Andre Novoa

Andre Seabra Real Sampaio da Novoa (born 1 July 1985) is a Portuguese game designer, writer, musician, and cultural geographer. He has lived in the USA and the UK, and is currently based in Lisbon Portugal.

Education

Novoa received a B.A. in history and a M.A. in anthropology from the University of Lisbon in 2009, where he studied bands and musicians on the road. In 2010, he moved to the United Kingdom where he completed a PhD in social and cultural geography at Royal Holloway, University of London with a critical analysis of mobility and social class in the European Union. For this work, he was the recipient of the award Best Young Anthropology by the Portuguese Association of Anthropology in 2018.

Since then, he has written about contemporary identities, extraterrestrial life , and space. He has worked in a major ERC academic grant called "The Colour of Labour", on how labour influences processes of racialization. Currently, he gives intensive courses on "Games, Society & Culture" across the world, exploring contemporary themes such as identities, religion, neo-liberalism and nationalism through the lenses of games and gaming.

As an anthropologist and geographer Novoa studied travels and considered them ritual passages for the researcher, concerning both a passage to participate in a foreign culture but also to becoming an established researcher".

Game Design

Novoa has written role-playing game (RPGs) books and modules since 2015. His work has been published in the US, Brazil and Europe. More recently, he created Games Omnivorous, a brand based in Portugal that publishes minimalist and bizarre games, including the critically-acclaimed Death Robot Jungle, the first RPG setting in the format of a music LP vinyl and Mausritter: Sword-and-Whiskers Role Playing. He is the recipient of the 2020 Hartvig Award by Rolisboa, the Portuguese roleplaying convention.

The first RPG for Andre Novoa was 17th Century Minimalist (2020). Novoa was a designer of Death Robot Jungle (2020), a role-playing game setting on a record. Novoa and Manuel Pinheiro also created Putrescence Regnant (2021) for Mörk Borg, also on a vinyl record of yellow-and-black marbled wax. Novoa was also a designer of role-playing games that use hex-shaped tiles, called Undying Sands, Bottled Sea, and the Hexcrawl Toolbox (2023). Novoa wrote the minimalist one-shot heist role-playing game The Job.

Music

Since his teens, Novoa has played in bands and toured Europe as the drummer for Susan Cadogan and Symarip. He was also one of the founders of Music With Soul Records, an indie label based in Amsterdam credited for the launch of Fumaça Preta , amongst others. More recently, he turned to sound design for board-games and role-playing games, collaborating with Portuguese musician and sound-designer Manuel Pinheiro under the guise of the Dead Robots.

Nóvoa analyzed for the band The Stingers ATX and discovered how their mobility on tour "became a process of creating their identity as musicians".

Politics

An activist since his youth, Novoa is one of the founding members of LIVRE, an eco-socialist political party in Portugal founded in 2014, which is committed to the Green New Deal and is the champion of minority rights in the country. He was a candidate to the European Parliament in the 2014 elections for the party, and a candidate to the Assembly of the Republic in the 2015 Portuguese legislative election.