(12/41: 2014) JESSE LABBÉ
The Notebook
Jesse Labbé draws before he designs. Every game starts in a notebook — a sketch, a character, a world rendered in his Burton-esque illustration style before anyone asks what the rules are. The Jackson Free Press documented the process: initial ideas recorded in the notebook, translated to concept paper, then developed into mechanics. The drawing comes first. The system follows.
This is not how most designers work. Most designers find the mechanic, then dress it. Labbé finds the world, then figures out what the world needs to feel like at the table. It explains both his greatest strength — games that feel cohesive, where art and theme and mechanics speak the same language — and his most persistent limitation. The feelings arrive before the math does.
He studied at the Art Institute of Dallas. Before games, he drew — Marvel Masterpiece Sketch Cards, work connected to Disney and Hasbro, freelance illustration. In 2010, he and Anthony Coffey published Berona’s War through Archaia/Boom! Studios, debuting at San Diego Comic-Con alongside David Petersen’s Mouse Guard. A graphic novel about warring animal kingdoms. The worldbuilding instinct was already fully formed. The game design instinct was still germinating.
The Trail and the Orphans
Cross Hares: Testing Ground (2014) was the first published design. Labbé described it as an attempt to resurrect the trail game — Fireball Island, the roll-and-move adventures of his childhood — by layering RPG elements, variable player powers, and hand management onto the format. In his own words: the trail game was “truly a dinosaur” and he wanted to update it for a modern audience.
The critical reception was polite but clear. The Deseret News noted the game offered “few choices of real significance” and that “virtually everything revolves around dice rolls.” Gaming Bits gave the components a perfect 10 out of 10. This became a pattern — production values earning praise that the mechanical depth couldn’t match. The ambition was real. The execution was a first draft.
Endangered Orphans of Condyle Cove (2016) showed genuine growth. A focused take-that card game with deck depletion as an elimination mechanic — tighter, faster, more confident in its restraint. The Kickstarter raised $355,000 from over 7,300 backers. The Meeple Street praised it as one of the few games where take-that gameplay actually worked. Father Geek’s review revealed a polarizing theme — children found the subject genuinely disturbing, which is either a design flaw or a feature depending on your tolerance for dark whimsy. The game proved Labbé could ship, could find an audience, and could build a studio around the process.
The Clicker
Who Goes There? (2018) was the leap. Based on John W. Campbell’s novella — the source material for The Thing, not the Carpenter film — it was a semi-cooperative hidden-traitor board game that raised $612,000 on Kickstarter from 6,500 backers. The budget, the ambition, and the mechanical complexity all jumped by an order of magnitude.
The central innovation was the “Vulnerable” paranoia engine. In most hidden-traitor games — Battlestar Galactica, Dead of Winter — someone starts as the traitor, or infection is randomly assigned. In Who Goes There?, everyone begins human. Infection spreads through the survival actions players need to perform: eating, sleeping, trading resources. Fail at basic survival and you draw Vulnerable cards. The physical infection clickers create audible tension at the table. Paranoia emerges from the mechanics, not from a card dealt at setup.
It was a meaningful distinction. Multiple reviewers highlighted it. Meeple Mountain called the game “tense and immersive… gorgeously crafted… You can feel the passion.” The thematic integration was exactly what Labbé’s notebook-first process was built to produce — a game where the mechanic and the fiction tell the same story.
But the architecture underneath had problems.
The Structural Truth
The 1st edition of Who Goes There? was widely criticized for balance skewed heavily against the human team. Win conditions felt mathematically impossible at some player counts. The game spiraled — one early mistake could make the remaining two-plus hours unwinnable. Player elimination in a three-hour game. The clicker mechanic and crafting phases created pacing flaws that pushed sessions past the advertised runtime. The rules were, in Fuzzy Llama’s words, “extremely difficult to understand” on first encounter, with community-created player aids on BoardGameGeek confirming the learning curve.
Board Game Guys praised the immersion and replayability but flagged a complex endgame, disruptive random events, and the elimination problem. The helicopter escape — a resource gate where players must pool resources to buy seats, creating a Prisoner’s Dilemma at the climax — was a strong thematic concept undercut by the structural issues surrounding it.
The 2nd edition (2020) was an explicit overhaul. Frostbite replaced instant player elimination. A new Base Camp board and buildable host tests addressed the pacing and balance criticisms. The fact that it took a full second edition to fix the core problems confirms the initial architecture was rough. A BGG average of 7.64 and weight of 2.92 place the game in respectable territory. The fun, as multiple reviewers noted, derived from the table talk and the narrative — not from the tightness of the mechanical loops.
The pattern holds across the catalog: high rules overhead that doesn’t always translate to strategic depth. Production values consistently outperforming mechanical rigor. Games that feel better than they play.
The Studio
Certifiable Studios was the machine Labbé built. Co-founded with Rick Moore — CEO of Mad Genius, an advertising agency — the studio operated from Ridgeland, Mississippi, a non-coastal market that made the $2.16 million in total Kickstarter funding across six successful campaigns more remarkable. Labbé served as lead creative: designer, artist, creative director. Anthony Coffey joined as co-designer and co-artist. Opie Cooper handled marketing and Kickstarter campaigns. Brian Thompson contributed as mechanics developer on Who Goes There?.
The studio’s personality was its product as much as the games were. Humorous video marketing, the “Certifiable” branding, a community Discord, monthly First Friday game nights drawing 40 to 50 attendees pre-COVID. In 2021, Labbé and Moore opened Dogmud Tavern, a gaming bar in Ridgeland — the “Dogmud” being a fictional drink from Labbé’s college days that appeared as an Easter egg across multiple games.
Then the signal went dark. The last Kickstarter — Altar Ego, April 2021 — was cancelled after failing to reach its $41,421 goal. Social media went silent. A BoardGameGeek thread around 2024 asked whether Certifiable Studios still existed, with community members reporting dead accounts and unresponsive customer service. Announced projects — Ash to Bone, Disasternauts, Booty Snatchers, Cops and Robbers — remain unaccounted for. Whether the gaming bar represented a pivot or an ending is unclear.
The Honest Assessment
Six published games across eight years. Three solo design credits and three co-designed with Coffey. A Kickstarter funding total that most indie studios never approach. A paranoia engine that reviewers consistently praised as distinctive. Production values that earned perfect component scores.
And mechanical depth that consistently lagged behind the art. A flagship game that required a second edition to fix its core architecture. No evidence — zero — of other designers adopting his mechanics, citing his work, or building on his systems. No awards. No nominations. No cross-genre work. A catalog confined entirely to board and card games. A career that may have ended before the ten-year mark.
Labbé is the specific archetype the Kickstarter era produced in volume: the artist-designer who entered through crowdfunding, found a real audience through production quality and thematic resonance, but left a limited mechanical legacy. His games sold because they looked and felt like passion projects from someone who genuinely loved the worlds he was building. They didn’t propagate because the systems underneath weren’t robust enough to become templates.
The Scoring Case
Invention (3): “Competent variation.”
The Vulnerable paranoia engine is the primary inventive contribution — infection spreading through the same survival actions players need to perform, with everyone starting human. It’s a meaningful twist on the hidden-traitor genre, and multiple reviewers noted it as distinctive. But the research flags uncertainty about whether prior games used a similar mechanic, and Brian Thompson is credited as mechanics developer on the system, complicating solo attribution. The trail-game modernization in Cross Hares was evolutionary — critics noted dice dependency still dominated. The D6 meta-RPG framing has precedents. No adoption by other designers whatsoever. Zero citations, zero third-party supplements, zero published games building on these mechanics. Identifiable variations that keep the genre fresh without pushing it forward. That’s a 3.
Architecture (4): “Functional but rough.”
Who Goes There? 1st edition was widely criticized for balance skewed against humans, with win conditions feeling mathematically impossible at some player counts. Player elimination in a three-hour game — a structural flaw significant enough to require a full second edition overhaul. Pacing flaws from the clicker mechanic and crafting phases. High rules overhead not translating to strategic depth. Cross Hares earned perfect component scores alongside critiques of limited meaningful choice. The 2nd edition corrections demonstrate responsiveness but confirm the initial architecture had real problems. BGG 7.64 and weight 2.92 place it in respectable territory. Games that feel better than they play is a consistent pattern. That’s a 4.
Mastery (4): “Developing craft.”
Clear, measurable evolution across a compressed timeline. Cross Hares (dice-dependent, 2014) to Endangered Orphans (tighter focus, 2016) to Who Goes There? (complex integrated systems, 2018) to the 2nd edition revisions (structural refinement, 2020). Six published games with three carrying unambiguous solo attribution. A recognizable design signature — every game begins as a drawing, art and theme integrated from conception. But production values consistently outperform mechanical depth. Eight years active, not enough to cross the 10,000-hours threshold where design fundamentals become instinctive. The craft is developing, genuinely improving. Not yet mastered. That’s a 4.
Adjustments (+1):
- ■ Full-time career: +1. Certifiable Studios was his primary profession and livelihood.
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: No. Approximately 8 years of active design (2013–2021). Does not reach the trigger.
- ■ Awards: No. No awards, nominations, or Hall of Fame inductions found.
- ■ Branded name: No. Who Goes There? is known within the Kickstarter board game community. Non-gamers have no idea it exists.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. Entire catalog is board and card games. No RPGs, wargames, or miniatures games.
- ■ Commercial success: No. ~$2.16M total Kickstarter funding across six campaigns. No single title approaches $10M lifetime retail.
- ■ Design propagation: No. Zero evidence of other designers adopting mechanics, citing work, or building on systems.
The Hidden Pattern
Jesse Labbé designs from the inside out.
Not from mechanics to theme — from world to system. The notebook comes first. The character sketch. The tone. The feeling of sitting at a table in the Antarctic and not knowing whether the person beside you is still human. Every game he made began as an illustration and became a rulebook. This is why his production values are exceptional and his balance is rough. He’s building the cathedral from the stained glass inward.
The pattern explains the trajectory. Cross Hares was all glass and no structure — beautiful, fragile, dice-dependent. Endangered Orphans was a smaller window, better framed. Who Goes There? was the first time the glass and the structure tried to match in scale, and the structure cracked under the weight. The 2nd edition was the repair. The growth is real. The direction is correct. The destination wasn’t reached.
What Remains
The paranoia engine. The specific feeling of sitting at a table where infection spreads through the actions you need to survive — where the mechanic creates the emotion rather than a card dealt at setup. No other designer copied it, but every player who experienced it remembers the clicker.
The demonstration that a two-person artist-designer team in Mississippi could build a viable tabletop studio through crowdfunding and ship $2 million worth of games to every continent except Antarctica.
And the notebook. Somewhere in Ridgeland, there’s a notebook full of worlds that became games and worlds that didn’t. Ash to Bone — the dream project — is still in there. Whether it ever comes out is a question the methodology can’t answer.
Labbé designed the way he drew — world first, structure second. The worlds were vivid. The structures were developing. The silence after 2021 leaves the story without an ending.
Total: 12 points. Year: 2014.
12 points. 2014. Six games from a notebook.
The notebook came first. The clicker came second. The silence came last.