Learning by Playing: The Game Design Workshop with Michele Garbuggio

There’s a moment, in every student’s journey, when curiosity turns into possibility.
When theory meets creativity, and imagination becomes a concrete tool to understand how things work and how we can change them.

It’s in this spirit that we launch the workshop “How to Design Board Games”, led by Michele Garbuggio, game designer and author of international titles such as Dune: War for Arrakis, The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, and Trudvang Legends.

A learning path designed for our students at H-FARM International School Vicenza, guiding them to discover Game Design as a language, a method, and a form of design thinking.
Not just a creative activity, but a journey into the logic of games, the structure of decision-making, and the magic that happens when ideas take shape.

A New Way of Learning by Designing

At H-FARM International School, we believe that learning is a living experience, born from doing, experimenting, and trying again.
Game Design perfectly embodies this approach: it connects creativity and discipline, storytelling and mathematics, empathy and strategy.
After all, a game is a complex system in which every rule, every choice, and every interaction must work together, just like in a real project.

During the workshop, students will be invited to explore every dimension of the creative process: from concept to mechanics, from prototyping to testing.
They will discover that designing a game means designing an experience placing the player at the center and building around them a coherent, engaging world capable of sparking emotion.

The Educational Value of Game Design

Play has always been one of the deepest forms of learning.
Through its rules, challenges, and dynamics, it teaches us how to manage complexity, collaborate, make decisions, and embrace the consequences.

Bringing game design into the classroom means offering students a true gym for the mind: a space to train creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, and resilience.

In this sense, Michele Garbuggio’s workshop is not just a didactic experience, but an expression of H-FARM’s educational values: the will to nurture curious, conscious minds, ready to interpret the future with new tools.

From the Game Board to Design Culture

Board games are not merely entertainment objects: they are narrative microcosms, where strategy meets story, aesthetics meets logic, and collaboration meets competition.

Michele Garbuggio will bring into the classroom examples from his own work, such as Dune: War for Arrakis and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, to show how an idea can become a tangible experience and how behind every game mechanic lies a vision.

Through these examples, students will learn to see a game as a design artifact, the result of intentional narrative and structural choices.
Step by step, the workshop will guide them in building their own prototype, helping them understand how an idea is born, and how it evolves when shared with others.

Looking Ahead: A Workshop in Progress

Over the coming weeks, the workshop will unfold through multiple sessions, alternating between theory and practice.
Students will be guided in creating their own board games, experimenting with the phases of ideation, development, and testing.

This is not about “winning or losing,” but about learning to think like designers: observing, deciding, revising, improving.
Because in game design, as in life, every decision has a consequence, and every attempt is a step toward a better version of what we imagine.

Learning to Play, Playing to Learn

This workshop represents one of the many ways in which H-FARM International School turns its educational vision into reality, merging innovation, creativity, and critical thinking through hands-on experiences.

Through the language of play, our students will not only develop technical and design skills, but also discover something deeper: that knowledge is an ongoing process of exploration, built on both rules and freedom.

In games, as in design, the true goal is not to finish first, but to understand how the journey transforms us.
And perhaps that’s the most important lesson to carry forward.

Because every great project begins in the same way: with the willingness to play.