactical consequences at the strategic scale (ship movement, combat resolution, mission success). The two layers talk to each other in real time.
This isn’t entirely without precedent—Space Hulk married individual tactical movement to a larger scenario framework, and Star Wars: Rebellion would later separate character missions from fleet combat. But Battlestations integrates the scales more tightly than most designs attempt, and layers campaign play with persistent character advancement across multiple alien species on top. It’s an RPG wrapped in a board game wrapped in a miniatures game, and the fact that it works at all is a minor engineering achievement.
Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower gave the first edition a five out of five for substance. The second edition Kickstarter raised $222,572 from 1,707 backers—530% of its $42,000 goal—and earned Kickstarter’s Project We Love designation. The Advanced Rule Book included guest missions from Richard Garfield, Peter Adkison, Ken St. Andre, Kevin Wilson, and Phil Eklund. When the creators of Magic: The Gathering, Wizards of the Coast, Tunnels & Trolls, Arkham Horror, and High Frontier all contribute to your game, that’s peer respect you can’t buy.
Battlestations: Dirtside (2019) extended the system to planetary surface missions in a cooperative, GM-free format, raising $167,226 at 597% funding.
The honest limitation: Battlestations’ dual-scale system, for all its ambition, never propagated. No other designers adopted the framework. The game has roughly 1,200 ratings on BoardGameGeek—a devoted cult following, not a mass movement. Its genre-hybrid positioning (too RPG for board gamers, too board game for RPG players) kept it in a niche that awards committees and mainstream audiences rarely visit.
Lifeboat: Social Cruelty in a Small Box
If Battlestations is Siadek’s magnum opus, Lifeboat is his passport. Published in 2002 and distributed in seven languages by eight publishers across Europe, Asia, and South America, it’s the design that proved he could reach beyond the garage.
The premise is elemental. An Edwardian-era shipwreck. A lifeboat. Four to six passengers, each with a secret love and a secret enemy among the others. Limited supplies. Someone has to row. Someone has to navigate. And someone, eventually, has to go overboard.
Lifeboat is a negotiation game with teeth. Every round forces a vote—who rows, who navigates, who sits idle, who gets thrown to the sharks. Your hidden relationships create asymmetric objectives that cut against the group’s survival interest. You need certain people alive and certain people dead, but you can’t say why, and everyone else has their own list. The result is a pressure cooker of alliances, betrayals, and desperate bargaining that plays out in forty-five minutes and generates stories people retell for years.
The Cannibalism expansion did exactly what the title promises.
Lifeboat was nominated for Traditional Card Game of the Year at the 2008 Origins Awards. In 2025, Siadek launched a Deluxe Edition Kickstarter that raised $33,131—twenty-three years after the original release. Games rarely sustain demand across two decades. Lifeboat’s mechanics are simple enough to outlast any trend.
The claim that Lifeboat prefigured the social deduction boom is tempting but imprecise. Lifeboat’s hidden relationships create asymmetric motivations, not hidden roles in the Werewolf/Mafia sense. It’s closer to negotiation-with-secrets than social deduction proper. The distinction matters: Lifeboat doesn’t ask “who is the traitor?” It asks “what does everyone want, and how badly will they screw you to get it?” That’s a different question, and a good one, but it’s not the question that defined the social deduction genre.
The Rest of the Ludography
Beyond the two flagship titles, Siadek’s catalog reveals a designer who refuses to sit still.
Who Would Win? (2009) achieved the broadest commercial distribution of any Siadek design when Gamewright—a mainstream publisher—licensed and released it in 2011. The party game pairs randomly drawn characters against randomly drawn scenarios (Abraham Lincoln versus a velociraptor in a hot air balloon) and lets players argue and vote. Over a million possible combinations. Simple, endlessly replayable, and exactly the kind of game that works at a family gathering where nobody wants to read a rulebook.
9th Generation (1985) was the post-apocalyptic RPG that started it all—three books and supplements, photocopied covers. The Gamesmiths era (1992–1998) produced Total War, Pantheon, RoboTanks, Caesar, Monster Derby, and Throwing Stones—the kind of mid-nineties small-press catalog that lives and dies by convention sales and game-store consignment. Monster Derby, a racing game with asymmetric fantasy creatures, earned comparisons to Titan and Cosmic Encounter.
Later titles include Desert Island (2015, a spiritual sequel to Lifeboat), Palaces (2016, a deck-building bidding game), Love and Hate (2018, a meta-game overlay for any point-based board game), and Love Conquers All (2024, a cooperative tile-laying game). He also wrote Galactic Revolution, a science fiction novel set in the Battlestations universe, funded through Kickstarter.
In total: twenty-two published designs across board games, card games, and RPGs, plus a novel, spanning four decades. Not a single one published by a major studio except the Gamewright pickup of Who Would Win.
Game-Design Aikido
Siadek articulated his design philosophy in a 2016 guest post for the League of Gamemakers. The core concept is what he calls game-design aikido—rather than pursuing perfect balance (which he calls a fickle phantasm), he deliberately introduces multiple imbalances and redirects them against each other to create approximate equilibrium.
This explains a lot about how his games feel. Battlestations’ alien species are not balanced against each other—they’re imbalanced in different directions, forcing players to find advantages within their constraints rather than starting from symmetry. Lifeboat’s secret relationships create wildly unequal power dynamics that shift with every vote. Monster Derby was described by critics as rambunctious, unbalanced, and unfair—and that was the point.
He cites Richard Garfield as his favorite designer—both for creating the CCG genre and for being, in Siadek’s words, an absolute prince of a man—and Agricola by Uwe Rosenberg as his favorite game. Collaborators have described his working style as that of a chef, always adding a bit here, tweaking aspects there.
The Honest Assessment
Jeff Siadek’s draft arrived at 15 points with adjustments of +1. The methodology corrects the total to 18. The pillar scores hold. The three missing points come from adjustment triggers that the draft’s own evidence clearly supports but were never run through the checklist.
The longevity trigger fires at +2, not +1. The methodology requires published designs spanning 20+ years—it does not require continuous full-time professional activity. Siadek published 9th Generation in 1985 and Love Conquers All in 2024. That’s thirty-nine years of published output. The trigger is binary. It fires.
The awards trigger fires at +1. The draft documents Lifeboat’s nomination for Traditional Card Game of the Year at the 2008 Origins Awards. The methodology reads: any major industry award win, nomination, or Hall of Fame induction. An Origins nomination is a major industry nomination. The draft listed this evidence under Mastery but never ran it through the adjustment checklist.
The cross-genre trigger fires at +1. The draft documents RPGs (9th Generation), board games (Battlestations, Monster Derby), and card games (Lifeboat, Who Would Win). That’s three distinct game formats—well past the two required. Another binary fact hiding in plain sight.
The pillar scores tell a different story—one of persistent craft operating at a consistent level without breakthrough impact.
Invention 4 reflects a designer whose best innovations are meaningful variations on known formats rather than new categories. Battlestations’ dual-scale system integrates personal and strategic play more tightly than predecessors, but it builds on Space Hulk’s tactical corridors, RPG campaign structures, and hex-based ship combat. Lifeboat’s hidden relationship cards create effective social pressure, but the mechanism didn’t establish a new genre or get adopted by other designers. The innovation is real. It’s also bounded.
Architecture 5 reflects functional design across a large catalog. Battlestations supports campaign play with persistent characters, multiple editions, and cooperative expansions—it arguably has more depth than the 5 description suggests. But across twenty-two games, most are small-press productions with limited distribution. BGG ratings cluster in the 6.5–7.5 range: solid work that serves its audience. No propagation to other designers. The 5 represents the body of work honestly.
Mastery 5 marks the 10,000-hours line. Forty years of continuous design output crosses that threshold even without full-time professional commitment. There is visible refinement from photocopied garage-press to internationally published designs. But the improvement reads more as production maturity than dramatic craft evolution. Lifeboat is the craftsmanship peak—elegant, tight, international. The rest of the catalog is competent without reaching that level consistently.
The Scoring Case
Invention (4):
“Good twist.” Battlestations’ simultaneous dual-scale action system—crew-level personal actions on modular ship tiles directly affecting ship-to-ship hex combat in real time—is a genuine design innovation. Few games have attempted this integration, and fewer have made it functional. Lifeboat’s secret love/enemy relationship cards create effective asymmetric social pressure. However, neither mechanism established a new category or was widely adopted by other designers. The dual-scale concept builds on existing traditions rather than creating a new format. Meaningful variation at the high end.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” Twenty-two published designs across forty years, spanning RPGs, board games, card games, and party games. Battlestations supports campaign play with persistent character advancement, multiple editions, scenario books, and cooperative expansions—a functional system that has sustained play across two decades. The Dirtside expansion successfully adapted the system to GM-free cooperative play. BGG ratings cluster in the 6.5–7.5 range—well-crafted work that serves its audience without achieving broader adoption. Most of the catalog beyond Battlestations and Lifeboat is small-press with limited distribution. Solid construction across a large body of work.
Mastery (5):
“Working designer.” Forty-year career (1985–2025) of continuous design output. Visible progression from photocopied garage-press RPGs through internationally published card games to major Kickstarter campaigns. Solo or family-authored throughout—clear attribution. Peer respect demonstrated by guest missions from Richard Garfield, Peter Adkison, Ken St. Andre, Kevin Wilson, and Phil Eklund. The 10,000-hours line is crossed. The craft refinement from early to late work is visible but modest—production maturity more than dramatic design evolution. Steady hand across four decades.
Adjustments (+4):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (1985–2024, thirty-nine years of published designs across the span. 9th Generation to Love Conquers All.)
- ■ Awards: +1 (Lifeboat nominated for Traditional Card Game of the Year, 2008 Origins Awards.)
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 (RPGs: 9th Generation. Board games: Battlestations, Monster Derby. Card games: Lifeboat, Who Would Win. Three distinct formats.)
- ■ Full-time career: No. Siadek has never made a full-time living from game design.
- ■ Branded name: No. Non-gamers have never heard of Battlestations, Lifeboat, or Who Would Win.
- ■ Commercial success: No. No single title generated $10M+ in lifetime retail revenue. Total Kickstarter funding across fifteen campaigns: $539,000.
- ■ Design propagation: No. No documentable evidence of other designers copying Siadek’s design approaches.
The Hidden Pattern
Jeff Siadek doesn’t design games. He designs situations.
A sinking lifeboat where everyone has a secret reason to save one person and drown another. A starship where the engineer’s decision to reroute power determines whether the pilot can dodge the missile. A party where Abraham Lincoln fights a velociraptor and the table has to decide who wins.
The through-line isn’t a mechanism or a genre. It’s the belief that the best moments in gaming happen between the players, not between the players and the board. Rules are scaffolding. The game is what people do to each other when the scaffolding puts them under pressure.
This is why his design philosophy centers on aikido rather than balance—because perfectly balanced games don’t create the friction that forces players to negotiate, argue, betray, and laugh. Imbalance is the engine. The designer’s job is to aim it.
Forty years. Twenty-two games. One garage. Zero corporate backing.
The gorilla keeps making games.
What Remains
Battlestations—the dual-scale system that proved one designer could build an RPG-board-game hybrid from scratch, sustain it across two editions and a cooperative expansion, and attract guest missions from Hall of Famers.
Lifeboat—seven languages, eight publishers, three expansions, twenty-three years of continuous demand, and the Cannibalism expansion.
A Kickstarter record of fifteen for fifteen.
The respect of Richard Garfield, Peter Adkison, and Ken St. Andre—designers who don’t write guest missions for games they don’t believe in.
And a garage in Hawthorne, California, where the boxes still ship.
The methodology asks what you built and whether the world built on it. Siadek built twenty-two games across four decades from a garage with no corporate backing, no full-time income from design, and no intention of stopping. The world didn’t build on his work. His community did. That’s a different kind of answer, and the score is honest about the difference.
Total: 18 points. Year: 1985.
Total: 18 points. Year: 1985.
The methodology asks what you built and whether the world built on it. Siadek built twenty-two games across four decades from a garage with no corporate backing, no full-time income from design, and no intention of stopping. The world didn’t build on his work. His community did. That’s a different kind of answer, and the score is honest about the difference.