QWEIN ZINE

My name is Michele. I was born in Italy in 1966, and I sign my work as Qwein. Frankly, that ought to be enough.  [ qwein@protonmail.com ]

I began designing games in 1986, pounding out rules on an Olivetti 22 typewriter, striking through lines in ink, leaving pages thick with corrections that probably made sense only to me. Back then, you didn’t play online. You’d gather at a friend’s house, sit on the floor, and lose yourselves in the mechanics. You’d sneak into the cinema pretending to be older just to catch Carpenter’s The Thing or Scott’s Alien. You’d cheer on the Vipers against the Cylons on a black-and-white television set. Those stories didn’t just captivate me; they rewired me. I turned my back on fantasy almost at once and began drafting my own systems for travelling the stars.

I’ve never been a particularly social creature. I publish my games, but truth be told, I make them for myself. After a kidney transplant and a double bypass, everything shifted. What had once been a quiet pastime became my lifeline. The rhythm of writing, of folding a single A4 sheet into an eight-page A7 booklet, of distilling an entire world into a handful of rules—it anchored me. It still does.

To date, I’ve released 433 independent games. Two of them, Cats and Proelium, saw full publication, each running to between forty and ninety A4 pages. But my true affinity lies with the minimal. There’s a quiet kind of magic in a single folded sheet that holds a complete experience. I don’t design for trends or broad appeal. I craft what speaks to me, and if it happens to find its way into someone else’s hands, so much the better.

That’s Qwein. A maker of small things, shaped by old typewriters, late-night screenings, and a life that taught me how to keep going, one page at a time.

Warm regards,
                             Qwein                                                      Artisan of Imagination Since 1986