Jul 2025 – Jun 2026 · age 16–17 · paid client work
Pivot
A 2–5 player economic strategy game by Tom Inglis, published by Teomach Games. I helped take it from printed cards to online play.
- Client
- Teomach Games, Edinburgh (paid, part-time)
- My role
- Developer (credited on BoardGameGeek)
- The game
- 2–5 players · 50–150 min · 13+
- Commits
- 260, alongside school
The problem
Pivot is set in 2077. Each player invests in startups across five future industries, and can run any company they hold shares in: building factories, growing shipping routes, selling into regional demand. Most shares means CEO control, and with it the choice of when to sell the company. Cards played from a shared market push prices around and move the game clock, so everyone can see how much time is left to build or cash out. Richest player at the end wins.
A board game that only exists on a table is hard to playtest and hard to show people. Pivot needed to be playable online, and its cards and rulebook needed to be ready for print.
What I built
- Tabletop Simulator edition: done. The full game, free on Steam Workshop, with the rules automated in Lua.
- Board Game Arena version: I started it and helped build it.
- virtualtabletop.io version: big progress, then paused. It's my final year of high school, so the bac comes first.
- Help with the cards and rulebook for the physical game.
How it works
- Tabletop Simulator: the free way to play the full game online. Lua scripts handle the rules and the bookkeeping, so players just play.
- Board Game Arena: the browser version on BGA's framework, which I started and then built with the team.
- virtualtabletop.io: a lighter browser table. Most of it is built; finishing it waits until after the bac.
What went wrong / what I learned
Honest note: I used an AI coding assistant for parts of the implementation. Roughly half of my commits on Pivot were written with its help.
deadlines hit different when someone's paying.Results
Pivot is listed on BoardGameGeek as a 2027 release, with me credited as a developer. The full game is free to play on Tabletop Simulator, and Teomach plans a Kickstarter for early 2027.
Stack
- Lua
- Tabletop Simulator
- Board Game Arena framework
- virtualtabletop.io
- JavaScript
- Card & rulebook design
Links
This is client work, so there's no public source. These pages are public: