Avery Alder wins award and goes for broke with new pocket-sized RPG
She started at the Forge and now she’s here.
Avery Alder was 17 years old when she designed her first roleplaying game. Now, despite being only 36, she’s been making games for almost two decades. Best known for The Quiet Year and Monsterhearts, Alder is undoubtedly one of the most influential designers in the indie RPG space. But since 2018, when she released Dream Askew, things have been relatively quiet. Or rather, they were until now. In Feb 2025, Alder was first awarded the Lizzie Magie prize recognizing her entire body of work before also announcing a new game, Going For Broke. As the ancients said, you wait for a bus long enough, two come at once. But what is this award? What’s Alder been up to for all these years? And maybe most importantly, what keeps bringing her back to game design?
The Lizzie Magie Award
Rennes en Jeux is a games festival and convention in Rennes, France started in 2017. It’s free or pay-what-you-want and is built around celebrating games and taking them to a broader audience. In 2021, the volunteers who organized the festival started an award named after Lizzie Magie, the creator of The Landlords Game, which “inspired” Monopoly (some might say “was plagiarized to make”). Speaking to Rascal over email, two jury members, Sélène Tonon and Polgara, said the prize “was born from a desire to offer a different kind of award, decided by a jury composed of local figures from various fields in the world of board games: game designers, board game café owners, librarians, retailers, and members of associations. The main goal was to highlight the cultural dimension of board games… going beyond mechanical innovation and entertainment. The award emphasizes board games as cultural objects and their impact on the audiences they reach.”
