Funtails Authors
Who actually comes up with such ideas?
We founded Funtails to take the quality of board games to the next level. We stand for the highest quality in game mechanics, balancing, as well as in regards to game material!
Of course, that also means that we work with some of the best authors in the game industry: From Arve D. Fühler to Matthias Cramer to Klaus-Jürgen Wrede. Here you can learn a little more about how our authors came to develop board games. Enjoy!
Matthias Cramer
Matthias Cramer
Matthias Cramer, the author of Glen More II: Chronicles, has been successfully developing and publishing board games since 2010. His debut work Glen More was nominated for the International Gamers Award. With Lancaster Matthias won the Dutch Game Award and a nomination for Kennerspiel des Jahres, the expert game category of the Spiel des Jahres Award. Rococo, which he developed with Louis and Stefan Malz was also nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres. His ludography includes great games like Helvetia, Kraftwagen and Dynasties.
Gender: Male
Job Title: Author
Funtails Games:
Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Klaus-Jürgen Wrede is the author of Carcassonne and guest designer of the Glen More II Chronicle “Highlander – there can be only one“. Since visiting the game fair in Essen in 1989 the occasional playing became a great passion, and soon the development and conversion of his own game ideas resulted. Carcassonne was named Game of the Year in 2001 and received the German Game Award in the same year and many international awards. Further games have been placed on the recommendation list several times by the Spiel des Jahres jury. When inventing games, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede is particularly attracted by the conversion of historical themes into family-friendly games. His next game with a historical background ‘Caral’ will be published by Funtails.
Address: Germany
Job Title: Author
Funtails Games:
Arve D. Fühler
Arve D. Fühler is the designer of The Penny Mobs Chronicle in Glen More II.
The name Arve is due to his quarter-Finnish descent. He was born in 1966 in Frankfurt / Main in Germany. As a game designer Arve is fascinated by finding and developing creative ideas and solutions: how can a topic, a mechanism or complex process be transformed into a simple, playful and entertaining action system? How could an aesthetic, visual and haptic implementation be designed?
Finding the answer to these questions drives Arve to design great games like TA-KE, Festo!, El Gaucho and Pagoda among others.
Dr. Hans Joachim Höh
Aiming to understand the human abilities for data analysis and problem solving, Hans first explored computer science, only to subsequently study philosophy, psychology and sociology. For his PhD thesis he specialized in logic, philosophy of language, and brain research.
At the same time Hans was also a grandmaster of various Trading Card Games. Among many other titles he has won six national championships, a player of the year title and a world championship.
After more than a decade as a professional gamer, Hans has also developed amazing analytical skills when it comes to creating games. With his first game Götterdämmerung he pushed the limits of the social deduction game genre, and with My Gold Mine he made it onto the “Spiel des Jahres” recommendation list. He joined Maikel Cheney and Tobias Immich at Spiel Instabil to turn Feed the Kraken into a fantastically balanced and engaging masterpiece.
Maikel Cheney
Maikel spent his childhood in South Africa and enjoyed a creative multi-culti education. He studied computer science in Germany and discovered a great fascination for the art of expressing logical operations in code as a software engineer.
Maikel loves to get involved in all sorts of social games and can’t stand a weekend without a good board game night. That combined with the urge of always wanting to create something new, led him to devote all of his free time to design Feed the Kraken – Sailors’ favorite deduction game.
Tobias Immich
Tobias grew up as a native computer gamer. In his early years he was fascinated about everything digital a person could play with.
After school Tobias quickly realized he wanted to help people in distress. Therefore he became and worked as a paramedic and later re-educated to a nurse. After years of helping people, he decided to return to his childhood dream to be a computer engineer.
By now he is working at the same company as his best friend Maikel Cheney at day, while developing the epic social deduction game Feed the Kraken with Maikel and Hans at night.
Rüdiger Dorn
Rüdiger Dorn is one of the most successful authors around, with over 40 published games and numerous awards (including Kennerspiel des Jahres 2014 for Istanbul and 1st place in the 2005 Deutsche Spielepreis for Louis XIV).
Born in Osnabrück in 1969, Rüdiger Dorn found his way to game development by discovering the magazine “Die Spielbox”, whose reports showed him that there are actually people behind the development of games – a knowledge that was not widely spread at the time. As an enthusiastic gamer, he succeeded in 1992 with his first publication – the game Cameo at Haba Verlag.
That was the beginning of an impressive career, and that was in addition to his work as a teacher. For Funtails Rüdiger Dorn developed the chronicle “Feasts & Follies” of the Glen More II expansion “Highland Games” and the family-board-game Treehouse Diner
Jonny Pac
Jonny Pac Cantin is the author of Coloma and guest designer of the Sticks & Stones chronicle in Glen More II: Highland Games.
Jonny is a freelance board game designer and developer with a background in visual arts, music, and education. He is fascinated with psychology, behavioral economics, and risk management. In his work as a designer, he focuses on creating euro-style games that feature novel systems, streamlined mechanics, and inextricable themes. He values intuitive, human-centered design principles—with extra attention given to ergonomics and UX.
Glen More has been a favorite game of his since it came out a decade ago. Then, Funtails took it to another level, with incredible art, high-quality components, streamlined rules, and a library of modular expansions. He feels honored to contribute to the game’s ongoing legacy.
Peter Prinz
Peter Prinz was born in Vienna in 1969, grew up in Germany, studied mathematics and has been living back in Vienna with his wife, two children and the family cat for almost 4 decades.
Peter published his first two games on his own before he published his great board game success “Jenseits von Theben”, nominated for “Spiel des Jahres” in 2007, with a renowned publisher. In 2022 he received the Austrian “Spiel der Spiele” award for his game “RAISE” in the category “Spiele Hits für Karten”.
His latest game “Comet” will soon be published by Funtails.
Besides board games, Peter loves any kind of puzzles, plays chess, is a passionate runner and has been an avid Frisbee athlete for over 30 years, a sport in which he became “Beach-Ulitmate Masters” World Champion with the Austrian national team in 2004.
Rocky Bogdanski
Rocky was born in Dortmund but lives and works in his adopted home of Berlin.
Every spare second of his life is dedicated to games. As a full-blooded gamer, the step into being an author was only a logical conclusion. In 2016, Rocky was nominated for the Young Game Designer Scholarship and has since celebrated his first publications.
Together with his cousin Kai Wetzel, the family author duo will whisk you away to a shadow bazaar full of deception and shady machinations in our game “Obscurians”.
Kai Wetzel
Kai Wetzel was born and grew up in the Ruhr area.
He has dedicated his life to medicine. As a psychiatrist, he is not only able to empathise with the depths of the human psyche, but is also a serious opponent at the gaming table in the field of social deduction.
Together with his cousin Rocky Bogdanski, he has been developing board games since 2014 and with Obscurians, you hold their first work in your hands, which has undergone countless optimisations from its beginnings to its release.
