Hey Leaf, this is @swordpeddler from twitter. First of all thanks a whole hell of a lot for putting some spotlight on this; right now independent creator-publishers in tabletop games have basically one central market to sell our wares and a lot of us are looking for other places to go. There has been a huge push to move to itch for about a year now. Something that would help us out a lot is these better tags, and I have some suggestions. The biggest one is I think you should change "Physical Games" to "Tabletop Games" as the broadest, top level category—I think physical games is a fine descriptor but as a colloquialism it is less known.

These are my sidebar suggestions to keep it as neat as possible; these categories are broad strokes of the kinds of games and game accessories made for tables:



Roll and Write: these are solo-play tabletop games, not strictly roll playing games in the same sense as D&D is. A good example is this gem: https://metalsnail.itch.io/hall-of-the-dwarven-king

Role Playing Game: this is where you'd drop your regular, full games or so. Knave is a full RPG, and is the type of game that'd drop in to this category: https://questingbeast.itch.io/knave, as would Nora Blakes Endless Waltz: https://neithernora.itch.io/endless-waltz, this one about snakes: https://kiramagrann.itch.io/a-cozy-den, or even https://makebigthings.itch.io/damntheman.

RPG Supplement: this is a category for things like adventures and campaign settings that are compatible with other, full RPGS. Existing examples of this would be https://olobosk.itch.io/the-will-of-rot, https://cone.itch.io/coldwinter, or https://swordfishislands.itch.io/hot-springs-island.

Board Game: this would be your print & play games that are not RPGs, things like: https://randyo.itch.io/scoundrels, https://rockmanor.itch.io/maximum-apocalypse, or https://adriannovell.itch.io/magos-y-tabernas-printnplay.

Card Game: this is print & play card games like: https://evilisa.itch.io/qwap, https://offcutgames.itch.io/complicated-board-game-the-card-game, and https://terriv.itch.io/pusherkings.

Utility Apps: things made to support tabletop games like https://cone.itch.io/hex-kit.

Zines: tabletop zines are wildly popular, and you're going to see a bunch of them uploaded to itch around March, when the "Zinequest" Kickstarter Event starts to fulfill. This is going to be a popular category!







I think you'll find a lot of people will want game-specific tags, so there is a good place to start. A lot of independently produced tabletop material is made to be compatible with existing games, so you'll see people want tags like this: PbtA, OGL, OSR, FitD and Fate. Those may be greek, but a lot of people are going to get it trust me. Other popular tags to cover all of the proposed categories would be wargame, solo, adventure, source book, print & play, campaign setting, core rules, system neutral, rules light, gmless, map, hex crawl, social, one page, and 2-players. I am sure other users will come up with some more good ones.

In tabletop games, most of the time when you see genre it means the same thing as it does in the literary world; so instead of adventure as a genre like you have in digital games, we would want stuff like fantasy, sci fi, post apocalypse, western, crime, horror, investigative, pulp adventure and stuff like that. I bet we could rustle up a good primer somewhere on that!

As far as classification goes, I think most of the categories, tags, and genre will cover what folks traditionally expect out of sorting tabletop games. Maybe someone else has better suggestions.

And finally I think the biggest thing I would love to see to make selling tabletop games through itch is an upfront way of selling a physical book; I know we can use the rewards tool but something more front and center might be cool? I'd also love, if possible, to be able to add more than one thing to a cart via the widget. But that's a heavy ask!



Again, thank you so much for replying to me on twitter and stepping up, I know a lot of people are looking at itch now as an alternative to what little there is now.