Ethan Pasternack

A lifetime tabletop gamer, Ethan has been in the industry since late 2001, when he joined WizKids Games as a graphic designer. He excelled in that role (especially with technical design tasks) and displayed a talent for innovation that brought him to the attention of Jordan Weisman. After a couple of years on the Art team, Jordan recruited him into his newly formed blue-sky R&D team where Ethan's artistic and game design skills could be combined.

Ethan worked on a wide variety of published and unpublished games as a part of Jordan's team, but he was particularly instrumental in the company's Constructible Strategy Game initiative. He played a pivotal role in (and designed all the models for) the Pirates of the Spanish Main series, the Rocketmen: Axis of Evil CSG, the short-lived Football Flix game, and later the Star Wars PocketModel TCG which he also designed (and with which he had invaluable model design help from Darrel Rustvold). Even after Jordan's departure from the company, Ethan remained a core element of the WizKids game design team until the company closed down in late 2008.

After the closure of WizKids, Ethan and a small group of company veterans (once again led by Jordan Weisman) founded a new game company called Compound Fun, LLC, where Ethan became the Director of Product Development for the company's core/hobby brand, Wells Expeditions. There he designed and directed their groundbreaking mass action miniatures game Arcane Legions, which launched at GenCon Indy 2009 with much critical acclaim for its innovative game engine and tournament-level incorporation of user-generated content. Despite the retail success of the game, the company was forced to close at the end of 2009 for financial reasons.

Now a successful freelance designer, Ethan went on to create the Star Trek: Fleet Captains board game for WizKids/NECA, and is currently working on a number of other as-yet unannounced game projects.

In 2011 Ethan joined the mobile games company Z2Live, makers of Trade Nations and Metalstorm, where he designs games for the iOS platform, however he continues to work on freelance tabletop projects.