Protospiel Michigan 2025

Welcome to Protospiel Michigan!

Protospiel is an event where you can bring a board or card game prototype to play with other designers, play testers, and publishers. It's a great way to break your game and to fix it. It doesn't matter what level of polish your game has. Many games are made right on the spot at Protospiel using the free prototyping materials provided by The Game Crafter. But there are also many games there that are just doing final testing just before they are published or put out on Kickstarter.

Change of Venue

Protospiel Michigan 2025 Marriott Detroit Metro Airport (30559 Flynn Dr, Romulus, MI). This is a new space for us! We've got a very nice rate on hotel rooms at the hotel (block rate here; let us know if we run out of rooms and we can request more). This space is physically smaller than what we've had the past few years, but has dramatically better access to hotels for the out-of-towners.

Note: Since the event is hosted at a hotel this year, we will no longer be allowed to bring outside food or beverages into the event space. There are a number of restaurants very near the hotel (Coneys, diner, Italian, middle eastern, etc) and a broad swath a bit further afield.

Change of Price

We endeavored to keep the pre-Pandemic pricing of Protospiel as long as we could, but event space costs have risen to the point that it's no longer practical. To that end, this year the following changes are being instituted:

• we're going to shift the processing fee from tabletop.events to the badge price
• the previous years' prices will be maintained for early bird tickets

Early bird pricing will end April 30, after which prices will go up a bit. In practice the travel and hotel expense are the overwhelming bulk of the cost for most out-of-town attendees, so I expect the badge price change amounts to a rounding error (and for locals the total dollar cost of the conference is pretty low anyway). That said, if the updated cost poses a financial hardship please reach out.

Who is Protospiel for?

If you want to play games in any state of development, then Protospiel is for you. If you want to get your own designs played, then Protospiel is for you. If you are looking to come to promote a complete (or released) game and never play anybody else's game, then Protospiel is not for you.

That said, we're running a family friendly shop here. Games with explicit adult themes and the like are probably best playtested elsewhere.

Game Designers

If you are a game designer looking to get professional level feedback from other designers there is no better place to get that feedback. With dozens of other designers in attendance you'll have the opportunity to play test your designs many times through-out the weekend. And the friendships you'll make will last a lifetime.

Game Players

If you're a gamer who likes to try out new and maybe/likely broken things, then Protospiel is also likely the best experience you'll have. You'll get to see dozens if not hundreds of new designs in a single weekend. Plus you'll get to shape them before they hit the shelves of stores or the pages of Kickstarter.

For more information about Protospiel in general, check out protospiel.events

What is Protospiel Like?

Reader, Protospiel is delightful. If you're a designer, a decent rule of thumb is that you'll spend about 30% of your time getting your game prototype(s) playtested, about 50% of the time playtesting others' prototypes, and 20% of your time networking, making friends, learning, and getting inspired.

The Protospiel Golden Rule is that you should try to put in as many playtesting hours as you get from the community!

What if my Game Isn't Finished Enough for Protospiel?

No Game Is Too Unfinished For Protospiel.™

What if I made a Tabletop RPG or a Giant/Event game?

That's great! Protospiel is mostly geared towards for board games, and most playtest sessions run under 90 minutes. You will want to be very clear with people upfront if you expect your game to run 2+ hours. For a successful TTRPG, we recommend preparing a one-shot adventure with pre-made characters and rules references on hand. Big Event games traditionally struggle- you'll need to be very proactive about expectation-setting and scheduling. In either case you should also be very clear about what kind of feedback you're looking for- it's possible that your playtesters will opt out once they feel like they've provided that. Time is precious at Protospiel and big long games are a commitment.

Badge Prices

An all-weekend (Friday-Sunday) badge costs $60 at the early bird rate. A single-day badge (Friday or Saturday only) costs $30. Publishers get in for free. (Email is us if you're a publisher!)

You can buy tickets here!

Infection Precautions

There is no longer a mandate for vaccination or masks for this event (nor do we anticipate one). That said, free masks and hand sanitizer will be available at the admin table.

Publishers

We'll announce these are they are locked in!