Game Designer

Game Designer (Contract) — Bangarang! Games
Location: Remote (U.S.-based)
Type: Independent contractor, project-based (1099)
Commitment: ~15–25 hrs/week, 3-month initial engagement with renewal/full-time potential as needed following.

Reports to: Founder

Who we are
Bangarang! Games makes loud, fast, family-friendly party games — the kind that get pulled off the shelf at Thanksgiving and somehow still get played at 1 a.m. by the adults. We build for the table, not the algorithm. Clean by design, chaotic by nature: nothing inappropriate is baked in, but we won’t stop your uncle from making it weird. That’s on him.
We’re small and moving fast — a founder-led studio with a catalog that’s already prototyped and a real go-to-market plan (licensing to established publishers and self-publishing direct). We’re not a 40-person studio with a foosball table and a mission statement about “synergy.” We’re a couple of people who’ve printed actual games you can hold, and we need another sharp brain to help us build the next ones.
What you’d actually do
Party-game design is deceptively hard. Anyone can write “everyone shouts an answer.” Making that land at a table of six strangers, in under a page of rules, with the right amount of chaos — that’s the craft. Here’s the work:
• Take a game from spark to shelf-ready. Concept, core loop, component list, the whole arc — not just “idea guy” work.
• Write rules a stranger can understand cold. This is the single most underrated skill in the job. If your rulebook needs a second rulebook, we’ve got a problem.
• Run and interpret playtests. Not “did they laugh” — why it stalled at minute 12, which card everyone ignored, where the tension leaks out. Bring the diagnosis, not just the recording.
• Balance for the table you can’t see. Our games get played by 8-year-olds and drunk 38-year-olds, sometimes at the same table. Design for both.
• Sanity-check manufacturability. A brilliant mechanic that needs a custom-molded widget at $6/unit is a hobby, not a product. You should have instincts about what’s cheap to make and what isn’t.
• Kill your own darlings. We iterate hard. The best designers here will scrap a clever mechanic the moment a playtest says it isn’t working.
What we’re looking for
• A real portfolio of tabletop or party-game design — published, self-published, prototyped, or convention-tested. We care that you’ve shipped something people played, not where it came from.
• Genuinely clear writing. Send us a rulebook you’re proud of.
• The judgment to tell a 4/10 idea from an 8/10 — and the honesty to say so out loud, including about your own.
• Comfort working scrappy and independently. You’ll get direction and creative freedom, not a 30-page brief and daily standups.
• Bonus: instincts for what makes a game sell on a shelf (name, box, the 3-second pitch), not just what makes it fun to play.
What we’re NOT looking for
• Digital/video game designers hoping to pivot. Different sport. Great skills, wrong table.
• “Big idea” people who don’t want to do the unglamorous 80% (rules polish, playtest #14, component spreadsheets).
• Anyone who needs the concept to be edgy to be funny. Our whole thing is that the game is clean and the players are the problem.
Logistics
• Fully remote, async-friendly. We’ll do a standing weekly check-in and stay out of your hair otherwise.
• You keep your own hours within reason; we care about milestones, not timesheets.
• IP for work produced under contract belongs to Bangarang! Games (standard for this kind of engagement — happy to talk specifics).
• Real path to ongoing work. If this clicks, we want to keep building together.
To apply
Send us:
1. A short note on a party game you love and one specific thing you’d change about it. (This tells us more than a cover letter ever could.)
2. A portfolio, a link, or even a photo of a prototype on your kitchen table.
3. One rulebook or design doc you’ve written.
Skip the formal cover letter. We’d rather read the note about the game.
Bangarang! Games is an equal opportunity engager of talent. We hire for taste, judgment, and craft — nothing else.