FDG2025 | 6th Workshop on Tabletop Games

Conference on April 15-18 | Vienna & Graz, Austria

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

Paper submission deadline: 7 February 2025
Author notification deadline: 10 March 2025
Camera-ready paper deadline: 24 March 2025
Workshop date: 15 April 2025

4 Submissions

We welcome paper submissions as describing novel research. Papers submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review, and each submission will be peer reviewed. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to give an oral presentation of their paper at the workshop. Presenters are expected to attend physically.
All submissions should be anonymized, as the review process is double-blind. All submissions should be in PDF format and use the 2-column (sigconf) ACM Template. Authors may submit either full papers (typically up to ten pages in length, excluding references and appendices), or short papers (up to six pages, one column or four pages, two columns in length, including references).
Papers should be submitted through EasyChair (to the "Workshop on Tabletop Games" track).

Topics include but would not be limited to:
Player/User Experience Testing and Playtest Methodologies
Design and Manufacturing of Physical Game Objects
Impact of 3D printing and rapid prototyping
Rules Generation, Development, and Extraction
Crowd-Funding Development and Processes
Social Networks and Discussion Groups on Analog Games
Impact of YouTube (i.e. video rule-books) on games rules presentation
IoT Technologies in Games Objects
Procedural Content Generation
Technology applied to the understanding of play
Historical Reviews, Post Mortem, and Lessons Learned
Dos and Don’ts of Game Design
Applications of tabletop games (education, personal transformation, cultural heritage, etc)
Digital support/extensions to tabletop games (including XR)
Ancient tabletop games

5 Organizers

Antonios Liapis is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence in Games, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Creativity, and User Modeling. He has published over 140 papers in the aforementioned fields, and has received several awards for his research contributions and reviewing effort. He has served as general chair in four international conferences, as guest editor in four special issues in international journals, and has co-organized 16 workshops.
Akrivi Katifori is a researcher at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the ATHENA Research Center. She has authored several papers in different research areas of computer science, including interactive digital storytelling, virtual reality and digital heritage.
Hamna Aslam is a lecturer at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has a Ph. D. in Computer Science with a focus on user experience evaluation and affordance theory. She researches digital and analog systems for their impact, desirability, and usability patterns. In this regard, AI systems and games are the primary focus.
Joseph Alexander Brown is an assistant teaching professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia Canada and an adjunct professor at Brock University, Canada. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Guelph. His research fo- cuses on Evolutionary Algorithms, Procedural Content Generation and Game Theory.
Micael Sousa is a post-doc researcher at UCD, focusing on serious analog planning games. He also serves as invited game design lecturer and instructor at Lusofona University, as a serious games developer for projects related to urban planning, collaborative and creative collective processes, as workshop instructor and as Board game reviewer and developer.

6 Program Committee

  • TBA