From Podcasts to Pages to Play: Why I Started Designing Board Games

For most of my adult life, I’ve been fascinated by stories and the communities that grow around them.

That fascination has taken me through a few different creative paths. I’ve spent years behind a microphone hosting podcasts. I’ve written a book exploring the cultural meaning of Star Wars fandom. And now I find myself doing something I never expected. I’m designing a board game.

At first glance those three things may seem unrelated. But the more I work across them, the more I realize they all come from the same place. I enjoy creating shared experiences.

Podcasting was my first real step into creating something for an audience.

When you host a show, you are not just talking into a microphone. You are part of an ongoing conversation with a community. Listeners respond, disagree, laugh, and bring their own perspectives to the discussion. Every episode becomes part of a larger dialogue.

Over the years podcasting taught me a lot about storytelling. It taught me pacing. It taught me how to frame ideas in ways that invite people in rather than push them away. Most importantly, it showed me how powerful it can be when people gather around something they care about.

Writing a book is a very different experience.

Where podcasting is conversational and spontaneous, writing requires patience and reflection. A book gives you the space to explore ideas more deeply and connect threads that might otherwise remain scattered.

When I wrote Who Owns the Myth? Star Wars, Fandom, and the Soul of the Saga, I wanted to explore something that had fascinated me for years. I was interested in the relationship between stories and the people who love them.

Stories are not just entertainment. They are cultural touchstones. They shape communities, inspire creativity, and sometimes spark passionate debates about what those stories mean.

Writing that book deepened my appreciation for how powerful shared storytelling can be.

Somewhere along the way another realization started to take shape.

There is a medium that blends storytelling, competition, and shared experience in a completely different way. Tabletop games.

Board games are unique because they are not something you passively watch or listen to. They are something you participate in. Every game session becomes its own story. It is unpredictable, competitive, sometimes chaotic, and always shaped by the people sitting around the table.

A great board game creates moments people remember. A risky move that pays off. A last-second comeback. The collective laughter when something goes spectacularly wrong.

Like a lot of people who grew up loving science fiction, certain scenes stuck with me for years. One of them was the podracing sequence in The Phantom Menace. What I remember most was not the spectacle. It was the feeling of barely controlled speed. Those machines looked powerful, dangerous, and just a little unstable. That idea stayed with me. When I started thinking about designing a racing game, I realized that was exactly the emotion I wanted to capture. Not just speed, but the tension of pushing a machine right to the edge.

Enter Sand Slicers

That curiosity eventually led me to start designing a game of my own called Sand Slicers: Scorchbelt Racers.

The idea began with a simple question. What if a racing game could capture the tension of pushing an engine beyond its limits?

In Sand Slicers, players pilot experimental twin-engine machines across deadly desert circuits on the planet K’ta’jah. The faster you push your engines, the closer you get to victory. At the same time you move closer to catastrophic mechanical failure.

It is a game about speed, risk, and the thrill of deciding just how far you are willing to push your machine before something breaks.

Designing the game has been a completely new creative challenge for me. It combines systems thinking, storytelling, and visual design. Every playtest teaches me something new about how tension works in a game.

What Pete in the Seat Is

That journey is what inspired me to create Pete in the Seat.

It is a small creative studio built around the idea that stories can take many forms. Sometimes they are conversations shared through a podcast. Sometimes they are ideas explored through a book. Sometimes they are worlds people can step into through a game.

Each medium offers a different way to connect with people and create experiences together.

Right now I am deep in the process of developing Sand Slicers and exploring what it takes to bring a tabletop game from prototype to reality.

If you are interested in following that journey, I will be sharing updates here as the project continues to evolve. Also, join the mailing list to be the first to know when it hits Kickstarter.

Because at the end of the day, whether it is through podcasts, books, or games, the goal is the same:

Create something worth sharing.