Anna Smith

May 30, 2026 GridCore made its convention debut at ConCarolinas in a 45-minute Open Play session. Three players sat down: William, Chris, and Chase. The game ran through all six Records, followed by a feedback discussion. One result stood out. William successfully matched all six of his Cores. Chase matched only two. Chase won. The difference was prediction. Throughout the game, Chase consistently read the other players correctly and collected enough Footnotes to overtake someone who had...

Sunday, May 24, Town Brewing Game Designer Taylor Hayward entered GridCore at a moment where the game was structurally functional, but still searching for stronger emotional energy at the table. And it needed to “find the fun”. Taylor’s feedback consistently pushed toward tension, and social immediacy. One of Taylor’s earliest observations was that the game needed a stronger “fun factor” - not by abandoning interpretation or philosophy, but by adding more table energy around them. During a...

Town Brewing Co. — Charlotte, NC Tuesday evening, 7:00pm GridCore was playtested with a new table, including three first-time GridCore players: Timothy, Abraham, and Taylor. What started as a normal session quickly turned into a live simplification experiment. I think the unlock for me to feel at peace and go with what the table was feeling was hearing Taylor say: “I would buy this game.” That created enough safety for me to seriously explore a different direction. So we began removing...