Ted Alspach is an American game designer and CEO of Bezier Games, Inc. He is best known as the designer of Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Suburbia,
One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Ultimate Werewolf, and Werewords. Alspach is also one of the world's leading experts on Adobe Illustrator. He served as its Group Product Manager for several releases and published 18 books on it over the course of 20 years.
Early life and education
Alspach was born in New York on February 1, 1968, and grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania. He credits his father and grandfather with instilling in him a love of board games from a very early age. He received a B.S. in Marketing from Messiah College in Grantham, PA. While there, he founded and published a school magazine there, The Grand Tham, funded entirely by local business advertisements.
Career
As a college senior, Alspach interned at Laser Graphics 2000, one of the country's first graphics service bureaus. This turned into an opportunity in system design and training as the small company transitioned into Teeple Graphics (which enabled printing and graphics companies to move from analog to digital tools). During this time, Alspach designed two popular typefaces: RansomNote and LeftyCasual, the latter of which has been used for branding for Comedy Central, Pixar, and Levi Strauss & Co.
Writing
As a result of developing training curriculum, Alspach began writing reviews and how-to articles for magazines such as MacAddict and Macworld. He published his first book, The Macworld Illustrator Bible, in 1995, which contained a foreword written by Pierre Bézier. Over the next several years, Alspach wrote more than 30 books on graphics and desktop publishing, including the bestselling Illustrator For Dummies series.
Product Management
Alspach worked at Adobe as Group Product Manager for Illustrator and the Creative Suite from 1999 to 2006. He oversaw the release of Illustrator 9, 10, CS, CS2, and Creative Suite CS, CS2, and was responsible for many transformative Illustrator features including Live Effects, Transparency, Envelopes, and the integration of Adobe Dimensions 3D software into Illustrator. At Adobe, he also authored a patent for vector-based flares.
Alspach also worked in product management at Intuit and Corel, as well as gamification software company Bunchball, before leaving the software industry completely in 2013.
Bezier Games, Inc.
Alspach's journey in the game industry began with publishing several expansions for Age of Steam. He founded Bezier Games in 2006 with the release of Start Player.
Alspach's games range from social deduction and party games to mid-weight strategy games. He has carved out a unique niche with werewolf themed games, from Ultimate Werewolf to Werewords to the Silver series of card games. Alspach is credited as having designed over 80 stand-alone games and expansions.
Bezier Games, Inc. now publishes many games designed by Alspach, as well as other distinguished designers such as Tom Lehmann, Freidemann Friese, Scott Caputo, and Rob Daviau. In addition to being the CEO of Bezier Games, Inc., Alspach continues to design new games and to develop titles from other designers.
Awards
Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig won the Mensa Select award. His 2015 title One Night Ultimate Werewolf was on the Spiel des Jahres Recommended list due to its revolutionary app integration. In 2019, Werewords was a Spiel des Jahres finalist.
Game Designer list
The following are the games and game expansions designed by Alspach, including original publication date:
Age of Steam Expansion: Bay Area (self-published) 2005
Seismic (Atlas Games) 2006
Age of Steam Expansion: 1830s Pennsylvania / Northern California (self-published) 2006
Age of Steam Expansion: Disco Inferno / Soul Train (Bezier Games) 2006
Start Player: A Kinda Collectible Card Game (Bezier Games) 2006
Age of Steam Expansion: Mississippi Steamboats / Golden Spike (Bezier Games) 2007
Age of Steam Expansion: America/Europe (Bezier Games) 2007
Age of Steam Expansion: Barbados / St. Lucia (Bezier Games) 2007
Age of Steam Expansion: Jamaica / Puerto Rico (Bezier Games) 2007
