In this course, you’ll explore learning through play, curiosity, and experimentation. Together, we’ll play a curated selection of modern board and card games and treat them as more than just entertainment. You’ll analyze games as systems, stories, and design challenges, asking how rules shape behavior, how players learn through experience, and how games encourage strategy, creativity, and reflection.

Throughout the course, you’ll learn to think about games as texts you can read, critique, and redesign. We’ll explore ideas from philosophy, genre studies, and learning science, using gameplay to reflect on decision-making, collaboration, failure, and metacognition, or thinking about how you think.

The course is highly hands-on. As a final project, you’ll work in small groups to design and prototype your own board game. You’ll experiment with themes and mechanics, build rough versions, playtest with classmates, and revise your design based on feedback.

Seattle becomes part of our classroom. Possible field experiences include visiting a local games industry partner to learn how games are designed and produced, a trip to Seattle’s pinball museum, and working with the UW Libraries’ game archives to explore the history and evolution of games.

No prior gaming or design experience is required. This course is designed for curious students who enjoy collaboration, creativity, and learning by doing, and who want to see how play can be a powerful way to understand the world and themselves.