Bez Shahriari

Bez Bonnie-Beth Shahriari^[1] is a Scottish board game designer and mental health advocate who has designed over 50 games, most of which are self-published under her brand Stuff by Bez. Her most commercially successful game is In a Bind, which was picked up by Gigamic and republished internationally as Yogi.

Early life

Shahriari grew up in Glasgow and became interested in video games at an early age, watching her siblings play games on a ZX Spectrum before she started playing herself. At university, she studied videogame design for a year, but dropped out in the second year after the focus of the program moved away from game design to programming.^[2]

Game Design

In a Bind

In 2012, Shahriari moved to London and became involved with Playtest UK, a cooperative group that helped game designers by playtesting their concepts. Her first design that came out of that group was In a Bind, of which she commented "I went all out for silliness. I had people running around the table, spinning in circles, hopping, even doing sit ups during playtests."^[2] Shahriari self-published the game under the label Stuff by Bez.

In 2016, French publisher Gigamic picked up In a Bind and released it as Yogi, selling over 100,000 copies in 20 languages.^[3][4][5]

Three Wibbell cards

Wibbell

Shahriari's second design was called Wibbell. This game uses a custom deck of 48 cards; each card has a pair of letters, a number and border art. The purpose of the game is to win cards by shouting out words that use letters from a card on the table and a card in one's hand.

Shahriari then used the same deck to create a story-telling game titled Faybell, as well as a pattern-recognition game titled Grabell. She renamed the deck Wibbell++ to recognize its multipurpose function. In 2015, she came up with the concept of releasing a new Wibbell++ game every August 1.^[6]

In 2021 she changed the name of Wibbell++ to the ELL Deck.

In his 2021 book Board Games as Media, Paul Booth quotes Shahriari about her game design philosophy: "The world doesn't need just another game about farming that is done basically the same way... I just feel like you've got to seriously look at yourself and think, what is this game adding to the landscape of gaming?"^[7]

Other games

Shahriari continued to self-publish games for Stuff by Bez, but has also designed games for other publishers, including:

• Flowers in Towers as part of Dice & Ink: A Roll & Write Anthology by Inkwell Games
• Last Bug Standing in the Circle of Doom by Surprised Stare Games

Honours

• At Conpulsion 2020, Shahriari was awarded the Banquo Award, which annually recognizes "those who have encapsulated the spirit of Scottish gaming."^[8]
• In his 2024 book Tabletop Game Accessibility: Meeple Centred Design , Michael James Heron identified Bez Shahriari as one of the "indie game publishers who took accessibility seriously even when there were so many other calls on their time."^[9]