A University Press Will Now Peer-Review Tabletop Games

Carnegie Mellon University Press has opened submissions for Promptuary, a new anthology that publishes short games as peer-reviewed scholarly and creative work. The first volume takes the theme "Strange Worlds: Science, Technology, and the Anthropocene," and the announcement sets the deadline: submissions close Nov. 30, 2026.

Unlike a game studies journal, Promptuary prints the games themselves: rules texts, print-and-play sheets and other printable formats, each under 25 half-letter pages and playable in one session or a short series. The press is accepting board and card games, short tabletop roleplaying games, larp and other live formats, simulations and war games "that deal with topics other than war," solo and puzzle games, and experimental work. Review is double blind, with game designers, academics and subject experts reading and playtesting each entry.

The name comes from the "card abacus," or promptuary, an early calculating device that the editors describe as sitting "at the borderlands of the analog and the digital." The series editors are Jonathan Walton of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center and Ashley Werlinich of CMU Libraries. The wider CMU Press Games editorial board includes Kara Stone, Jesse Schell, Alenda Chang and José Zagal.

For more reading see the Promptuary submission guidelines, the CMU Press Games series page and Killscreen's 2014 interview "For Gonzalo Frasca, game studies means game production."