We are a small independent studio making games that take history seriously — not as backdrop or flavour, but as the substance of play. Founded in 2025 by designers who came to games through the archive.
Cold Alchemy Games was founded on a single conviction: that play is one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the past, and we are not using it nearly seriously enough.
The studio grew out of a history seminar. One of our founders was teaching a graduate course on Cold War diplomacy when they ran a simulation — an improvised, roughly-sketched negotiation exercise — and watched students engage with material they had been reading passively for weeks in a completely different way. The simulation forced them to make decisions under the constraints that real diplomats faced: imperfect information, institutional pressure, time. It transformed abstract knowledge into something closer to experience.
The question we have been trying to answer ever since is: what would it look like to do that rigorously? Not with a rough improvisation, but with a designed system that models the historical situation with genuine fidelity? Not as an educational tool that sacrifices depth for accessibility, but as a serious game that takes the player seriously?
That is the Cold Alchemy project. We work at the intersection of game design and historical scholarship — drawing on primary sources, consulting with specialists, and submitting our mechanics to the same kind of scrutiny we would apply to an historical argument. When a mechanic models a historical reality, we can explain why. When it abstracts or simplifies, we can account for what is lost.
We design for people who want to understand, not just win. If that describes you, we think you will find something worth playing here.
Historical accuracy is not optional. Every mechanical choice must be defensible against the record.
Games should make the cost of decisions felt, not just counted. Play must produce something like understanding.
We design in the open. Our choices, including our failures, are documented and available for scrutiny.
Complexity lives in the history, not the rulebook. Unnecessary procedure is a design failure.
Historian by training, designer by necessity. Spent seven years in the archive before deciding the archive needed a game. Responsible for the wargame series and the studio's approach to historical fidelity.
Came to wargames through tabletop role-playing, and to history through games. Leads mechanical development on the simulation titles and the classroom product line. Has a weakness for CDG mechanisms and strong opinions about rulebook structure.
Responsible for the look and feel of every Cold Alchemy title — from the alchemical sigil to the counter art. Background in editorial design and information graphics, with a conviction that a wargame map is a form of argument.
Cold Alchemy is a small studio and we stay that way deliberately. But we are always open to conversations — with designers, historians, educators, and institutions who share our conviction that play is a serious tool for understanding the past.
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