The School

Stefan Feld runs a high school. Not in the past tense. Not as a former career. Right now, as you read this, he is the director of the Marta-Schanzenbach-Gymnasium in Gengenbach, a small town in Baden-Württemberg near the Black Forest. He has been a full-time educator there since 1999—teaching sports and physics before taking over as principal in 2014. He manages faculty, budgets, student discipline, parent meetings.

On evenings and weekends, he designs some of the most structurally ambitious board games in the world.

This is not a charming biographical detail. It is the defining fact of his career. Stefan Feld has produced over 40 original titles since 2005—nearly all solo-authored—while running a school. His name has become an adjective in the hobby. “Feldian” denotes a specific architecture: novel central mechanisms, dice as strategic tools rather than random outcomes, multiple scoring paths that reward focus, and penalties that punish neglect. He has never won a major German game award outright, yet The Castles of Burgundy has held a place among BoardGameGeek’s highest-rated games for over a decade.

He designs games the way a physicist solves problems—mechanism first, structure second, theme last. His own characterization is instructive: “For me it is mostly working with creativity. Artist I think is laying it on a bit thick, since ‘feelings’ don’t affect the development process.”

The feelings, as it turns out, are in the dice.

The Motor

Every Feld game starts the same way. Not with a theme, not with a market analysis, not with a component list. With a mechanism.

He calls it the “motor”—the central engine that drives every decision in the game. In Macao (2009), the motor is a wind rose where dice results are placed on a rotating wheel, delivering resources in future turns. In Trajan (2011), the motor is a personal six-bowl mancala rondel that determines which actions you can take. In The Castles of Burgundy (2011), the motor is a pair of dice that map to numbered regions on both a shared supply board and your personal estate. In Amerigo (2013), the motor is a cube tower borrowed from Dirk Henn’s Wallenstein (2002) and repurposed as an action-strength governor.

The motor comes first. Then Feld builds outward—adding subsystems, scoring tracks, resource loops—until the game is complete. Theme arrives last, draped over the machinery like a tablecloth.

This approach has a cost. Nobody playing Castles of Burgundy thinks about fifteenth-century Loire Valley estates. They think about which hex to place, which bonus it triggers, whether the remaining dice values reach the tile they actually need. Feld has been explicit about the tradeoff: “I will never include a detailed rule just to be closer to the theme.” His games reward cerebral engagement and punish narrative immersion. That is a feature, not a bug—but it is also a ceiling.

The Dice Question

When Feld entered the hobby in 2005, Euro game designers treated dice with suspicion. The German design tradition—built by Kramer, Knizia, and Teuber in the 1990s—valued elegant control. Randomness felt like a concession to the toy industry. Worker placement was ascendant. Dice were for Yahtzee.

Feld saw something else. Beginning with Roma (2005) and systematized through Macao, Castles of Burgundy, Bora Bora (2013), and Bruges (2013), he demonstrated that dice could determine the strategic landscape of a turn without determining its outcome. In Castles of Burgundy, rolled values map to numbered regions on both the supply and your player board, with workers serving as modifiers—meaning no single value is inherently superior. The dice don’t tell you what happens. They tell you what’s available. The decisions remain yours.

This reframing was consequential. Kingsburg (2007, Chiarvesio and Iennaco) explored parallel territory, but Feld’s implementations—particularly Burgundy’s dual-use system—became the model other designers referenced. Grand Austria Hotel (Luciani & Gigli, 2015) is frequently compared to Burgundy’s dice-assignment approach. The broader shift in Euro design toward “randomness as input, not output” bears Feld’s fingerprints, even where the credit is diffuse.

He didn’t eliminate luck. He gave it a job.

The Mancala

If the dice work was Feld’s most pervasive contribution, the mancala was his most clearly novel one.

In Trajan (2011), each player operates a personal six-bowl mancala rondel. You pick up all the colored stones from one bowl and distribute them one by one, clockwise. Wherever the last stone lands determines which of six action types you execute—and which bonus tiles you can claim. The ancient pit-and-pebbles game, reimagined as a strategic action-selection hub for a complex Euro.

No prior modern board game had used mancala this way. The mechanism was widely recognized as inventive when Trajan appeared, and it opened genuine design space. Bruno Cathala’s Five Tribes (2014) adopted mancala-style distribution as its core movement system. Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (2018) built its action economy around a similar rondel. BoardGameGeek threads specifically seeking “games with a mancala mechanic” point to Trajan as the modern template.

What makes the mancala elegant in Trajan isn’t the novelty alone—it’s the self-balancing. Overfilling one bowl section creates inertia: your stones accumulate in areas you’ve already exploited, making future actions from that position predictable. The mechanism naturally prevents overcommitment to any single strategy. The physics teacher built a system with internal feedback loops.

The Punch

Feld games hit you.

In the Year of the Dragon (2007) sends monthly disasters—plague, drought, Mongol attacks—crashing into your fragile court of advisors. Notre Dame (2007) features an escalating plague track that overwhelms any player who ignores it. Bora Bora (2013) penalizes unfinished construction. Even Castles of Burgundy applies quiet pressure through the phase structure: tiles you don’t claim this round may vanish next round.

Viktor Kobilke, who edited Feld’s most ambitious recent design, described the philosophy as “throwing chaos at the players, which they have to somehow bring under control.” This is the “Feldian stress” signature—the feeling that the game is actively punishing you for not paying attention to the one thing you neglected while optimizing the three things you chose.

The design intent is deliberate. In a pure optimization game, the best player calmly maximizes. In a Feld game, the best player triage-manages—simultaneously building an engine and patching leaks. The emotional texture is closer to emergency medicine than to gardening. You are never comfortable. That discomfort is the point.

It also distinguishes Feld from his contemporaries. Where Uwe Rosenberg (also born 1970) designs pastoral farming engines that reward the satisfaction of building, and Vital Lacerda builds deeply thematic economic simulations, Feld designs optimization puzzles where you need to do ten things but can only accomplish two or three, with a novel central engine generating variety and looming threats demanding triage. The experience is cerebral rather than narrative.

The Golden Years

Between 2010 and 2014, Feld produced games at a velocity that would be remarkable for a full-time designer. For a school principal, it borders on implausible.

In 2011 alone, he published The Castles of Burgundy, Trajan, and Strasbourg—three medium-to-heavy Euros, each with a distinct central mechanism, in a single calendar year. In 2013, he released Bora Bora, Bruges, Amerigo, and Rialto—four games spanning heavy dice-placement to lighter area-majority. Stefan Brück, alea’s editorial director, served as mentor and sounding board through this period. Feld later acknowledged the debt: “He’s greatly influenced my work. I’ve learned a lot from him about what you need to pay attention to while designing games.”

The acclaim was consistent and specific. Castles of Burgundy placed 2nd in the Deutscher Spiele Preis. Trajan placed 2nd the following year. Notre Dame had already placed 2nd in 2007. Bruges took 3rd. Three Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations arrived between 2011 and 2019. The International Gamers Award went to Trajan in 2012.

But the top prize never came. In fourteen appearances in the Deutscher Spiele Preis top ten, Feld never won first place. Three Kennerspiel nominations, zero wins. The pattern tells a story: the peer community recognized sustained excellence but never quite anointed him as the best in any single year. Always the bridesmaid—a remarkable bridesmaid, returning every season in a different dress, but never the one walking down the aisle.

The Adjective

Somewhere in the early 2010s, Stefan Feld’s surname became a genre.

“Feldian” entered the hobby lexicon as a recognized adjective describing a specific set of design characteristics: multiple scoring paths, novel central mechanism, dice used strategically, threat mitigation under optimization pressure. Board game sites use it in reviews. BGG threads use it as both adjective and noun (“first-time Feldian”). Fan infrastructure emerged: Meeple Mountain published a “Focused on Feld” series reviewing his complete catalogue. A dedicated Facebook fan community formed.

The term “point salad”—describing games where nearly every action yields victory points through multiple scoring vectors—became nearly synonymous with Feld’s work. He didn’t invent multi-path scoring, but he systematized it so thoroughly that the concept and his name fused in community discourse. The label started as criticism: too many paths, too little theme, analysis paralysis at the table. It evolved into a recognized design category.

Experienced players push back on the surface reading. The common BGG wisdom holds that if you approach a Feld game trying to score everywhere, you lose. The multiple paths are there to force focus, not to reward scattering. The replayability comes from the fact that different setups demand different strategic priorities. The games resist being solved—which Feld has acknowledged as deliberate.

Queen Games invested in the reputation. The Stefan Feld City Collection—a branded series bearing a designer’s name, an honor typically reserved for the most commercially bankable names in the industry—launched in 2022 with new games and reimplementations of earlier designs. Hamburg rebuilt Bruges. Amsterdam refined Macao. Marrakesh was entirely new and earned the Diamant d’Or in 2023. Feld called it “a great opportunity and honor for me that there is now a dedicated series bearing my name.”

The Staying Power

The Castles of Burgundy is one of the longest-tenured games in BoardGameGeek’s upper rankings. Published in 2011, it has accumulated over 58,000 user ratings—a figure that indicates not cult following but mass adoption. It has been in continuous print through Ravensburger, one of the world’s largest publishers, across multiple editions since release.

A 2022 Gamefound campaign for a Special Edition produced by Awaken Realms met its €50,000 goal in under three minutes. It ultimately raised nearly €3 million from over 22,000 backers. A 2024 reprint campaign raised more than €1 million additional. Digital adaptations exist on Steam, iOS, Android, and Board Game Arena.

These are extraordinary numbers for a game with no miniatures, no narrative campaign, no licensed IP—a game that one major review site acknowledged nobody cares about the theme of. The staying power is entirely mechanical. Players return because the dice-tile interaction generates genuinely novel decision puzzles across hundreds of plays. The system doesn’t exhaust itself.

Trajan, his other 2011 masterwork, sits comfortably in the BGG Top 100 with similar longevity. Both games were designed in the same year by a man who spent his weekdays running a school. The productivity-per-available-hour ratio is perhaps the most remarkable statistic in modern game design.

The Evolution

Feld’s career divides into four periods, each demonstrating the same core philosophy applied at different scales.

The early work (2005–2009) established his voice through lean designs. Roma was a two-player card game that already featured dice-as-decision-space. Notre Dame and In the Year of the Dragon—both 2007—introduced the threat-mitigation pattern and multi-path scoring that would define him. Macao debuted the wind rose, his first genuinely novel “motor.” Four alea titles in this period built his reputation rapidly. He said later that these earlier games “often take some time before players recognize which qualities they have.”

The golden period (2010–2014) produced his most acclaimed work at remarkable velocity. Castles of Burgundy and Trajan crystallized the Feldian template. Bora Bora pushed into heavy territory. Bruges showed he could work lighter. The “point salad” label and “Feld game” as a genre descriptor both solidified here.

The experimental period (2016–2019) showed willingness to break his own conventions. The Oracle of Delphi (2016) abandoned victory points entirely for a race format—the first player to complete twelve tasks wins. Revolution of 1828 (2019) was a spare two-player political card game, his least “Feldian” design. Carpe Diem (2018) earned a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination by demonstrating he could produce streamlined, accessible work.

The ambitious recent period (2020–present) stretches the full complexity spectrum. Kokopelli (2021) was surprisingly light. Civolution (2024) is his most complex game ever—a civilization-building Euro with a 44-page rulebook, four eras, and a tech tree. The City Collection systematically revisits and refines earlier designs. Marrakesh was received as among his best work. The range now spans from weight 2.0 to weight 4.0+, and he is still designing.

The Clean Record

Feld’s attribution profile is among the cleanest of any active designer. Of approximately 44 base games, only Merlin (2017, with Michael Rieneck) carries a co-designer credit. Every other title is credited solely to Feld across all sources: BGG, publisher pages, award records, reviews.

This 98% sole-authorship rate means his design evolution, quality variation, and innovations can be attributed directly to him with high confidence. The peaks are his. The valleys are his too.

Developer and editor contributions from publishers—Brück at alea, Queen Games editorial staff, Kobilke at Deep Print—follow standard industry practice and do not carry design credit. When Feld published Pillars of the Earth: Builders Duel (2009) within a franchise whose main game was designed by Rieneck and Stadler, the standalone design was credited solely to Feld.

His wife and son serve as first playtesters. The Offenburger Spiele-Freunden gaming club handles broader playtesting. He is, by temperament, a solo architect: “For me, this kind of collaboration only works on a relationship level… I’m the handshake type.”

The Honest Assessment

Feld’s narrative pushes upward. The name that became an adjective. The game that never leaves the Top 20. The part-time designer who outproduced most full-time professionals. Forty-plus solo-authored games from a man who spends his days managing teenagers and faculty meetings.

The methodology measures something more specific than narrative momentum.

Invention scores 7—”People noticed.” Multiple genuine innovations: the mancala action-selection hub, dice as starting conditions rather than outcomes, the wind rose timing puzzle, the supply-demand queue auction. Each opened real design space. Each was adopted by at least a few designers. But no single Feld mechanism reached the ubiquity that defines an 8—the level of worker placement, deck-building, or dual-use mana. The mancala appeared in a handful of games, not a hundred. The dice approach changed Euro design sensibility broadly, but the credit is diffuse. Multiple meaningful innovations, each adopted narrowly rather than broadly. The conversation shifted. Industry infrastructure did not.

Architecture scores 7—”Built to last, built for itself.” Castles of Burgundy is one of the best-engineered Euro games ever published. Trajan’s mancala engine is self-balancing and deep. Both support hundreds of plays. But the dual test demands quality AND propagation, and the propagation evidence is thinner than it appears. “Feldian” is a word hobbyists use, not a blueprint designers study. Nobody built ON Feld’s systems the way they built on D&D’s skeleton or Magic’s engine. They compared their games to his. That is admiration, not structural adoption. Direct designer-to-designer citations crediting Feld as a personal influence are thin. The systems are excellent within scope—self-contained individual games that people return to, not foundations others construct on.

Mastery scores 8—”Proven master.” This is where Feld’s sheer volume and attribution clarity hit hardest. Forty-four games, 98% sole credit, clear four-period evolution, identifiable design voice, demonstrable refinement from early punitive designs to mature interlocking systems. The City Collection shows a designer treating his own catalogue as a body to be revised. All from a part-time designer. Why not 9? Because the quality isn’t uniformly excellent. Bonfire and AquaSphere are acknowledged weak entries where subsystems fail to cohere. Some mid-2010s designs prompted community “Feld fatigue.” Fourteen Deutscher Spiele Preis top-ten finishes without a single win tells a specific story: sustained excellence that never quite peaks. Proven master, not yet grandmaster. The career is still active—this score could move.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Feld designs games the way he runs a school. Not with inspiration or drama, but with systems. Structure over narrative. Process over personality. Every game starts with a motor—one novel mechanism that generates all the decisions—and then builds outward with the methodical precision of a curriculum developer adding units to a course plan.

The hidden pattern is in the constraint. A full-time principal designing 40+ games is not a paradox—it is a method. The same mind that runs a gymnasium on process and structure produces games built on process and structure. There is no chaos in the design philosophy, only controlled chaos in the play experience. The “punch in the face” is always calculated. The dice are always working for you if you understand the system.

Feld never pretended to be an artist. He said so himself. What he is, unmistakably, is a craftsman—one who happens to practice his craft in the hours left over after a demanding day job, and who produced, in those stolen hours, a body of work that an entire generation of players uses as a measuring stick for what a Euro game can be.

What Remains

The most telling fact about Feld may be the City Collection. Most designers move forward. Feld went back—revisiting Bruges, Macao, Bora Bora, Rialto, Rum & Pirates—and asked whether each game was as good as it could be. Not remakes for commerce. Revisions for craft.

It is the instinct of a teacher grading his own work. Red pen in hand, margin notes accumulating, the same question driving every correction: does this system hold under stress? Can I remove what doesn’t bear weight? Can I add what was missing?

The answer, for his best games, has been yes for over a decade. Castles of Burgundy holds. Trajan holds. And the principal keeps designing, after hours, in a small town in the Black Forest, because the motor in his head won’t stop turning.

Total: 29 points. Year: 2005.

Total: 29 points. Year: 2005.