FDG2025 | 6th Workshop on Tabletop Games

1 Introduction

Analog games have seen a surge of interest: board game cafés, new titles, and a more accepting culture to role-playing games as a pass-time has fueled a boom in sales. However, academic research is relatively stagnating upon the analog domain as an object of design, due to both the interdisciplinary nature taking cues from computer science, narrative creation, psychology, and due to a lack of good publication venues for such works. Although being integrated to achieve crucial outcomes such as brain health diagnosis, industrial training, recruitment process, analog games have been under-studied in terms of human factors consideration and design improvisation. The workshop endeavours to highlight such issues by discussing existing solutions and potential areas of improvement. Furthermore, the aim of this workshop is to address the gap between research and practice, looking at the ways in which academics can apply their tools to the discussion of analog games; this includes but is not limited to board games, war games, and tabletop role-playing.

This year sees the 6th iteration of the FDG Workshop on Tabletop Games. Details of past workshops, and papers accepted to them, can be found at the workshop archives.

2 Important note on scope

We define tabletop games here to include any game played by a group of players (or one player, in niche cases) on the tabletop: this includes board games, role-playing games, technology-enhanced board games (e.g. Mansions of Madness or Alchemists), and so on. Computer simulations of tabletop games are also included, e.g. for simulated board game play for the purposes of artificial intelligence or other computational tasks. Importantly, the topics of this workshop do not include playground activities or urban games, pervasive games (e.g. played throughout the day during other activities), and games intended to be played exclusively on the computer (e.g. digital card games such as Hearthstone). Therefore, while a computer-based generator which outputs a map and description which can be played on a tabletop role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons is acceptable, should the same generator only output dungeons played on the computer it would not be acceptable. Similarly, a computer simulation (interactive or not) of Chess would be acceptable provided that it simulates a board game (in this case Chess) which can be played on the tabletop. Papers that approach the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of board games, and how these relate to the state-of-the-art and future research on analog games are also welcome. If you have any questions on whether a topic is within scope of this workshop, contact us (see Organizers) for the specific case.

3 Important Dates