Elizabeth Hargrave


Elizabeth Hargrave is an American game designer whose game Wingspan won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres for best connoisseur game of the year. Her game Tussie-Mussie won the 2018 Button Shy - GenCan't Design contest.

Biography

Hargrave, who earned a master’s degree in public affairs, worked for many years as a public policy analyst at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Described by the New York Times as "a spreadsheet geek," she lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband landscape designer Matt Cohen.

Game design

Hargrave meets regularly with others from the Washington, DC area to play board games. She got the idea to start designing games based on themes from nature in 2014 at one such event, according to Audubon:
Hargrave and her husband loved nature, and had recently started birding. All their friends were similarly outdoorsy. “Why,” she posed to the group, “are there no games about things we are into?”

To another interviewer, Hargrave explained she felt "... there were too many games about castles and space, and not enough games about things I’m interested in. So I decided to make a game about something I cared about."
Hargrave designed Wingspan using online data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and from the National Audubon Society. She describes the game as "a card-based engine-building game about bringing birds into a nature preserve." Hargrave pitched the game to three different publishers at Gen Con in 2016; it was bought by Stonemaier Games. Published in 2019, the game sold 44,000 copies worldwide over three printings in its first two months of release, with the publisher issuing a public apology for not having more copies available. Wingspan won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres for best connoisseur game of the year.
Hargrave created the game Tussie Mussie in 2018 during the month leading up to the 2018 Game Design contest of Gen Can't Each game card shows a different flower, together with text describing its secret meaning in the Victorian "language of flowers." After winning the Gen Can't contest, the game was published by Button Shy games, funded by a Kickstarter campaign with a $1000 goal that instead brought in more than $80,000.
Hargrave is also working on games about migrating monarch butterflies, mushrooms, and the genetics of dog-fox hybrids.

Games