Marceline Leiman Unleashes Ordinary Magic

Designer Marceline Leiman graduated from New York University with a MFA (master of fine arts degree) in Game Design, and her experience there has served her well in the intervening years. "We were turning around projects in a week", she tells me. "They'd say 'Make a co-operative word party game", and we would turn in a project fully designed, playtested, and fabricated in a week's time."

That environment did two things: First, she learned to work quickly and fail fast, while trying to make interesting things happen. "I don't know which particular game will be a hit", she says, so she wants to keep moving and not fixate on one design. Numerous designers I've talked with over the past two decades have said the same thing: A publisher might not respond to your pitch for months — and the path to publication after signing a contract might take years — so dive into new projects while waiting for publisher feedback.

Second, she gained skill in preaching her design work to others. "It's important to get people to listen," she says, "and you want them to latch on to your work." After all, designing games is only a small part of the work you do as a game designer. You need to sell that work to someone who will publish it, write rules so people will play it, work with artists to create the world of the game, and so on.

Diving In

Leiman's first published design, Oceans: Solo, followed her "work quickly and fail fast" formula, but not as she originally intended.

Before having any professional game design experience, she had tried to design a solo mode for Oceans, a title from North Star Games. In a newsletter, Oceans co-designer (and North Star owner) Dominic Crapuchettes had invited fans of the game to submit a solitaire version, but Leiman's first efforts, including one that used an AI-style bot to play cards, went nowhere.

She left a video editing job to spend less time on screens, took a part-time job at a game store, and dove into rogue-like video games and solo versions of various board games. In a designer diary about Oceans: Solo, she writes:

It was around that time I started to have game design dreams. These are dreams where it's as if my design problems are thought through to their logical conclusions and solved as I sleep.

This was the first time it ever happened. It was a simple thought: What if I replaced the AI's card plays with a chit-pulling mechanism? After stumbling out of bed and making coffee, I set up Oceans on the table and started moving pieces around. Everything I needed to make the proof of concept was in the deluxe box already: bags, tokens, population boards. The process was like lightning in a bottle. I was able to play a full game there and then.

She posted about this design on social media, and Crapuchettes reached out to ask for details. In late 2022, Oceans: Solo was included in a crowdfunding campaign along with an expansion for the game, and it was released in the second half of 2023.

Starting a New Trek

By that time, Leiman was working part-time at Underdog Games as a developer, initially focusing on the second edition of Trekking the World, with that game's co-designer Nick Bentley (who had also co-designed Oceans) praising her efforts in a designer diary, pointing out that she had designed both the solo mode in the new edition, as well as its Bucket List expansion.

Of Bentley, Leiman says, "We would talk for hours in our off-hours about what makes great games. Those conversations were very fulfilling as we imagined what the future of Underdog would look like."

Unfortunately, after President Trump imposed illegal tariffs on goods imported to the United States, many companies responded with cutbacks, including Underdog Games, which let go of both Bentley and Leiman. At the time, Bentley said, "I may have worked my way out of the job" as he had started to focus on developing card games for the company at the end of 2024, and by early 2025, five card games were "mostly ready to go", with three of those games having been designed by Leiman. (The first of these titles, Dino Racer, debuted at Gen Con 2026. Here's an overview of that game.)

Going Solo...in a New Way

While working at Underdog, Leiman also created other designs, with Daniel Newman's announcement of Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged 2024 inspiring her to create and publish a game of her own: High Tide.

High Tide is a two-player abstract strategy game in which you take turns moving one of your tiles (or a neutral tile) to a higher adjacent space in the playing area. Whenever a player can't move, the round ends and whoever has the most visible tiles wins. Win three rounds to win the game.

Leiman brought twenty handmade copies to sell at Indie Games Night Market and sold out in less than ten minutes. (You can read about her production process and the design of High Tide in this designer diary, and you can discover the IGNM experience from PAXU 2024 in this report from Chris Wray.)

Multiple publishers approached Leiman about licensing the design, and she went with Underdog Games, "who I trusted to make the game right, with access to the audience who I think will connect with the game". Underdog's edition of High Tide debuted in September 2025, with U.S. book chain Barnes & Noble featuring the title as its "game of the month" in June 2026.

For IGNM at PAXU 2025, Leiman debuted the self-published card game Heavenly Bodies, which Korean publisher Playte has since licensed for release as Nebular Colors, and in addition to Underdog launching Dino Racers at Gen Con 2026, Leiman released the self-published card game Shortstack during that show at the first Game Market Indianapolis.

Becoming Unstable

After getting notice from Underdog that her position at the company was ending, Leiman says, "In that period of time when [Nick Bentley and I] sort of had jobs, we made a bunch of games together. From that process, we were happy with how we collaborated and worked alongside each other — and we decided that whatever we'd do next, we should be together."

During that time, they were approached with bids from Unstable Games and Dolphin Hat Games, which re-branded as Taco Cat Games in May 2026. "We talked about these brands and how we'd work with them", says Leiman, and in the end she went with Unstable Games and Bentley went with Taco Cat. "I think Nick has been doing a great job with the Taco Cat line."

Unstable Games launched in 2017 with the take-that card game Unstable Unicorns from company founder Ramy Badie, and it's released many other mainstream-friendly games since then. With Leiman now on staff, Unstable Games is launching a new studio titled "Ordinary Magic", which will debut with three Leiman designs as part of a Q4 2026 crowdfunding campaign.

The idea behind Ordinary Magic is that all of the games will exist in a shared world of characters and locations that will be expanded as future titles are released. Magic in this world isn't something unique and explosive, but an everyday part of the characters' lives. "Magic is not used from a position of power or as part of a social hierarchy", says Leiman. "It's just this thing that exists to help you find joy or comfort. Magic in this world is always non-combative."

Just as we humans wouldn't be freaked out to see a dog walking down the street in our world, the inhabitants of Ordinary Magic would shrug at a gryphon passing by. One creature you won't find in this world, though, is humans, although the games were inspired by very human experiences: a bit of humor, real-life interactions, "places of nostalgia, places related to my childhood or the American idea of 'growing up', the experiences we have day to day", says Leiman. "Sifting through those themes and interests in our internal conversations, the name 'Ordinary Magic' came up."

As for the games in the Ordinary Magic line, Unstable plans to reveal one every two weeks, so to date only the first design has been revealed, with The Curious Little Bookshop taking place in a cozy neighborhood bookshop where every member of the staff has an opinion about which titles deserve a place on the coveted "staff picks" shelf. As one of the booksellers, you will arrange books that match your hidden preferences on a shared shelf, trying to build lines and groups of books that feature the genre with which you're obsessed. (For a few more details, read this Gamefound update.)

"These are the largest games I've ever produced", says Leiman. "I'm excited for the world to see them and discover how varied a designer I am." She says that while the first three Ordinary Magic releases differ in terms of who they will appeal to, in terms of difficulty these titles will all straddle the BoardGameGeek audience and the mass audience that's more typical for Unstable Games, landing somewhere between Pandemic and Forbidden Island in terms of complexity.

As for what to expect in terms of gameplay, Leiman says she likes to create "passive aggressive" games, designs that aren't about in-your-face conflict, but which do place you in direct competition with others. "When making any game, my personal goal first and foremost is interaction", she says. "I want players to feel like they're playing with each other and organically creating an experience. You shouldn't be expecting 'take that', but worthwhile experiences that meaningfully bring people together."

She continues, "Some people have suggested my designs are created by subtraction, by seeing how much complexity and depth you can get out of a smaller set of rules. They're all streamlined in rules, but broad in complexity."

Leiman says that working with Unstable Games has been like joining a boosted start-up business: "I have access to their developers, testing environments, graphic designers, artists. Everyone at Unstable does great work behind the scenes, and it's hard to appreciate from a customer's point of view. All of these interesting creative people are working behind the scenes to make the design a reality."

The Gamefound crowdfunding campaign isn't necessary for these games to exist given the stability of the publisher. "Its primary purpose is to build awareness of the brand", says Leiman. What's more, this campaign will offer deluxe editions of each design that won't be available via retail outlets. Beyond these titles, Leiman says, "I have a lot of ideas for the brand in the future. My current worry is what I'm releasing two years from now."

Aside from Ordinary Magic, Leiman still plans to release self-published "weirder stuff" at indie game markets. "They're close to my heart", she says, and she was delighted to hear from Nick Brachmann that High Tide had inspired him to self-publish Imps in 2025, with that design having since been picked up by Allplay, with the updated version of that design being crowdfunded at the same time as Leiman's Wildberries. (I published overviews of these two titles in June 2026.)

She encourages designers to try the self-publication route, adding that "When you have to sell your idea to a normal person who doesn't know what BGG is, it's a humbling experience."

Whether on her own or working with the Unstable team, Leiman is excited for the future: "People think you're coming out of nowhere firing on all cylinders, but what seems like rapid success is years of work. I want to run a successful business with me doing game design. The only way to do that is with fire in the heart."