Gladden Design

Gladden Design is a husband-and-wife studio, run by Tom and Sarah Brinton, creating paper-based games and tools that use ideas borrowed from videogame design and procedural generation. Their best-known work, Paper Apps Dungeon, is a solo role-playing game presented as a pocket-sized book, where each page represents a room in a procedurally generated dungeon. Every copy is unique, and all you need to play is a pencil and a die.

Building on that idea, Gladden Design have released a growing collection of Paper Apps covering genres such as space exploration, golf, and labyrinth puzzles. They’ve also produced physical accessories like the Pencil Dice and Golf XL, a two-player paper golf game, all designed around portability and simplicity.

Alongside their games, they’ve created practical Paper Apps such as a to-do list and a health tracker. Everything they make shares the same goal: reducing reliance on screens while still feeling playful, thoughtful, and well designed.