Meet Steven Ritchey
The eight-year shelf
It started with a box on a shelf. A board game prototype, eight years old, the kind of thing you only see when you’re cleaning out a closet you’d been pretending didn’t exist. The cards still worked. The mechanics, surprisingly, still held up. The problem was everything around them. A binder full of printouts. A spreadsheet from a laptop two computers ago. Sleeves with hand-cut paper inserts because the last version had broken at exactly the wrong moment, twenty playtests in, when changing one stat meant manually updating fifty-four cards.
The founder opened the old design tool he’d been using back then. It launched. That was about the best thing he could say about it. He looked for a better one, the way you do when a tool has been sitting in your “someday I’ll find a replacement” mental folder for half a decade. He looked for an hour. He looked for a day. The replacements he found were either professional-grade graphics suites that assumed you already knew what bleed was, or hobbyist scripts that worked great until they didn’t.
So he did the unreasonable thing: he started building the tool he wished had existed back when he was eight playtests deep into a game he thought might be good and one stat change away from giving up.
A designer’s view of design tools
Steven lives in Seattle and has been making games on and off for about a decade — paper prototypes, half-finished card decks, the occasional house-rule fork of something published. His day job is in the IT industry, which is the part of his background that explains why someone who wanted a better card designer also had the technical chops to build one. (Most designers who hate their tools just complain on Reddit. Steven complained, then opened an editor.)
When he’s not designing games, he’s playing them — video games for the things board games can’t be, board games for the things video games can’t. The overlap is what he finds most interesting: when a tabletop game uses the right rules to feel like a video-game system, or a digital game leans into the deck-building loop that started on cardboard.
Steven builds Chitmunk the way he wishes other tools had been built for him: every feature has to survive the question “would a first-time designer understand this in ten seconds?” That’s why CMYK gets a tooltip the first time it appears. That’s why bleed lines are on by default. That’s why you can drag a spreadsheet onto a card and it just works, with no plugins, no setup wizard, no “configure your data binding namespace” dialog.
What I’m trying to build
Depth, not breadth. There are a lot of tools that promise to take you from idea to Kickstarter to manufacturer in one platform. Chitmunk is not that. Chitmunk wants to be the best card and component tool in the lifecycle of a tabletop game — the place where the spreadsheet becomes a deck, the deck becomes a balanced deck, and the balanced deck becomes a print-ready file. The rest of your journey (project tracking, crowdfunding, the actual print run) is somebody else’s job, and we’re fine with that.
Beginner-first is the other half of the mission. Most design tools were built by people who already knew design. Chitmunk is built for the first-time designer who has a great idea and a spreadsheet and not much else. Templates that work without tweaking. Generators that produce a playable component on the first click. Print options that say “print at home” or “ship to a printer” instead of asking you to choose a color profile. The serious tools are still in the toolbox — they’re just not in the way.
Talk to me
If you’re using Chitmunk and something feels off, or you’ve hit a wall, or you’ve made something cool with it — the easiest way to reach me is the Discord. I read every message. The contact form works too if you’d rather email.