Best Known For::
Matt Leacock is best known for the cooperative board games Forbidden Island (2010) and Pandemic (2008).
Other Games:
Other games designed by Leacock include the dice game Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age (2009) and the race game Lunatix Loop (2000). He has also designed an expansion for Pandemic, On The Brink (2009).
First Published Game:
Leacock's first published game was the limited edition kingdom-building game Borderlands (1995), which was published by his own company, Locust Games.
Awards:
Pandemic was named the 2008 Family Game of the Year by Games magazine, and it was nominated for a 2008 International Gamers Award for Multi-Player General Strategy Game. It was also my pick as the best board game of 2008.
More About Matt Leacock:
According to a biography on his web site, Leacock started designing games as a teenager. "Typically, I'd get some lame mass market, tv-show-of-the-year game, get frustrated by its mediocrity, then try to do better on the reverse side of the board with a magic marker," he said.
In 2008, Leacock spoke about the design of Pandemic at a Google Tech Talk. I highly recommend this lecture for anyone interested in the process of designing a board game.
