John Ring was born in 1958 in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and brought up in Richmond, which is just out of Nelson, in the north of New Zealand’s South Island. Since then, he has spent most of his life in Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand.

He was always good at playing board games, but not as good as some. He was never ranked higher than tenth in his high school chess club.

John has written several novels without being able to find publishers for them, and has twice stood for political office without being elected.

Although Diamond Star is the first of his games to be commercially released, he has always had an interest in inventing games. What he likes about Kadon is that they make it fairly clear what sort of games they like, and that made it easier for him to invent a game they could accept.

The idea for the game started from messing around with triangles and hexagons. Somehow a pattern of rhombuses emerged, so there was a board. A lot still needed to be done, but that was the start.

He was active in a number of community organisations, including an anti–globalisation group. This group isn't really all that clear about what it supports because its membership is diverse, from the centre right through to the extreme left. John wrote: "The only things we're united about is what we disagree with. I'm certainly in favour of some individual liberties (I was once on the executive of a civil liberties group for many years), but I don't agree with Libertarian economic ideas." John added, "I understand that in the United States the American Civil Liberties Union covers the whole country, and almost all their members are lawyers, but here we have three regional groups that sometimes co-operate but usually don't, and within the local group, only about a third of the active members are lawyers. Hence campaign methods are less likely to involve lawsuits than in the USA."

He also worked as a laundryman. As he put it, "I can survive on surprisingly little. And sometimes that is an advantage."

He was a home winemaker and had read very widely.

His father passed away in August 2007. His mother breeds Australian Cattle Dogs.

John told us that this profile is shorter than what he had planned to write, but shortly after he started he got distracted because the neighbour's house was on fire.