David "Dave" Howell is a board game designer, who was an early days employee of Wizards of the Coast.[1][2]
He co-wrote and co-edited Wizards of the Coast's first product, "The Primal Order," and wrote the fourth book in that series, "Chessboards: The Planes of Possibility." He was the production manager for Magic: The Gathering from Alpha through the Revised, and also managed production of the first couple of foreign editions. He created and managed the online support team as the Cyberspace Liaison ("snark@wizards.com"), which for a while had the broadest online support of any company. He transferred these responsibilities to others when he was tapped to found the Book Publishing Division, which worked with HarperPrism to publish the first tie-in novels. He left Wizards in December of 1995.
Since that time, he has been a frequent playtester and design assistant for James Ernest and Cheapass Games. In 2012 he Kickstarted PennyGems, a series of board game tokens.
According to Dave himself, he was responsible for coining the terms summoning sickness and flavor text, and the creation of the very first tap symbol.[3]