There is a good chance you know Dylan Mangini’s work, even if you don’t recognize the name. We met Dylan in the Seattle- area game design scene, but we’ve been working together since AEG published our first design, Point Salad. He is responsible for almost all of the graphic design in Flatout Games’ games and a lot of the art, particularly in the small box games (Point Salad, Point City, Deep Dive, Point Galaxy, and Propolis). Dylan is also the artist behind Teebletop Board Gaming Apparel, and if you’ve spotted an omnigamer apparel, or the tie-dyed Calico hoodie, those are his. Check out the Teebletop booth this year at PAX Unplugged! As you’ll learn below, Dylan is an all-rounder in the tabletop world, with credits in game design, illustration, and professional championships.
What are some of your favorite tabletop games? And why?
I'm more of an omnigamer so I enjoy a lot of different genres but I think Castles of Burgundy is an all timer for me. I don't think I'd play it with more than 2 players but it does a really good job at integrating a lot of classic mechanisms (dice placement, set collection, tile laying) without being overly complex. Nowadays I'm playing TCGs like Flesh and Blood. It's nice to not have to learn new rules all the time like you would when you buy a new board game. The other part that's unique about TCGs compared to board games is that you get to solve the 'puzzle' of the metagame whenever a new set is released. I could be walking my dogs and theorycrafting new decks and strategies to try next time I play - and that makes it pretty engaging over time.
We have worked with you primarily as an illustrator and graphic designer, but you have also designed games, like Mephisto and Penny Black. What got you into game design?
My route into game design is a little random. In one of my college sculpture classes we were given free reign to pursue any kind of sculpture we wanted, independent of media or thematic restrictions. For mine, I decided to make a board game out of ceramic (I called it "Crypticus"). All of the pieces were hand made out of clay, featuring a lot of occult and lunar symbology. The gameplay was pretty bad, admittedly, but afterwards I spent more time refining the mechanics and iterating on the rules, which sparked an interest in game design that has yet to subside.
You are on the team for our current roleplaying game project, Whisperstone. As a player, what are the big differences between board games and role playing games?
I think the biggest difference is that you aren't playing to WIN in a tabletop roleplaying game. Board games are great at defining the boundaries and goals that create a fun experience with a limited set of moves. At the start of a board game, you know the end goal and then you spend your turns trying to reach that goal as quickly as possible. When you play a TTRPG, on the other hand, it's more about the journey, not the destination. A lot of RPGs don't even have an end point - they just go on until the players feel satisfied or move on to other games (sometimes lasting years). TTRPGs are more about the narrative experience and the memories you make while creating a story at the table than about 'winning the game'.
I often argue that TTRPGs have more in common with games like Monikers than they do with Gloomhaven. The real meat of the game is the improvisation and creative problem solving that goes down in your campaign, not the tactical, goal-oriented systems like combat or character skill progression. You can get amazing dungeon crawling experiences in a variety of board game boxes, but what makes the TTRPG genre unique is that extra social layer of pretending to be someone else and having the other players react to you in real time. It's much more of a party game in that sense.
In what ways does your knowledge and familiarity with games inform or support your graphic design decisions on a board game project?
I think being an avid gamer myself is huge in my ability to make appropriate graphic design decisions. When you boil down what a board game is - it's a collection of rules and symbols that get manipulated by a person. As a graphic designer, I'm responsible for how those symbols look and how the players physically interact with them. If I didn't understand how the games were played out, I would be missing a huge piece to that puzzle. And it's really the job of a UI/UX designer combined with a graphic designer. You have to do more than just create icons or choose the right font - you need to understand how they are used by the player, and which icons have priority so you can guide them down the path of least resistance. Luckily for me, the Flatout team's prototypes are quite robust and already have a keen eye for design, so it's more about refinement and iterating on what's already there.
Please tell me a bit about your tabletop game apparel business, Teebletop! How did this come about? What inspires your designs?
Teebletop came about as I was wandering the halls of one of our many big board game conventions and wondered "where's all the cool swag?". It felt like there weren't a lot of apparel designs that were directly related to the board gaming hobby and I wanted to fix that. I've also been designing t-shirt graphics since I was a teenager so it's another way to combine some of my passions.
What is something unusual/cool about you that people might not know?
Hmm, maybe that I'm also a pro Flesh and Blood player.
