Intro

Noa Chazan

— 2 min read
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Hello readers I am Noa (she/her). I'm a designer of board games, tabletop RPGs, and also other stuff. I'm interested in when games blur boundaries - between the real world and the game world, between language and meaning, or between genres of play. I'm also a handweaver, which may come up here again in future.

I'm starting this newsletter/blog so that people can keep up with my different projects. I plan to do posts with greater detail on these in the future, but here's the overview of what I've got going on:

Situations play example
  • In Situations, you and your friends build a scenario by gluing together nouns and adjectives, and then each write your own flash fiction based on what you came up with. It's a card game with strong TTRPG influence that I self-published in 2019. It's available for purchase in physical or digital form at Indie Press Revolution.
Chromatic Conjuring spell papers
  • Chromatic Conjuring is a sticky-fingers tabletop roleplaying game of creative wizardry where you cast spells by dipping paper in water with ink floating on top and reading the patterns of color that emerge. Inspired by the traditional craft of paper marbling and the concept of keepsake games, it will be released next year as part of the Plus One Exp RPG Zine Club.
They Were Here Long Before Us gameplay
  • They Were Here Long Before Us is a manual for surviving a circular-time apocalypse - walk around your neighborhood, look for the ancient symbols in the built environment, and plan what you will do when it happens. It's a diagetically written solo journaling wander RPG, and I will be selling hand-bound copies at PAX Unplugged 2026's Indie Games Night Market.
  • I'm writing an article about procedural generation techniques in TTRPGs versus those used in computer games, which will be in issue one of Playtest Material. It explores the question of when randomness is used to generate answers, and when it's used to generate questions.

I also have a couple board game projects that are slightly on the backburner at the moment:

  • I have a paper-doll based fashion board game in the works, where the best outfits determine what aspects are "in" and "out" in order to create a scoring mechanism based on the fashion cycle. I'm working on drawing hundreds of items of clothing for it, which takes a long time.
  • I've been working on a strategy game where the pieces move automatically, and the players manipulate the board to redirect them. The goal is for it to feel like you're playing with the Butterfly Effect, pulling the strings behind the scenes to make things happen down the line.

If any of these sound interesting to you, stick around for more details, design case studies, and other thoughts on games!