About · two friends, one table

The Shared Table

Cardboard, dice, and good company.

The Shared Table is a two-person board game studio that moves at exactly the pace two people with day jobs can move.

We're Diewe and Jan. We've been designing games together since 2025, mostly in evenings, mostly at the same table we play on. Some ideas die in week one. Some hang around for months. A few make it all the way through and become something we'd actually hand to a friend.

We make games we want to play ourselves — full of raccoons, bad decisions, and the kind of moments that make someone groan and laugh at the same time. We take the design seriously and ourselves much less so.

There's no roadmap, no release window, no marketing calendar. When a game is ready, it shows up here. That's the whole plan.

Who we are

The two of us

Co-designer

Diewe

Diewe lives in Heerlen, writes software for a living, and has been deep in board games ever since the lockdowns gave him a perfectly good excuse. He's the fast player at the table — quick turns, gut decisions, and a deep faith that the dice know what they're doing. Diewe's taste swings between Dune: Imperium for thinky strategy and King of Tokyo for dice-chucking chaos, which more or less explains the games he likes to design too. Deckbuilding and action programming keep showing up — engines that hum, turns that backfire spectacularly — and both turn up all over the prototypes he builds with Jan. When he's not coding or shuffling cards, he's writing a fantasy novel one stubborn chapter at a time.

▤ jan portrait

Co-designer

Jan

Jan also lives in Heerlen, and he's the strategist of the pair — the kind of player who counts cards, tracks probabilities, and quietly assembles a winning position three turns before anyone notices. His favourites tell you most of what you need to know: Unmatched for the tactical duels and Spirit Island for the deep, cooperative puzzle. Recently he took a sledgehammer to a basement wall to build the duo's new board game room and design office.