About Doug Selph

I’m Doug Selph, the designer behind Pumpkin Face Games and Leaf & Let Die. The game grew out of three long-standing parts of my life: decades of work with complex systems, nearly forty years in intentional Christian community, and a deep concern for creation care.

Life in Intentional Christian Community

For most of my adult life, I have been part of Reba Place Fellowship, an intentional Christian community rooted in the Evanston/Rogers Park area just north of Chicago. That experience has shaped me more deeply than any professional role or creative project. It has formed how I think about responsibility, patience, accountability, forgiveness, stewardship, shared discernment, and the slow work of learning to love actual people in actual circumstances.

One way I understand intentional Christian community is this: it is a way of arranging life so that we can love one another more concretely. Christian love can remain vague if we are rarely present to each other, rarely known by each other, and rarely available to each other. Community disciplines such as locality, shared meals, small groups, common life, and mutual discernment are not meant to be arbitrary rules. At their best, they are practices that make love less accidental. They create the conditions in which people can know and be known, serve and be served, challenge and be challenged, forgive and be forgiven.

Leaf & Let Die is not a game about Reba Place Fellowship, and it is not a game about intentional Christian community. It is a fantasy tabletop game about gnomes, polyhedral dice, growing Plant Creatures, and tactical battle. But the values underneath it are not accidental. I found myself drawn less to domination for its own sake and more to themes of cultivation, guardianship, interdependence, restraint, endurance, and protective strength. Under the gnome silliness is a question I care about: what does it mean to become the kind of guardian who can protect something living and communal?

Systems, Software, and Game Design

Professionally, I spent much of my life designing and building software systems. That work trained me to think about many interacting parts at once: how to make complexity understandable, how to keep systems from collapsing under their own weight, and how to give people meaningful choices without overwhelming them. That same instinct shaped Leaf & Let Die. I wanted to make a game where polyhedral dice, cards, timing, risk, and tactical choices interact in ways that stay alive throughout play — not as a tangled mess, but as something players can learn, shape, and enjoy.

Creation Care and the Botanical Imagination

The botanical world of Leaf & Let Die also comes from a long concern for creation care. Soil, gardens, trees, farming communities, and living systems have mattered to me for many years. At one point, I helped start a CSA connected to Plow Creek, an intentional Christian farming community in Tiskilwa, Illinois. I have also tried to connect personal choices, such as air travel, to practices of repair — including supporting tree planting in response to carbon impact. Leaf & Let Die is not an ecology lesson, but its world of roots, vines, growth, decay, adaptation, and stewardship comes from that deeper imaginative soil.

Pumpkin Face Games is where these threads come together: community-shaped imagination, systems thinking, creation care, and a love of tactile tabletop play. My hope is to create games that are lively, thoughtful, and memorable — games where strategy matters, but where the thing you build also feels like it has a life of its own.

You can learn more about Leaf & Let Die, read longer essays on the Reflections page, or join the list to follow the game as it moves toward publication.