THIBAUT GUFFOND

An "open table" sandbox campaign set in a realistic yet magical prehistory, where players embody Homo Sapiens or Homo Neandertalensis.

Played remotely with a group of about 10 people, this campaign was designed according to the "West Marches" style by Ben Robbins. Players are not bound to their usual group and can play whenever at least two of them are available at the same time. Their characters live in the same world, and their actions have a durable impact on the world, meaning that two groups of people who never play with each other still interact indirectly through the marks they leave on the world.

The rules of the game had to be and still are being modified heavily to accomodate this playstyle, and I often introduce new rules as I get feedback from my players.

An unofficial hack of the role-playing game "Ironsworn" by Shawn Tomkin, adapting the game to Nickelodeon's Avatar universe.

Elementsworn mostly keeps the structure of the Ironsworn system, but introduces the concept of balance (borrowed from the official Avatar rpg, Avatar Legends) with associated rules and moves. It also introduces over 80 new assets, cards representing aspects of a character and comprising three skills each.
As a fan game, Elementsworn also supports the creation of both canon and non-canon narratives by the players and has worldbuilding rules suporting that aspect.

Elementsworn was downloaded over 2,000 times on itch.io and featured in more than 180 collections.

An unofficial supplement to the role-playing game "Ironsworn" by Shawn Tomkin, it adds mechanics dealing with factions as different modules that can be used separately to allow each player to customize their experience.

The concept of factions already existed in Ironsworn, but aside from a few generative tables, there was not much about them in the rules. With Feats & Favors, players who like games of political intrigue can use these rules not only to create factions, but also to make them act on their own, make them grow or decline according to the game events, and it even allows to join a faction and eventually rise as its leader.

Feats & favors was downloaded over 2,000 times on itch.io and featured in over 100 collections.

A series of games and physical exercises to teach students the practice of trollball, a sport combining larp combat with ball-sport teamplay.

These exercises where designed as part of my responsibility as the lead coach of Jean Jaurès University's trollball team.

Personally, I think that level design is not just related to the design of spaces, but more importantly to the design of progression. With this in mind, I used a level design methodology to write a full curriculum of physical exercises for the practice of trollball. It especially helped me identify and isolate the core skills needed to learn, and to create a year-spanning timetable to teach thoses skills.

An fan-made version of the famous game "Werewolves of Miller's Hollow / Les Loups-Garous de Thiercelieux".

Designed to be played by players with a lot of experience in the base game, it keeps the same mechanics but changes the cards and roles to create new dynamics, with an emphasis on social interaction and investigation.

The power to kill other players has been redistributed and associated with conditions or risks to reduce the frustration of players getting eliminated randomly by others. There are also a number of roles that change the objective of players in addition to simply giving them powers, resulting in highly social and sometimes complex games where deception is the key to win.

A fan-made expansion to the game "7Wonders" by Antoine Bauza, adding 7 new wonders inspired by different mythical cities and places.

These new wonders all come in two versions, a "A-side" using the basic rules of the game with a simple twist, and a "B-side" introducing new rules and often a wildly different economy for each city.

The intent was twofold: create a set of playable wonders centered around a common theme that could easily blend with the base game, and give each of them a new and unique playstyle using only mechanics and concepts of the original game.

A board game for up to four players, inspired by the age of discovery and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Each player controls a ship, and tries to complete objectives while exploring the sea, trading with the natives, and fighting pirates and/or each other.

The design of the game stemmed from a reduced set of core mechanics - the idea of exploring a world by revealing tiles, and sailing using dice-generated winds - and grew progressively as the game was playtested with more and more people.

As the complexity of the game grew, however, so did the length of a single game. As my first 'real' game project, this game taught me a lot about the importance of player feedback and the danger of feature creep, among other things.

A board game sold as a bonus goodie for a music album. In its base state, the game is fun but heavily relies on chance.

Unsatisfied by the experience I had with the game, I decided to rewrite the rules, keeping them as close as possible to the author's intent while reducing the part chance plays and increasing player agency.

Dice rolls have been made less common, starting conditions have been made less random, and the range of player actions has been expanded.

While not perfect (as it never is), the result is a game that feels very similar to the original design, but manages to engage players on a much deeper level.