Richard Channing Garfield (born June 26, 1963) is an American mathematician, inventor and game designer.

[6] Garfield was born in Philadelphia and spent his childhood in many locations throughout the world as a result of his father's work in architecture.

After college, he joined Bell Laboratories, but soon after decided to continue his education and attended the University of Pennsylvania, studying combinatorial mathematics for his PhD.

Playtesters began independently developing expansion packs, which were then passed to Garfield for his final edit.

[15] In June 1994, Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer.

[14]: 219, 279  Netrunner (1996) was Garfield's CCG based on Cyberpunk 2020, where he included an element that made it an asymmetrical game, so that the two players each had entirely different cards, abilities, and goals.

[14]: 211, 281  Wizards published the BattleTech Collectible Card Game in 1996, based on a design by Garfield.

[14]: 126  Peter Adkison was developing a Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG based on a design from Garfield and Skaff Elias, but left Wizards in December 2000 after Hasbro sold the D&D computer rights and cancelled the project.

[19] He has shifted more of his attention to video games, having worked on the design and development of Schizoid and Spectromancer as part of Three Donkeys LLC.