(17/41: 2015) BANANA CHAN
The Designer Who Turned the Canvas Into a Curse
Banana Chan makes games where the scariest thing in the room is you.
Not you the player sitting at the table. You the character holding the brush. You the forger who notices the paintings changing around you. You the seamstress whose patterns start stitching themselves. You the late-night radio host whose callers aren’t calling from anywhere on the map. In Chan’s games, horror isn’t an external threat. It’s an internal reckoning — the slow recognition that the monster was always the one making the art.
She’s a Chinese Canadian designer based in Seattle who runs Read/Write Memory, a small-box publishing company that functions as both studio and creative laboratory. She’s won ENNIE Awards. She was named Dicebreaker’s inaugural Designer of the Year in 2022. She’s written for Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and Dune. But her most distinctive contribution to tabletop design is something smaller and stranger — the idea that the game mechanic itself should be an act of creation, and that creation should be the thing that destroys you.
Bob’s Burgers Meets Vampires
The breakthrough came in 2021. Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, co-designed with longtime collaborator Sen-Foong Lim, tells the story of a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant in 1920s Chinatown — and dealing with jiangshi, the hopping vampires of Cantonese folklore, after dark. The game splits into two halves: by day, you manage the restaurant, serve customers, and navigate the pressures of immigrant life. By night, you fight the dead.
Chan described the concept as “Bob’s Burgers meets vampires,” which is both accurate and insufficient. The game’s real innovation is tonal — the horror is grounded in domesticity, in the exhaustion of a family keeping a business alive in a hostile country, and the supernatural is almost secondary to the cultural specificity of the experience. The Kickstarter raised over a hundred thousand dollars in its first day. ENNIE Awards followed: Silver for Best Setting, and the game collected nominations for Best Production Value and Product of the Year.
But Jiangshi’s deeper contribution to the field isn’t mechanical. It’s the extensive guidance material Chan and Lim wrote for non-Asian players — a framework for how to portray a Chinese-American family with authenticity and respect, integrated directly into the rules text. Cultural specificity as design infrastructure, not flavor text. The game teaches you how to play its culture the way other games teach you how to play their combat system.
The Mephistopheles Trilogy
If Jiangshi is Chan’s most successful game, the Mephistopheles Trilogy is her most ambitious. Three solo horror games, each built around a different act of artistic creation, each exploring the Faustian bargain between the artist and something that wants to consume them.
Forgery (2022) is a paint-by-numbers game. Literally. You play an art forger replicating masterworks, and the colors you choose — fill in this section red, this section blue — determine the narrative outcomes. The physical act of painting is the mechanic. As the story progresses, the paintings around your character begin to change, and the horror seeps in through the palette rather than the dice.
Knockoff (2024) replaces paint with fabric. You play a fast-fashion designer, and the game mechanic involves actual cutting and collaging of material. Sewing as gameplay. The horror, again, lives in the creation — the patterns start making themselves, the designs arrive from somewhere other than your imagination.
The third installment, Sample, is still in development. It will use musical composition as its mechanic. Three arts. Three bargains. Three ways of discovering that the thing you made is making you.
The trilogy represents Chan’s most distinctive contribution to the solo journaling genre — the integration of physical artifact creation into game mechanics. Other solo games ask you to write. Chan asks you to paint, sew, compose. The output of play isn’t a journal entry. It’s an object you made with your hands, and the game asks whether making it cost you something you can’t get back.
The Portfolio Beyond the Personal
Chan’s range extends beyond indie horror. She was part of the design team for Betrayal at House on the Hill: 3rd Edition (2022), the Avalon Hill franchise that has been a staple of mainstream horror board gaming for two decades. She co-designed Questlings (2021), a family-friendly RPG for children that won an ENNIE Silver for Best Family Game. She co-designed the officially licensed Chucky board game (2024). She wrote for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium core rulebook, which won ENNIE Gold for Best Writing. She contributed to Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, and to multiple Pathfinder supplements for Paizo.
The pattern across these credits is a designer comfortable operating at multiple scales — intimate solo experiences, licensed franchise products, children’s games, major publisher supplements — without losing the tonal control that defines her personal work. The party game Mr. Lovenstein Presents: No Context (2023) sits next to multimedia horror experiments, and both feel like the work of someone who understands that mechanics serve mood.
The Scoring Case
Invention (5): “It was out there, this person implemented it”
The paint-by-numbers narrative resolution in Forgery and the fabric collage mechanics in Knockoff are genuinely novel as interfaces — artifact-creation-as-gameplay, where the physical output shapes the narrative. Jiangshi uses a familiar PbtA-adjacent framework with cultural specificity as the distinguishing element. The Mephistopheles Trilogy’s “you are the horror” conceit is interesting but remains an implementation of the broader solo journaling wave rather than a new paradigm. Not 6 because the innovations haven’t been adopted by other designers or opened design space beyond her own work. Not 4 because the tactile/art integration shows genuine creative ambition that goes beyond a twist on existing formats.
Architecture (5): “It works”
Jiangshi is well-crafted — the dual-track system (restaurant by day, horror by night) creates meaningful tension, and the cultural guidance material is exemplary world-building infrastructure. Forgery’s paint-by-numbers mechanic is elegant but narrow. Betrayal 3rd Edition is a co-design credit on an existing franchise architecture. These are lightweight systems designed for short campaigns and one-shots, functioning cleanly within their scope. No system has been adopted by other designers as a foundation. Not 6 because no subsystem demonstrates depth beyond its immediate scope or supports extended replay. Not 4 because the games function cleanly and achieve their design goals without house-ruling or interpretation.
Mastery (3): “Early career or limited depth”
Approximately thirteen to fourteen designed or co-designed games across roughly ten years (2015–2025). Many key titles are co-designed with Sen-Foong Lim, making personal attribution harder to isolate. The Mephistopheles Trilogy shows a coherent artistic vision and identifiable voice — horror, cultural specificity, tactile mechanics. But the body of solo-attributed work is small, and the career is still in its growth phase. Dicebreaker Designer of the Year 2022 is real recognition. Not 4 because the volume of demonstrably personal work doesn’t yet show sustained refinement across a body of solo designs. Not 2 because there are multiple distinct games with a recognizable design identity and clear creative direction.
Adjustments — +4
- ■ Longevity 10+ years (+1): Published design work from approximately 2015 (They’re Onto Me, Golden Cobra entry) through 2025. Ten years of active output.
- ■ Full-time career (+1): Runs Read/Write Memory (formerly Game and a Curry) as primary professional operation. Game design and publishing is her livelihood.
- ■ Awards (+1): ENNIE Gold (Best Writing, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium). ENNIE Silver ×2 (Jiangshi: Best Setting; Questlings: Best Family Game). Dicebreaker Designer of the Year 2022. Golden Cobra Best Pervasive Game 2016.
- ■ Branded name (+0): Not recognized outside the TTRPG community.
- ■ Cross-genre success (+1): RPGs (Jiangshi), board games (Betrayal 3rd Edition, Chucky), solo journaling (Forgery, Knockoff), party games (No Context), LARP (They’re Onto Me). Five distinct formats.
- ■ Commercial success (+0): Jiangshi Kickstarter raised approximately $100K. No single title approaching $10M lifetime revenue.
- ■ Design propagation (+0): No documented cases of other designers adopting her mechanical approaches.
- ■ Field stewardship (+0): No evidence of formal mentorship programs, educational initiatives, or institutional contributions beyond her own publishing.
The Hidden Pattern
Every Chan game is about the cost of making something.
Jiangshi asks what it costs a family to build a restaurant in a country that doesn’t want them. Forgery asks what it costs an artist to replicate someone else’s vision until the replication starts replicating you. Knockoff asks what it costs to stitch together fast beauty from someone else’s patterns. Even the Betrayal redesign — a franchise about a house that turns against its explorers — is a game about inhabiting a structure that consumes you from the inside.
The Faustian thread running through the Mephistopheles Trilogy isn’t just thematic decoration. It’s a design philosophy. Chan’s games propose that creation and destruction are the same act viewed from different angles — that the brush stroke and the curse are indistinguishable if you hold them up to the right light. The physical artifacts her games produce (paintings, fabric collages, compositions) are simultaneously proof of play and evidence of corruption. You made something beautiful, and it ate you alive.
That’s a design signature. Whether it develops into a body of work that reshapes how others build games remains the open question. The trajectory is pointed upward. The voice is unmistakable. The canvas isn’t finished.
What Remains
Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (2021) — the game that proved cultural specificity could be game architecture, not just setting flavor. ENNIE Silver. A hundred thousand dollars funded in a day.
Forgery (2022) — paint-by-numbers as horror mechanic, the first entry in a trilogy that asks whether art can be haunted by the act of making it.
Knockoff (2024) — fabric collage as game system, extending the Mephistopheles thesis into new material.
The Darkness at the Brink of Ohio (2024) — multimedia solo horror, radio drama folded into journaling, the late-night broadcast from nowhere.
A career still in motion. A voice still sharpening. The trilogy isn’t finished yet.
Total: 17 points. Year: 2015.
17 points. 2015. The designer who turned the canvas into a curse.
A career still in motion. A voice still sharpening. The trilogy isn’t finished yet.