From my cave to Essen

 

If, eight years ago, when I started this blog, someone had told me that I’d end up at Spiel Essen 2026—the world’s largest board game trade show—demonstrating an award-winning game, Endeavor Deep Sea, which won the 2025 Kennerspiel des Jahres, for a Canadian publisher, Burnt Island Games, I wouldn’t have believed it.

 

Just as I would have found it highly unlikely that I would be able to switch my full-time regular job to part-time so I could devote time to a professional activity related to games.

And I would have had good reasons to doubt it!

The thing is, at the time, I knew absolutely nothing about the professional side of board games. I didn’t know anyone working in the field in Portugal, much less abroad. Local gaming groups and major conventions, dedicated social media groups and crowdfunding platforms, the multitude of online stores, and the true encyclopedia that is BoardGameGeek—and much, much more—had all passed me by.

Games—a lifelong hobby and the most constant constant in my life—remained a passion shared within my family and a close circle of friends. We bought them at local stores in Portugal or while traveling abroad. We played them at home or at friends’ houses, on regular days or during vacations.

Then, when I started this project, I embarked on an uncertain journey with no set destination or direction. The ensuing discoveries soon led to my first collaborations, translating rulebooks into Portuguese. Having enjoyed the experience, I sought to broaden the range of possibilities. Some collaborations led to others. Then, naturally and gradually, as I noticed issues in original rulebooks, the work expanded into proofreading manuscripts, then editing, and later writing rulebooks from scratch.

In about eight years, starting from absolute zero, I’ve now completed over 400 projects, including writing the rulebook and scenario booklets for Apex Legends – The Board Game, a participation on the editorial team for Unconscious Mind, the Portuguese translation of Concordia and some of its expansions, English translations of historical war games created in Spain, an exhibition of games from my collection, collaboration on the design and implementation of the GamesLab at the Department of Social, Political, and Territorial Sciences at the University of Aveiro, among many, many others. And the portfolio keeps growing!

But beyond the projects lie the bonds forged with people who bring all these worlds to everyone’s table. From Portugal to the United Kingdom, to Poland, and all across Europe. From the United States to Canada. From India to Australia. From creators trying to turn a dream—their first game—into reality, to those with reputations built over decades and a place in the history of modern games.

Connections that still sometimes feel unreal, especially for someone who, not long ago, was just peeking out of their cave, without a clear vision of what they could do in the world of games. Virtual connections that finally turned into in-person relationships at the world’s biggest stage for board games!

The journey has been worth it. 

And I’ll keep wandering in the world of games 😊

For some reason, the post for the blog's 7th anniversary was missing... So, here it is!

Seven years ago, launching this blog marked a sort of return to the world of board games. Not that I had ever truly left it, because games have always been a constant companion. But the journey that began then felt different. Perhaps because the world of games had substantially changed, promising countless discoveries along the way. Perhaps because there was no set course or destination, allowing all manner of detours, stops, encounters, and surprises. A journey I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. Here are seven moments, among so many others, to mark seven years.

2018. InvictaCon. A fleeting visit to my first gaming convention, held at the Gondomar multipurpose pavilion. Clearly, the hobby—once a small niche—had grown, and I'd missed that growth because I had been immersed in other worlds. Seeing so many people playing, so many games, and so much hard work and dedication behind the scenes made me want to discover more and be a part of it. My convention journey was just beginning.

2019. My first projects for MasQueOca (MQO), a Spanish game publisher, translating and proofreading rulebooks. It came in an unusual way, since the initial contact wasn’t direct. At the time, I was reaching out to publishers launching games on Kickstarter to gauge their interest in including Portuguese among their language options. One of those contacts was  Luke Warren of North Star Games, around the time of the game Oceans’ launch. That collaboration didn’t materialize, but Luke kindly passed my contact information on to José Antonio Garrido at MQO. Shortly thereafter, a collaboration began that not only continues to this day but has also recently expanded to include NAC Wargames, MQO’s subsidiary.

2020. The Geeky Pen. My collaboration with this Belgian board game translation company is another of my longest-standing, most regular, and most intensive partnerships. I never could have imagined it would turn out this way when I responded to an ad on a BoardGameGeek forum. Especially since it was a studio made up of professional translators—which I wasn’t. But the first job came along, and others followed—a sign that Portuguese was becoming an increasingly attractive language for publishers. I met Jo Lefebure, founder and director of TGP, in person at an international game convention. Today, this company operates in 25 languages!

2021. The exhibition. The challenge came much earlier, by Margarida Almeida. But then the pandemic struck. The world became surreal, the physical gave way to the virtual, and plans were postponed. Later, we were able to resume the project and organize a board game exhibition at the University of Aveiro. This prompted me to look differently at all those games that normally never even leave the house: setting a goal, telling a story, finding a common thread, selecting the games, choosing what to showcase from each one, and designing the layout of the boards, pieces, and other components. It also led me to better understand the behind-the-scenes aspects of something we usually only see from the other side. 

2022. Apex Legends. This adaptation of a first-person combat video game into a board game, by the Polish publisher Glass Cannon Unplugged, was undoubtedly my most complex challenge to date. The work involved developing the rulebook from scratch, based on working versions and in collaboration with the development team. But this is no ordinary game: the action takes place in a three-dimensional space, featuring buildings and other obstacles, weapons and effects of all kinds, the need to establish lines of sight between shooter and target, and the requirement to recreate the frenetic atmosphere of the original game. This unique product took many hours of intense work and close collaboration—especially with Grzegorz Przytarski, one of the lead developers.

2023. Cannes International Games Festival. I had decided to check out one of the major conventions abroad and chose Cannes—after all, it’s smaller and closer than Essen. It was also an excuse to brush up on my French and, in a way, a trip down memory lane to the 1980s, when news from the world of games reached me through the magazine Jeux & Stratégie. Not only did I spend a few days at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes—which we most often associate with cinema—but I also attended the As d’Or awards ceremony for the winning games, ran game demos for Wonderful World Board Games, a Taiwanese company and creator of Animals Gathering, among other titles, and spent late nights testing prototypes at the Nuits du Off.

2024. Unconscious Mind. This was another collaboration on designing and editing a rulebook for a game that caught my attention from the start—because of its theme, some of the mechanics used, and the art by Andrew Bosley, Vincent Dutrait, and Yoma. It’s funny—and still feels a bit strange—to have my first encounter with the final product at a convention, in this case VianaCon, watching people learn the game from the rulebook that, just a short time before, had been the focus of my daily work.

2025. DCSPT GamesLab. Another year, another challenge. This time, I collaborated on introducing board games as a teaching tool in the Department of Social, Political, and Territorial Sciences at the University of Aveiro. We had the opportunity to participate from the very beginning—discussing activities, selecting games for the game library, organizing the first awareness-raising events with themed games, and paving the way. We played Die Macher just the week before the legislative elections, and Rising Waters a few weeks later. And today there’s more: a presentation on board games and their uses, and a game session with urban development as the backdrop.

Bring on seven more!

Portfolio update

This was long overdue... More than two years have passed since the last version. Two more years of intense collaborations, some recurring, some new. Over 400 projects now, since 2018. Rulebooks have always been at the core, but the work also includes playtesting and using games in higher education, for example.

Portfolio available at this link.