One of the world’s most popular board games was created in Silver Spring

The least competitive board game meetup in Silver Spring takes place at Elizabeth Hargrave’s kitchen table.

On a recent afternoon, she pulled out dozens of placards in laminate sleeves and a makeshift cloth board. A trio of professional game designers discussed the task at hand: playing a still-untitled, very-much-unfinished concept that won’t hit game store shelves for at least 18 months.

As is the case almost every Friday, Hargrave, Connie Vogelmann and Dominic Crapuchettes spent about six hours refining various ideas they’re each working through. There were no winners and no losers. Instead, they looked for gameplay flaws, ways to tweak difficulty and improvements that could simply make their games more fun.

This summer marks 10 years since Hargrave first pitched to publishers a birding-inspired game she’d dreamt up. That concept became Wingspan, an instant award-winner that took off internationally; to date, it’s sold over 2.6 million copies. Appealing to proficient gamers, novices, and birders, too, Wingspan is one of the industry’s best-sellers since its release in 2019.

It’s an engine-building game, meaning players race to create progressively stronger systems. On each turn, a player can gain food, lay eggs, or acquire more bird cards.

Hargrave, 53, is a Florida native who went to Brown University, then worked on Capitol Hill and eventually as a freelance Medicare policy consultant. She moved from Washington to Silver Spring in 2005 and got hooked on board games during a Western Maryland ski trip, playing popular ones like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride.

Salad Miller, who works at Canton Games in Baltimore, said Wingspan, which typically retails for $65, has risen to the level of those modern classics. Customers praise its artwork and how each game can be entirely different.

“It’s kind of just an all-around perfect game,” Miller said. “And you get bird facts.” (The Baltimore oriole, one card states, weaves “pouch nests” that hang from tree branches.)

Board game creation was first just a hobby, like birding, for Hargrave. “I plugged away on the side for years,” she said.

Eventually her passions united to form “Bring in the Birds,” a working title for what became Wingspan. More than anywhere, she play-tested her concept at “Break My Game” gatherings at the Board and Brew café in College Park.

It’s been reported that the game was inspired by Prince George’s County’s Lake Artemesia. But really, Hargrave said, it was inspired by birds in general, from Artemesia to Wheaton Regional Park in Montgomery County to vacations in Costa Rica.

She first pitched the game in 2016, and Stonemaier Games published it in 2019. Its ascendance quickly crowded her schedule. She had to rearrange her day job, for example, around an impromptu trip to Berlin, Germany, where she won a major award in game creation.

Soon afterward, she weighed whether she could continue her consultant work, given her sudden success as a board game creator. But before she could even approach her client, they had a suggestion: Perhaps she should focus on games.

Since then, she has.

Her games reflect her penchant for nature. In addition to Wingspan expansion packs, there’s a game on fox breeding, The Fox Experiment; on Monarch butterfly migration, Mariposas; and, most recently, on seashell collecting, Sanibel.

Once the president of the Mycological (the study of fungi, for the mushroom-unaware) Association of Washington, D.C., Hargrave has even published an evergreen and fungus-focused game, Undergrove.

Her design process requires spreadsheets and computer mapping. But a lot of it is tactile. It can be akin to arts and crafts.

“I’ll just take scrap paper and start moving things around on my desk,” Hargrave said.

Then it’s a matter of modifying the game through trial and error. In early stages, she’ll pretend to be two players and later play-test with local residents eager for new games. She avoids asking her husband too often to constantly tinker with her latest development.

“I try not to burn him out,” she said.

Board game creation is a popular hobby, but a rare vocation. Amateur designers descend upon conventions — like UnPub in Baltimore or the massive Gen Con in Indianapolis, where Hargrave scored publisher meetings in 2016 — to pitch their wares. Many enter. Few win.

If a company does decide to print, creators usually receive between 5% to 8% of sales revenue, according to a 2020 survey. An advance, if the designer gets one, is often a few thousand dollars. To quit your day job, you generally have to hit it big.

“You need a blockbuster,” said Crapuchettes, whose portfolio includes the popular Evolution series.

He founded North Star Games, an independent publishing company, in 2003, shortly before graduating from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and now lives in Bethesda.

The Washington area has an unusually robust board game creator community, and part of that is logical: Designers need others to regularly play-test.

Vogelmann, a Washington-based Yale Law School graduate, left her job as an attorney with the federal government last year and now designs out of a coworking space. On a recent Friday, though, her office was Hargrave’s kitchen table.

The trio worked through Hargrave’s newest creation, a cooperative sorting game of amphibians that migrate in the spring to reproduce.

“Because the cards are moving around a lot, I was trying to think of something like: Why would you want to be grouping them?” Hargrave said.

They spitball the difficulty. It’s on the “hard side of medium,” Vogelmann suggested. Hargrave scrolled through a spreadsheet as Vogelmann and Crapuchettes offered gameplay pointers.

“Ah,” Hargrave said, making a note. “This is what I was stuck on.”