Justin D. Jacobson is an attorney and professional

game design Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...

er.

Career

Justin D. Jacobson is an attorney, and was the owner and operator of

Blue Devil Games ''Blue Devil Games'' publishes role-playing games and games of strategy. Description The company is best known for ''Dawning Star'', the first full-scale science fiction campaign setting using the d20 Future rules from Wizards of the Coast and ' ...

, publishers of

role-playing games A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal ac ...

and

strategy games A strategy game or strategic game is a game (e.g. a board game) in which the players' uncoerced, and often autonomous, decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Almost all strategy games require internal decisio ...

. He is best known as the designer of ''Poisoncraft: The Dark Art'', ''

Dawning Star ''Dawning Star'' (abbreviated ''DS'') is a science fiction role-playing game by Blue Devil Games built on ''d20 Modern'' and powered by ''d20 Future'' by Wizards of the Coast. It is the first full-scale campaign setting using the ''d20 Future'' r ...

'', and ''Passages'', and the winner of the About.com 2004 Shared Pieces Design Competition for ''Golem''. In 2004, Blue Devil Games was one of the seven companies working with

Indie Press Revolution Indie Press Revolution (also referred to as "IPR") is a sales network that acts as a fulfillment house for publishers of indie role-playing games. It was founded in 2004 by Ed Cha of Open World Press and Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games. IPR repre ...

as a fulfillment house to serve small press publishers with their publications in terms of warehousing, selling, and shipping to customers directly. Jacobson joined with

Fred Hicks Fred Hicks is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games. Career Fred Hicks discovered the ''Fudge'' role-playing game system while online and used it for his games based on Roger Zelazny's ''The Chronicles of Amber''. Hic ...

and Rob Donoghue of

Evil Hat Productions Evil Hat Productions is a company that produces role-playing games and other tabletop games. Chief among them is the free indie RPG, ''Fate'', which has won numerous awards. History Fred Hicks had been working with Lydia Leong, Rob Donoghu ...

and Chris Hanrahan in 2008 to form the game company One Bad Egg, intending to publish high-quality PDFs for fourth edition ''

Dungeons & Dragons ''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by TSR (company)#Tactical Studies Rules ...

'' which encouraged storytelling in play; however, sales were bad, and Hicks announced in September 2009 that One Bad Egg would be closing down.

Restoration Games

In 2016 Jacobson and

Rob Daviau Rob Daviau is an American game designer known for creating legacy board gaming. Career He has guest lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and New York University on game design and has been a visiti ...

founded Restoration Games, a tabletop game publishing company, specializing in out-of-print mass-market games from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Their company was announced at

Gen Con Gen Con is the largest tabletop game convention in North America by both attendance and number of events. It features traditional pen-and-paper, board, and card games, including role-playing games, miniatures wargames, live action role-playing ...

2016. After allowing people to send in suggestions for what games to restore through their website, Jacobson and his team decided on

Stop Thief! ''Stop Thief!'' is a 1901 British short silent drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually q ...

, Downforce (an iteration of

Wolfgang Kramer Wolfgang Kramer (born 29 June 1942 in Stuttgart) is a German board game designer. Early life As a young child, Wolfgang Kramer used to play games with his grandmother, and said he developed a positive attitude about games because "she always use ...

's Top Race series, and Indulgence (a recreation of the card game Dragonmaster). Stop Thief was actually funded on Kickstarter where it raised over $100,000. Jacobson's next foray into Kickstarter was bringing back the classic

Fireball Island Fireball Island is a board game first published by Milton Bradley in 1986. The tagline is "''The dimensional adventure game of pitfalls and perils!''" It is set on an unexploited (by treasure hunters) tropical island, the home of the ancient idol V ...

as Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar. On Kickstarter it raised over $2.8million with over 23,000 backers. The third game funded on Kickstarter for Jacobson and Restoration is their biggest to date. The game is called

Return to Dark Tower ''Return to Dark Tower'' is a board game for one to four players, designed and published by Restoration Games. The game is a sequel to the 1981 board game ''Dark Tower'', by Milton Bradley Company. ''Return to Dark Tower'' has players cooperate ...

which is a sequel to the legendary Dark Tower that was released in 1981. The sequel raised over $4million from over 23,000 backers. Restoration and Justin's most popular non kickstarter based game is called Unmatched which is based on the 2002 release

Star Wars Epic Duels The Star Wars Epic Duels board game was released by Hasbro in 2002. It was designed for ages 8 and up, and for 2-6 players. The main designer of the game was Craig Van Ness, with assistance from Rob Daviau. It is out of print. Characters The ...

. They produce this game along with Mondo. To date there have been 30 characters released. These releases range from licensed 1 character boxes, such as

Bruce Lee Bruce Lee (; born Lee Jun-fan, ; November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973) was a Hong Kong and American martial artist and actor. He was the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a hybrid martial arts philosophy drawing from different combat disciplines that ...

, to box sets with 4 public domain characters lik
Cobble & Fog
featuring Dracula, Invisible Man, Jekyll &Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes. The 2 most recent releases are part of a licensed deal with Marvel, with 2 more sets to come in the futur

In 2020 Justin and Restoration held a contest for fans of the game to create their own characters. These have yet to be released. Regarding Justin's future goals he said in a 2021 interview that his dream character for Unmatched is Muhammad Ali and his dream IP is James Bond.

References

External links

Blue Devil Games websiteDawning Star websiteRestoration Games website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobson, Justin D. Board game designers Living people Role-playing game designers 1970 births