About Theresa:
Theresa Duringer is the owner and CEO of Temple Gates Games, a San Francisco–based digital board game studio known for best-in-class adaptations of modern tabletop games. Her team has brought Ascension to VR and developed acclaimed digital versions of Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, Shards of Infinity, and more, with a relentless focus on speed, clarity, and intuitive UI. Theresa works closely with designers and publishers to translate complex tabletop systems into digital experiences that feel natural, responsive, and faithful to the original games, helping players around the world connect and play together online. In this episode, she shares insights on what makes a great digital adaptation, why performance and UX are inseparable from game design, and how to bridge the gap between physical and digital play without losing what makes tabletop special.
More about Theresa and Temple Gate Games:
Justin’s Ah-Ha! Moments
Board Games Are UI, Not Just Games: A board game is already an interface to a system. Digitizing the User Interface (UI) forces you to confront it. Every card, zone, and transition either communicates clearly or breaks the experience. Great digital adaptations work because they make the system readable, not because they add polish.
Show the Decision, Hide the Noise: Great UI is all about showing the right thing at the moment a decision is made. Theresa’s rule: maximize critical information related to decision-making and eliminate everything else. When players feel overwhelmed, you know that you’re prioritizing the wrong information.
Real Differentiation Comes from Uncomfortable Problems: Temple Gate Games moved early into VR and other hard spaces where the rules didn’t exist yet. Solving problems before anyone agrees on the answers is how you build real leverage, and real expertise.
Show Notes
“We see a lot of adoption from people who already know how to play the game, but it's harder to get people to pick up something as complicated as a board game when they don't already know how to play it.” (00:28:50)
One of the hardest problems in digital tabletop is onboarding. Physical board games amortize their learning cost socially, because friends teach friends and the fact that rules are softened by the community, food, and shared space. Digital games remove that buffer. The lesson here is that accessability is about replacing social scaffolding with intentional design. A digital game has to present enough information to get a player hooked in just a few minutes or it will never reach new players.
“We are not using generative AI.” (00:45:23)
Despite Temple Gates being early adopters of neural network AI for gameplay, she explains why generative AI is different. The issue is trust. She frames creative work as a covenant between creators and the systems that support them, and argues that covenant is currently broken. She suggests that just because a tool is powerful doesn’t mean it’s ready to be used responsibly. Long-term trust matters more than short-term efficiency.
“So from my point of view, board game apps are almost entirely UI.” (01:00:26)
As we mention in the Ah-Ha moments, in digital board games, UI is the game. Every button, highlight, animation, and constraint is making design decisions on the player’s behalf. The lesson is that UI isn’t a cosmetic layer added after design—it’s the mechanism through which the design exists. If the interface is unclear, slow, or misleading, the game itself is broken, no matter how strong the original system was.
“So we as designers are saying, what does the player probably want to be doing? Let’s make it a big shiny button.” (01:04:14)
Theresa explains the deceptively deep thinking behind something as simple as an “OK” button. In a physical board game, players infer what happens next through shared rules knowledge and table culture. In a digital game, the interface has to make that call. The lesson here is that good UI removes friction, without removing agency. Designers should automate throwaway decisions so players can spend their attention where it actually matters. Its important to remember that speed isn’t the enemy of strategy; confusion is.
