About

The designer

I’m Bill Ward, and I’ve been a lifelong fan of board games. I was struck with a flash of inspiration in 2015 while driving home from a friend’s house after playing board games there, and by the time I’d gotten home, my first design idea had taken form. Of course it was terrible, but that’s what first drafts are for.


Since then I’ve gone on to design (to varying degrees of completion) about a dozen games. I became an active participant in the game designer playtest community in the San Francisco Bay Area, but shifted to online playtesting after COVID hit. In spring of 2026 I resumed attending in-person meetups.

After a career in software engineering and product management I’ve applied that mindset to game design, building a production pipeline for playtesting prototypes first on my own, and later incorporating the use of AI coding agents via Claude Code. Read more about that work in my prototype pipeline page.

The studio

Cardboard Reveries is the Internet home for my game designs. At this point none of them have been published and I’m not interested in going the self-publishing route. I enjoy the creative work of designing tabletop experiences, puzzling out just what makes them fun, and seeing people’s reactions to them. I look forward to working with publishers to bring my games to a broader audience.

In the meantime, you’ll often find me at local playtesting events and gaming conventions, sitting at a table with a prototype out.

I’m also available for help with your games (design, development, and/or artwork), and production consulting; get in touch below.

Get in touch

Use the “Contact Me” tab in the comments section below to reach out with any inquiries.

Elsewhere

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