Sam Leigh, independent game designer, shared with me her journey from publishing her first game to focusing on game development more substantially, from owning one tarot deck to making a breakout tarot journaling game, and of designing games with introspection at their core.
Edited and adapted from a conversation on July 2, 2025
Alex: You’ve been a full-time game designer for about two years now, is that right?
Sam: Mostly! I still work for a research lab 18 hours a week. And then the rest of the
time, I’m supporting myself off of design work. It’s a little tricky sometimes
because I’m having my attention divided between two very different things. But at the
same time, it’s kind of nice because they really require different skills and different parts
of my brain. The design work, everything I do in RPGs is very cognitively heavy. It’s
designing, it’s writing, it’s editing, it’s making videos. And all of that really needs all of my attention all of the time. With the lab work, there are certain things that I do for the lab that are a bit more rote, are things that I’ve done for a long time. And so it’s not quite as cognitively demanding. It’s kind of nice in a way to have that work to supplement
the RPG work. Plus it’s nice to have some stable income as well.
Alex: Can you talk about that journey of how you went mostly full-time?
Sam: I started designing games right around the end of 2020, and that was about four months after I started my job at the lab. At the time I was living in New Hampshire and one of the really nice things about that job is that I could leave work at work. I wasn’t bringing any work home and it also wasn’t so exhausting that I would come home tired and unable to do anything in the afternoons. So it really allowed me to have the time and the energy to be able to focus on creative work in the evenings and on the weekends. I had been really interested in tabletop work. I had learned about the indie side of RPGs that summer, the summer of 2020. And I knew that I wanted to start writing. And so the situation with my job worked out well, where it really allowed me to have that time and that energy. So that’s kind of when I started it. And then it just really grew from there. The first game that I published in print was Anamnesis. And Anamnesis was much more of a breakout hit than I had thought it was going to be. I’m still amazed by that. And all of the designing and the learning that I was able to do about three years after I started designing, I got to a point where I felt comfortable cutting my hours in half and moving to Virginia, where rent is a little bit cheaper and I was closer to family and some friends.
Alex: Anamnesis, your first game, was a solo game that used tarot cards. Where did the inspiration for that come from?
Sam: My initial idea for what Anamnesis eventually became was nothing at all like Anamnesis. I had this idea of writing a game where all of the players are playing a character who lost their memory and where they have blank character sheets that the GM has filled character sheets for. And that as they play, the character sheets would be filled in as they learn more about their character. That’s nothing like what Anamnesis is. By the way, that game exists now. I did not write it, but there’s a game called Lethe.
Alex: Oh, like the [mythical] Greek river.
Sam: Yes! What happened is that I sat down to start writing it, and then I thought, oh, what if this was actually a solo game where it’s just one player who has a
character sheet? And actually, what if we ditch the character sheet? And actually this seems like it would be really good with tarot cards. And so it just evolved very quickly. Once I started to actually think about it, it evolved into something totally different, which was Anamnesis. That was kind of where the original idea came from. But in terms of tarot, I actually had not had much experience at all with tarot. I did a lot of learning about tarot as I was designing the game. I owned one tarot deck at the time, which was the Rider-Waite —
Alex: How many tarot decks do you own now?
Sam: (long pause): I think five. So, a reasonable number. Maybe six.
Alex: So you’re learning new things about tarot as the game went?
Sam: Yes. I have a friend who right before I started to design Anamnesis, they did a tarot reading for me because they’re really into tarot and I didn’t really know anything about tarot at the time. And the way that they described tarot was basically saying that different people use it in different ways, but they used it not as a tool for divination, but as a way to understand more about yourself, because the way that you interpret the cards can say things about what’s on your mind and what you want and what is troubling you.
Alex: Like meditation.
Sam: Yeah, I would say that. And that really struck me. I really liked that. And so when I started designing Anamnesis, it occurred to me like maybe tarot would fit this well, not only just not only because of the way that the tool can be used in the game, but because of the themes of the game of finding yourself and learning about yourself.
Alex: Your most recent game, if I’m not mistaken, is Death of the Author.
Sam: Technically speaking, The World We Left Behind was released a couple weeks after Death of the Author, but they were released right after each other.
Alex: Is The World We Left Behind related to this world is not yours?
Sam: No. I do have a writing credit on this world is not yours. That was actually one of the first writing commissions I ever did. The first time my words were every published in print were with this world is not yours. So I’m very grateful for Travis [Hill] for trusting me with that.
Alex: Tell me about your inspirations for The World We Left Behind.
Sam: Do you know the story about the ballet?
Alex: I do not!
Sam: The World We Left Behind was actually commissioned by this group in New York called Balletcollective. They do this really interesting thing where, every season, they get together groups of a choreographer, a composer, and what they call a source artist, which is basically any sort of artist. It could be a poet, it could be a writer, it could be a painter. The source artist makes an art piece. And then the composer writes a piece based on that art. And then the choreographer choreographs a ballet using the composer’s piece. And they asked me to be a source artist for their 2023 season.
Alex: And they discovered you from Anamnesis?
Sam: Yes. They already knew who the composer and the choreographer were going to be. And the composer, his name is Phong Tran. He had heard of my games, he had a copy of Anamnesis. The theme of that season was about chance and probability. And so Phong was like, why don’t we look into bringing on a game designer? Because that’s kind of what this is all about. So they reached out to me and I was just delighted. I started partnering with them at the beginning of 2023. And the ballet premiered in New York city at the end of 2023 with dancers from the New York city ballet. I traveled to New York to see it and to be there for it.
Alex: What was that like?
Sam: It was really an incredible experience. It was completely indescribable as an artist. I got to see one of their rehearsals before I saw the actual show and I was trying to hold back tears. It was the first time that I’d heard the music or anything. And it was really moving to see my work interpreted in that way. And I’m sure that is a sentiment that a lot of people can relate to.
Alex: And you were able to recognize your work in the ballet?
Sam: I was, yeah. The composer, Phong, he does a lot of electronic music. And the World We Left Behind is a sci-fi game. And the music really did feel like the game.
Alex: Is the ballet available to watch anywhere?
Sam: They performed it again in their 2024 season, they brought it back. There’s a recording of that up on Youtube.
Alex: In addition to your games, you’re known for making TikTok recommendation videos. Do you still do those, and how did you get started doing those?
Sam: It’s funny that we’re doing this interview right now, because I took an unofficial break from videos for a couple years. When I moved to [making] RPGs almost full time, I thought that would mean I would have more time for videos, but It actually meant I had less time for videos. I was trying to keep up with it, but ultimately I just wasn’t really able to make more of them. But I’ve done a lot of restructuring over the last few months. And one of the things that I’m doing is making videos again, because that’s important to me. I actually just posted the first one of being unofficially back. I just posted one on Hellwhalers today.
Alex: You are the fourth person I’ve interviewed who has brought up Hellwhalers. It’s hot right now!
Sam: They have a [crowdfunding] campaign going on right now. It’s a cool game. I was really impressed with it. I am really excited to play it at some point.
Alex: What’s inspiring you these days, or what can we expect to see next from you?
Sam: One thing that I can say that is inspiring me is I’ve been really eating up a lot of zone-based media. I just finished Roadside Picnic. I’m a big fan of Annihilation, and the kind of media where there’s a strange location that people go to that’s never really fully explained.This kind of answers the second question too. There’s a game that I’m very in the early stages of working on that is adjacent to that. That’s a larger project, I’ve been picking at it for a bit. I might end up releasing an ashcan first and just see if people are interested.
Alex: You’d be playing as people going into the zone, like in Annihilation?
Sam: Yes! And it would be a little bit of a megadungeon, actually, which is very unlike the stuff that I’ve published before. But I’ve had this idea for a couple of years now, just rattling around. It just hasn’t been the right time to work on it, and now’s the time.
Alex: A bit of a dream project?
Sam: Yeah, it is.
Alex: I’m excited to see what you do with that. Like you said, that’s a bit different than your usual work. Is there a thread there? What can people expect when they pick up a Sam Leigh game?
Sam: My games have a lot of introspection in them, in a way that wasn’t specifically intentional, as, like, “my brand”, but it’s true. It’s pretty clear in Anamnesis and Death of the Author, but even in The World We Let Behind, there’s a certain amount of contemplation that occurs. While the three games are very different from each other and in their themes, I think that is a through line between all of them.
Alex: You started with solo journaling games, but you’ve done an entire breadth. The one you’re working on now sounds more traditional, you said it was a megadungeon. Where are you most comfortable?
Sam: [Laughter] Still solo games, definitely. I’m most comfortable with solo games. Death of the Author is really solo or duet. Outliers is solo. I find it a bit easier to design for one person, the reader, and not design for a group of people. But I want to stretch those wings a little bit. The World We Left Behind was a little bit of that. It started off as a two-player game, and became a one to five– player game. So that one always had multiple people in mind. I want to make more solo games in the future, but right now I’m trying out new things.