Danielle Byrum

and finished fairly quickly. Next thing I knew, I was “picked up” by the FAA for an air traffic control facility in Fort Worth Texas. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. DFW is the second busiest airport in the USA, and the airspace around that airport is some of the busiest and most complex airspace in the USA. My airspace consisted of sequencing arrivals for Dallas and heavy military operations. As a gamer, I found immense satisfaction in taking 10-12 airplanes, vectoring and adjusting speeds until they were neatly lined up for approach control to take them to the runway. Sequencing was like a game within my job and you could easily see how well you had done. But I am not from Texas, I’m from Indiana and most of my family is in Indiana. When my daughter developed significant medical issues, I transferred to an air traffic facility in Indianapolis. This move meant that I had the family support that I needed but I completely lost the sequencing portion of my job. Indianapolis center does not feed any one airport with many arrivals, it feeds many airports with a few arrivals. The mini-game within my job was gone completely. I’ve spent years trying to explain my job to people without a good visual example. I finally had the idea a few years ago at Gencon to design a game based on sequencing arrivals across airspace on a game board. I spent a year working on my new game idea and showed it to some friends. They loved it so much I was convinced to try and publish it for every one to enjoy. Now, I'm working on several games (designing and developing games proved more fun than I expected), and I'm excited to share them with the board game community.