At Lone Shark Games, we celebrate individuality while enjoying the benefits of collaboration. Our culture channels our differences and wide-ranging skills into great gameplay. In the spirit of innovation, we create and collaborate together.
Aviva Schecterson
Aviva Schecterson is a game editor at Lone Shark Games where she started out as an intern and immediately took the helm of Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow’s Walk and the Apocrypha Adventure Card Game. In the past, she worked on various Pathfinder adventure paths and worked on DigiPen’s first puzzle hunt. She also creates digital action-adventure and puzzle games with narrative themes, and has created two multiplayer games on her student teams. When she’s not editing or designing, Aviva assists in running the IGDA Jewish Game Developers SIG, does ballet, and bakes lots of bread. She can be reached at @avivayalla.
Brian Coppola
Aside from designing and developing the Lone Shark Games Website, Brian Coppola has demoed for LSG at various events (Gen Con, PAX West), and spends a crazy amount of time playing, acquiring, and thinking about tabletop games. He's a front-end web developer by trade, and his interests are many—travel, music, playing bass guitar, cycling, hiking, dancing, anything sci‑fi or fantasy, general mischief, and sucking down as much information about the universe as he can—but through all that, he thinks endlessly about games, and is currently cultivating some tabletop game ideas of his own.
Chad Brown
Chad is a veteran of computers, puzzles, games, events, and organized play (don't let the name fool you - it's not that organized!) from Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. As a game designer for Lone Shark Games, he spends most of his time building the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Apocrypha Adventure Card Game. He is also the lead developer of Thornwatch. He can be reached at @chadpbrown.
Elisa Teague
Elisa Teague works at Lone Shark Games as a game and event designer. Previously working for Playroom Entertainment and consulting for both game companies and inventors, she has had a hand in the design, art direction, development and production of over 100 games, with her most recent game designs Geek Out! and Geek Out! Pop Culture Party coming out in the last two years. She was the graphic designer on The Maze of Games and is one of the authors and editor for Girls on Games: A Look at the Fairer Side of the Tabletop Industry. Known as “The Lizard King,” Elisa prides herself on juggling work and family, while taking part in all things games and geeky, from decade-long D&D campaigns to cosplay and more. She can be reached at @geekypinup.
Gaby Weidling
Gaby Weidling works at Lone Shark Games as a puzzle ninja but sticks her hands in almost all the projects. A few of the things included in her work are puzzles and events for the Seattle Symphony, Cards Against Humanity, Gen Con, PAX, and Microsoft, as well as being the developer on the puzzle novel The Maze of Games. Lately she’s been working on design for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Apocrypha. Very few people will get the puzzle in this bio. Only cats, funny hats, and Matlock can de-curmudgeonize this eighty-year-old-in-a-twenty-something-body. She can be found at @ermahgerdgerby.
Keith Richmond
Keith Richmond is a vicious cheese weasel who turned his evil powers towards making awesome Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Apocrypha cards. He is usually found hiding in the remote and barren outpost of Boston. His most notable previous work includes Epic Living Forgotten Realms adventures and minor projects and volunteer work for Wizards of the Coast. He can be reached at @KeithRichmond.
Liz Spain
Liz Spain designs games and specializes in weaving rich themes into the whole game experience. Beginning in 2009, she has worked in a number of roles for game companies such as Harebrained Schemes, Flying Frog Productions, and Aesterlight Studios. She has designed and organized live-action and escape room games across the United States and Canada. Incredible Expeditions: Quest for Atlantis, a steampunk exploration game, was her first solo board game design project. Today, Liz is the Card Shark, designing the card mechanics for games such as the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Apocrypha. She can be found at @voodoobunnyliz.
Marie Poole
Marie Poole is the company’s CBO, a job that not only requires wearing many hats but making sure we have hats in the first place. She got her degree in non-profit agency management and became an accountant. Some years later, she was convinced by her brother Mike to join her fellow gamers and use the skills she learned to entertain the world. Marie’s job has grown from handling the company’s backroom activity to the event face of Lone Shark and more recently to Chief Business Officer. Marie has been known to work events, negotiate contracts, do the taxes, and pick up coffee (and Mike). In her copious spare time, Marie can be found engaging in her favorite tabletop game at her favorite local game store, volunteering for some committee, or playing Zelda (oh, and your game too!). She can be found @lonesharkmarie.
Mike Selinker
Mike Selinker is the president and chief creative officer of Lone Shark Games. He's the co-creator of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Lords of Vegas, Unspeakable Words, and many other games, as well as the author of the books Puzzlecraft, The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, and the interactive puzzle novel The Maze of Games. While at Wizards, he helped design and develop games like Betrayal at House on the Hill, Risk Godstorm, and Axis & Allies, and was a creative director on 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. He can be found onstage at events like w00tstock, manipulating the masses with ARGs like the Cards Against Humanity holiday game, and at @mikeselinker.
Paul Peterson
Paul Peterson started his game design career at Wizards of the Coast working on Magic: the Gathering, Pokémon, and his card game, Guillotine. Since then he moved between the worlds of electronic and tabletop games designing everything from a massively multiplayer roleplaying game to a virtual world for girls to a collectible poker chip game. He is a designer and developer on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, as well as designing Smash Up, Running with the Bulls, and co-designing Unexploded Cow and Pairs. He also drives a really swank Mustang. He can be reached at @warewolf00.
Rodney Thompson
Rodney Thompson has been designing games professionally for over 15 years. His design credits include the Saga Edition of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Lords of Waterdeep, and Tyrants of the Underdark. When not working on Thornwatch and other Eyrewood properties at Lone Shark Games, you can find Rodney at Bungie, working on the Destiny franchise. He can be reached at @AntarianRanger.
Shane Steed
Some say he escaped, all we know is that he showed up here. As our Operations and Events manager, Shane gets to combine his previous experiences in video game retail, information technology and herding cats. Often referred to as the "glue" of Lone Shark, he works with Marie and Lance to help maintain internal systems so we can do neat things like send emails, write blog posts and send you cool stuff. Externally, he is responsible for getting us out in the world and dazzling folks with our awesome event experiences. He does all while toting around his game console and staying current on the latest and greatest of the video game world. Shane can be reached @LoneSharkShane.
Tanis O’Connor
Tanis’s love of games and puzzles began at a young age, when she figuratively devoured the pages of GAMES Magazine with her grandmother. (Paper, it turns out, tastes bad.) She’s designed and run three MIT Mystery Hunts, developed rules and edited content for Dungeons and Dragons with Wizards of the Coast, played an evil corporation in a coast-to-coast hunt for escaped organ renters, edited The Maze of Games puzzle novel, and currently spends her time creating content for and running the Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild, Paizo’s organized play campaign for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. She can be reached at @lemurtanis.
Interns
At Lone Shark Games, we believe in the power of cheap labor and often utilize it to do such thrilling tasks as prototype creation, getting coffee, and generally just doing whatever we feel like asking them to do. This picture is of our first group of interns (Javier, Lucy, Thomas and Aviva!) who were amazing and will be tough chairs to fill! If you are interested in being an intern at Lone Shark Games, please check with your school internship office.
Sharky McSharkerson
Sharky has had an incredible life, having made it here all the way from the Great Barrier Reef where he started a movement that would later make its way into mainstream media called “Fish are Friends, Not Food.” Besides his very sharp wit and carnivorous love of tofu, Sharky brings to LSG a unique perspective of how important it is to really listen to each other instead of just eating the competition. His job is to answer all of your email, but cut him some slack, because he doesn’t actually have hands.
Images by Len Peralta and John Kovalic