Roleplaying the Patient Experience: A New Clinical Tool
Summary:
Explore how roleplaying games can model the patient-provider relationship. This seminar covers using character-driven scenarios to improve medical communication and navigate chronic pain treatment.
Description:
This seminar explores the innovative use of roleplaying games (RPGs) to address the challenges of ongoing care for chronic pain. By utilizing character-driven scenarios, healthcare providers and patients can bridge communication gaps and reframe the care experience.
A primary focus is using the "magic circle" of play to help loosen a patient's rigid identity as a person with chronic pain. Stepping into a character allows participants to explore facets of themselves beyond a diagnosis, fostering psychological flexibility.
Key areas of focus include:
Identity Fluidity: Moving beyond the "chronic patient" label.
Reframing Ongoing Care: Navigating long-term medical relationships.
Advocacy & Empathy: Practicing self-advocacy in a supportive setting.
We will discuss practical frameworks for using creative levity to make these serious topics more accessible.
Roll for Communication: Using ttrpgs and aac to Build Inclusive Spaces for Diverse Communicators
Summary:
Level up inclusion with ttrpgs and aac. This session shares practical strategies for supporting autistic students and diverse communicators through collaborative play.
Description:
Communication is a human right—and play is one of its most powerful tools. In this interactive session, a speech-language pathologist explores how tabletop role-playing games can support autistic students and individuals with complex communication needs. Discover how Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) can be integrated into TTRPG mechanics to create meaningful opportunities for collaboration, storytelling, and self-expression. Participants will gain practical tools and inclusive design strategies to build communication-rich gaming spaces where every voice—spoken or not—has power.
Rolling a Critical Success on the Financial Side of Business
Summary:
With tariffs, employee challenges, fraudsters, and challenging financial roadblocks for start-ups, it’s important to go into your business adventures well-prepared.
Description:
With tariffs, employee challenges, fraudsters, and challenging financial roadblocks for start-ups, it’s important to go into your business adventures well-prepared.
Let the expert advisors at Regions Bank and their Tome of Wisdom help prepare you with the acumen you need to thrive financially, both on the business side and the personal side.
We’ll address:
Fraud prevention and protection
Credit and Lending Requirements
Building Credit
Establishing Payroll and Merchant/Card Services
Providing Benefits for Your Employees
Financial Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them
Planning for the Future
Run the Rules: Get your Rulebook in Shape for Game Time
Summary:
This workshop will get your rules draft started, explain the common layout and expected verbiage of rulebooks, and work with you to help refine those tricky written explanations for your awesome game.
Description:
Are you designing a board game? Are you avoiding writing the rules down ‘until later’ ‘when things are more finalized’? Then you need to attend this workshop! Kaity Bequette has helped run the CUDO Plays Boardgame Design Competition for over a decade, and if helping new designers has taught the Crew anything, it’s how to guide new game designers in developing how they teach their game & how to write their game’s rulebook. The biggest lesson on how to write rules for the boardgame you’re designing is: START NOW. This workshop will help you get that draft started, support your practice and provide seasoned feedback to help you refine those tricky written explanations for your awesome game. We’ll run your rules until they are ready for game time, so come play!
** GAME DESIGN ACADEMY ONLY EVENT / NOT INTENDED FOR GENERAL TRADE DAY AUDIENCE **
Running RPGs for Rotating Groups: Practical Strategies for Gaming with All Ages.
Summary:
Run awesome TTRPGs even when players come and go! Learn drop‑in adventure design, quick pre‑gens, scalable encounters, and clever tools to keep your table fun, safe, and rolling.
Description:
Life schedules are chaos—work, school, transportation, appointments, and surprise obligations mean game groups rarely look the same week to week. TTRPGs may assume consistent attendance, but you don’t need it to run safe, high‑energy, story‑rich games. This session shows how to design drop‑in friendly adventures, onboard new players in minutes with easy pre‑gens, and scale encounters whether three players show up… or thirteen. We’ll cover table agreements that support group safety, simple consent tools, NPCs that keep the story steady, and practical logistics for shared spaces like libraries, schools, and community centers. You’ll leave with useful tools to keep your games moving plus real examples, a bit of humor, and a demo on turning schedule chaos into collaborative storytelling magic.
Sharing the Inspiration Dice: How We Embedded Games Schoolwide
Summary:
Learn how to integrate tabletop games into all aspects of your school culture: convincing students, clubs, faculty and administration that they need games in their lives (which of course they do!)
Description:
From weekly game club sessions featuring Dragonbane, Dungeon Crawl Classics and Blood on the Clocktower, to teacher DnD nights at a local pub, to DnD team building for the varsity cheerleaders, to “STEAM into the Storyverse,” an annual convention managed by game club students, and finally a weeklong RPG Summer Camp, Washington Community High School has embraced the fun and benefits of tabletop gaming. Come and learn how our game club sponsor was able to build this culture, then brainstorm with us and bring ideas back to your own school, game store or library.
So You Want to Build a Circulating Board Game Collection
Summary:
What information do you need to pitch a circulating board game collection to your library? What comes after the yes? Cataloger Matthew Scrivner explores the answers to these questions and more.
Description:
What strategies convince Collection Development departments or other internal stakeholders to take a chance on a gaming collection? If you get the yes, what comes next? Speaking from his own experience, Kansas City Public Library Cataloger Matthew Scrivner will share ideas and key points in building a pitch for Collections departments and administrators; meaningful ways to explore the work of other public libraries; how to build support across departments; basics of cataloging games for catalog discovery; and ways to develop processing practices that are sustainable through the lenses of time management and finances.
Learn how immersive story games can provide a safe space to practice skills and mindsets that build adaptivity and future-readiness.
Description:
We can't train learners for a future we cannot predict. So why does so much workplace and professional learning still focus on upskilling and predefined outcomes?
Story-based games offer a powerful alternative. By inviting learners into shared narratives and empowering them with creative agency, these games make it possible to practice adaptability, perspective-taking, and collaboration in uncertain conditions.
This seminar and workshop explores a large-scale case study of a future-ready learning system built for 20,000 professional services employees. Attendees will then experiment with design methods for creating learning experiences that extend beyond traditional objectives, helping learners become more curious, more connected, and more creative as they navigate complexity and change.
Student Journey, 2e: Centering Play, Joy, and Purpose in Your Curriculum
Summary:
Enter the adventurous world of experiential learning and design thinking through play-based activities, and discover educator tools you can add to your inventory.
Description:
Our team’s goal is to create a life and career of joy and purpose for every student, and we want to help you do so, too! In this session, players will explore how we reimagine the student journey by helping learners define success on their own terms while building the mindsets and skills needed for life after graduation. Grounded in design thinking, experiential and play based learning, and student development theory, this session invites you to learn by doing. Players will learn the design thinking basics, see data that proves its power, try hands on activities pulled straight from our curriculum, and leave with ready to use exercises for them to take back to their institution. Expect radical collaboration, reflection, and a few “aha!” moments as you playtest new ways to help students (and yourself!) design meaningful pathways forward.
Games are defined by their systems, and understanding the principles of systems engineering can be a valuable part of the designer toolkit.
Description:
Underlying every game is a system - a series of interlocking causes and effects. Understanding the elements of systems and how they interact opens up a deeper understanding of design fundamentals. This talk will examine these elements, and show how they work with and against each other to create different game experiences. Topics will include: Resource Flow Sources and Sinks Feedback Loops System Stability Emergence We will conclude by looking at popular games to highlight the hidden design patterns that unify them, and how to leverage that for your own designs.