2025 War Room Guest Of Honor: The Players Aid
Grant Kleinhenz and Alexander Klein
Website
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The Players’ Aid, started by Alexander Klein and Grant Kleinhenz in April 2016, are content creators who focus on wargames and conflict simulations and maintain a YouTube Channel with over 20,000 subscribers and a written blog (www.theplayersaid.com). They have a passion for good design and approach their craft form the perspective of gamers and the way it feels to play games they cover. This is their 5th year attending Buckeye Game Fest and they consider it the “Best Little Gaming Convention in the Midwest”.
2025 Featured Guests
David Thompson
David Thompson is best known for the Undaunted, War Chest, and Valiant Defense series of games. He was the recipient of the James F. Dunnigan Design Elegance Award, has won five Golden Geek awards, a Dice Tower award, and has a Spiel des Jahres Recommended title.
Join him at Buckeye Game Fest to be one of the first to play his forthcoming game Line of Fire: Burnt Moon and test his forthcoming game Rebels Against Rebellion to be published by Flying Pig Games
Find him on X: David Thompson
Mark H. Walker
Mark H. Walker designs games, writes novels, and publishes both. Mark earned his living as a professional writer from 1997 until 2003, and then he began publishing games. He has written four novels (Dark War: Revelation, Everyone Dies in the End, Desert Moon, and Retribution), several short stories, and hundreds of articles for publications as diversified as Playboy and PCGamer.
He is the owner of Flying Pig Games and Tiny Battle Publishing and the designer of the Night of Man, the Platoon Commander series, The Long Road, Dark War RPG, Lock ‘n Load, and World at War series of games. Additionally, he has designed numerous one-off series of games such as ’65 Squad Level Combat in Vietnam, Brothers by My Side.
Find him on X: Mark H. Walker
Find him on Facebook: Flying Pig Games
Hermann Luttmann
Hermann is a long-time gamer and game designer. Best known for Dawn of the Zeds, A Most Fearful Sacrifice, At Any Cost, the Blind Swords series, and The Plum Island Horror.
Find him on X: Hermann Luttmann
Find him on Facebook: Hermann
Sabrina Culyba
Sabrina Culyba (she/her) is a game designer whose professional work has spanned digital games, location-based entertainment, and board games. Her game Diatoms won the 2023 Cardboard Edison award and was released to retail in 2025. Her upcoming cooperative game Uh Oh, Dino! will release this summer.
Sabrina is the author of The Transformational Framework. She serves on the boards for Global Game Jam and Broke the Game, as well as the Editorial Advisory for Play Story Press. She is an affiliate designer at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Transformational Play and runs Pittsburgh Playtest.
Sabrina lives in Pittsburgh with her partner and their two small humans, where she makes games and collaborates on other game-related endeavors under the umbrella of her independent publishing studio, Ludoliminal.