Hi, everyone! We just got a pre-production copy from Grey Fox, and this game looks/feels awesome! There are a few final tweaks they made, but this is very close to the final version! Here are some photos for you (last one shows sleeve sizes):
Hey, Everyone!
I know 2020 has been not exactly the best time for people. Some things are pretty messed up and we would like to add our voices in saying Black Lives Matter. I’ve been lucky and privileged in life to have a roof over my head, healthy food to eat, and not be treated horribly or killed because of my physical appearance. Some of us are dealing with real problems right now, so I’m definitely not going to complain about how COVID-19 has slowed down production for After the Empire. I am glad we finally seem to be moving forward, though.
With the shelter in place orders over the last few months, not surprisingly, Ryan and I haven’t gotten much play-testing done. He’s been diving into his new day-job, and I’ve been spending most of my time taking care of a tiny human. My free time (after the ladies go to bed) has been spent mostly working on the solo mode for ATE and trying to learn and script an ATE mod for Tabletop Simulator. It’s not exactly professional looking, but it’s currently 70% fully-functional. The mod will be very handy for play-testing in a world where we’re not supposed to physically share space around a table. Hopefully, ATE will do well enough in the near future to require lots of playtesting for the expansion material Ryan and I are excited to dive into!
Lots of folks are fans of sleeving cards in their board games. I totally get it, as I am one of those people. The idea of spin-shuffling the Invader and Siege decks has caused some concern for the ability to do this with sleeves on, since the openings would be facing different directions and may insert into and rip open other sleeves. You could always keep the sleeve openings uni-directional and sleeve the cards randomly rotated, but this would never truly be random if the sleeve opening is always up. You could also rotate them randomly as you put them out, which works as long as you fix the opening direction as you clean up the piles. My preference is to randomly rotate and sleeve the cards initially, then simply spin-shuffle gently. You have to use a little finesse, but it’s really not very difficult. I have thus far ripped 1 sleeve in the hundreds (thousands?) of times this deck has been spin-shuffled. I swear it’s not designed as a dexterity game (although, you do have to balance the little troops on your walls)!
Here’s a video of how I do it. I hope it allays any concerns. And, of course, I’m happy to answer any questions if I make it look too easy and you have trouble once you actually try it yourself (like those fairground light-blocking metal discs…they make it look so easy!).
In other news, Tim Eisner and I (Evan) have been working on a party game together and I’m really excited about it. It’s actually fairly enjoyable when play-testing over Zoom meetings, which I think is a pretty tough bar to cross. So, hopefully you’ll be hearing more about that in the future.
Speaking of Tim Eisner (creator of games like March of the Ants, Grimm Forest, Tidal Blades, and more), he’s got a new game called Canopy on kickstarter right now! Go check it out! I got the chance to do some playtesting for Canopy and really enjoyed it!
If you’ve been following any of our other projects, then rest-assured that Ryan and I will be getting back on the game-design train as soon as we’re able to do so. Talking about it over the internet just isn’t quite the same as sitting at the table together. We’re still very excited for the tentative (still awaiting final contract) 2021 Origins release for Mountain God’s Revenge. And, we’ve had some promising conversations with publishers about a few of our other designs.
I hope this finds most of you well, safe, and with some happiness!
Hi Everybody!
Well, the Kickstarter is about to come to an end and if you’ve been waiting to share it around with your friends or to support…now’s the time! The final 2-3 days is crunch time!
If you want to see the game in action, we just uploaded a couple play through videos for your enjoyment! Hopefully, my exuberance and our trash talk isn’t too distracting for you! We tried to keep it reasonable!
Click here If you want to see a 3 Player Playthrough with Ryan and I and featuring Jenna, currently the person with the most wins on record who’s neither Ryan nor myself. This one’s a little lively and I don’t shut up.
Click here if you want to see a 2 Player Playthrough with Ryan and I. This one’s a little more calm for the first half, then I get too excited mid-way through and once again keep talking. Extra special treat at 39:50 if you’re into topical improv singing. Thanks to Ryan, for really bringing that home with the lyrics scrawl.
For those of you who are waiting for the solo mode, I’ve been working hard to get it ready in time. We need more development/testing on it. But, I’m still hopeful we’ll be able to squeeze it in there in time before the pledge manager closes if not by the end of the campaign!
Thanks!
-Evan
We had a blast playing and teaching After the Empire to everyone at PAX West in the First Look section. Thank you so much to everyone who was able to join us! We even got to see Mike, who is one of our earliest and biggest fans out there. He first played here at PAX West 2 or 3 years ago! And, it was always good to see James and Andy, who’ve been fans almost as long! Special thanks to Ryan for letting us crash at your apartment and Andy for helping us get setup!
The Kickstarter goes live tomorrow, and we’d love your support again! Watch here or Grey Fox for exact start time and links to the campaign. You’ll see all the components, watch some play through videos, and see a review or 2 to help you see what you’re getting in case you’ve never had the chance to play it before. In the meantime, here’s a bunch of photos from when I remembered to take them this weekend:
Thanks for all the fun this weekend!
Come join us to play a demo of After the Empire if you’ve never had the chance or if you want to try it again! The Kickstarter goes live September 3rd! We’ll be in the First Look section of the board game area Friday evening, all day Saturday, and likely the first part of Sunday. If you can’t find us, just send an email and we’ll make sure to point you in the right direction!
Click here to see the list of all the other awesome games in First Look!
Hopefully, we’ll see some of you this weekend in Seattle!
Just in case you’re not following along with Grey Fox’s little teasers, here’s a few tasty morsels:
We hope you’re as excited as we are! I don’t want to be wrong again about when the kickstarter is releasing, so I won’t try to guess. But, I think the answer is SOON!
Thanks to Tom and crew for meeting me down at Gamestorm in Portland this Saturday to play some After the Empire. Tom won yet again! He’s defeated me the last few times we played. I keep pushing my luck to finally crush him again, but always just a little too far, and I came up short once again. Next time!
Additional thanks for play-testing our fairly dense 4x game currently in development; they were troopers for slogging through the complexity of such a game based solely on handwritten cards, paper scraps, lots of white out, and my brief explanations. They also taught me Horizons, which I hadn’t had the chance to play before. Special thanks to Levi Mote for being an all around awesome person and signing their copy. Also all too briefly, I saw Sarah Sharp of Creator’s Companion, who specializes in all your game related editing needs.
And of course the local designers Tim and Ben Eisner were there with their awesome new game Tidal Blades, as well an expansion for Tim’s first hit, March of the Ants. Keep watching these guys, they’re making lots of great games!
We had a great time at PAX Unplugged! We showed lots of people After the Empire, and some of them wrote or spoke a little bit about it. We made Eurogamer’s best 5 PAX Unplugged games list, and Eric from Punchboard Media along with Jake of Draft Mechanic had some nice things to say on the podcast. (Edit: in case you´d like to skip directly to After The Empire conversation, it starts at 01:17:09…thanks I.M).
We had a couple meetings, and we’re still looking to be on track for the first quarter 2019 kickstarter for After the Empire through Grey Fox Games. Let this young gentleman’s double fist pump show you how excited we are:
We also had some very productive meetings with publishers on a couple of our other games, like Mountain God’s Revenge, 3 Ways to Die (working title), and even my old little family game Big Fish River got a little bit of love. And of course we spent some quality time with our good friend Tim Eisner (watch for his new release Tidal Blades to come out).
Big things are happening!
After the Empire will be making a special appearance at this year’s “hot games” first look! The wonderful crew at PAX Unplugged will be showing our upcoming medium-heavy euro game, currently looking at a 1st quarter 2019 kickstarter launch through Grey Fox Games.
If you’re excited to try it out, check out all the details here and be sure to find After the Empire on the list and give us a thumbs up! Last I checked, we were #5 below the post. So, come on down to Hall A this Friday starting at 10am. We’re not sure when they’ll need to make room for other games throughout the weekend, so if you missed it and really wanted to check it out, send us an email and we can probably setup another play for you or at least tell you when we’ll have it back in first look.
We’re very excited, please come by and take a look! Just keep in mind it’s still a prototype!
Here's his rendition of the Oxcart Teamster, who was actually first seen on the game board itself. This is a card we've added in recent months of development as one of our starting refugees, to help balance availability of resources. I love the adorable oxen!
Yet another in our amazing series of invader cards by Tomas, to round out new additions to the base game invaders! His lighting skills really shine in this one!
Also, we had a great time at Gamestorm this weekend. We had lots of great feedback from play-testers on our new game, Mountain God's Revenge. We had the pleasure of playing After the Empire with one of our long time supporters, James Hampton, who's been playing throughout the evolution of the game and can give us great insights. After a long day of play-testing, Ryan went home and I was privileged to play a late night game or two with local design legends Tim Eisner (March of the Ants and Grimm Forest) and Ryan Spangler (Sol).
First, we three played Antiquity. This was my first Splotter game, so now I get what people were talking about. This game is everything I didn't know I wanted from Settlers of Catan: bigger, better, heavier, and more engaging. And, if you're not careful, you can totally mess it up! Can you accidentally spend all your wood, then have no way to get more necessary resources for the rest of the game? Yep. Don't spend all your wood, unless you already have a woodcutter who can get you more next turn!
Then, Ryan and I twice played Tak, a great abstract game in the vein of chess, checkers, and go. The first game and a half I was basically convinced that it was mostly blind luck and there was no way to know or plan what to do more than 1-2 moves in advance. But, eventually things gelled, and it's really quite a deep and engaging yet quick play experience.
Check out another one of our new refugee cards! Ted has really captured the feel we were hoping for on this one!
Check out this new piece from our old friend Tomas O. Muir! As we've been figuring out what exactly is in the basic game and what is in the advanced play variant, we needed to add a little more content! So, here's one of the new invader cards!
Hey everybody!
So, what's been happening? Lots! So, we've been subjecting After the Empire to some penultimate playtesting rigors by even more people as we get closer and closer to the final stages of getting the game ready! Believe it or not, that's actually leading to some down time for Ryan and Evan here at Portland Gamecraft.
Downtime!? Not really. Actually, we've been busy working on lots of new designs and having fun playtesting them all:
What's this monstrosity? It's a secret...unless you can read Evan's chicken scratch on paper scraps for a game he's wanted to make for well over a decade. This one's going to take some time, so you might not see it any time soon unless you live in Portland and come by one of our playtest sessions.
Here's a lighter weight physical strategy game prototype we're excited about that's pretty darn unique. We're getting ready to bring it with us to PAX Unplugged in Philly next month. It'll be a little less stark white by that point...but probably not too much!
Here's another one we've been fiddling around with for about a year now! A big thanks to the gentleman who was still up with us at 3am Sunday morning at Gen Con.
And, of course, we're still playing lots of After the Empire and dreaming big for our release with Grey Fox Games next year! Thanks to Thomas for getting me out to Guardian Games in Portland this weekend to play a couple more rounds with him. It's always a pleasure to get destroyed by a fledgling upstart! I've played this thing well over 300 times, and you still kicked my butt twice in a row! We also met Jonas and Anders, who put up tough competition and provided some great feedback! I forgot to take photos!
Of course, there are lots of other ideas and things on the horizon for Portland Gamecraft, but rest assured, our primary focus is making our first game the best game it can possibly be. We're very excited to be working with Grey Fox, and we're very excited that they're helping to make one of my favorite games ever become a reality!
Well, we're finally recovering from a crazy sleep-deprived weekend in Indianapolis. There were so many amazing games and people there, it was almost too much. Our highlights were meeting up with Grey Fox's Shane and Josh, seeing our good friend's The Grimm Forest hit #1 on the hotness list, 7 minutes of heart-pumping mech-battling video-game action, meeting the incredible and friendly Margaret Weis, play-testing one of our currently unnamed projects, hanging with some hometown friends, and of course, playing After the Empire with friends both old and new.
We are very excited for the direction After the Empire has taken since working with Grey Fox, and we are looking forward to finishing it up and finally getting it out to all of you mercifully patient folks! We promise it's even better than before and hope you like it as much as we do!
As always, if you're in the Portland area, just get in touch with us if you want to join in on our playtesting sessions to help us make our games even better!
He says his friends will get it!
We weren't the only table with games going in this bar. This was an intense moment for the future of our nation!
3am never felt so good!
We're stoked to be at Gen Con 50 this year. It'll be our first, and we think we're jumping in on a good one!
Since signing on with Grey Fox for publishing, we've been working hard and focusing on making After the Empire the best possible game we can now that they're taking care of all the marketing and other heavy lifting. This has enabled us to make some really good changes, improve the experience for the first time player, and clean up a few things that had always felt just a little bit off.
The base game design is ready to go and we're excited to show it to Grey Fox for final approval, as well as all the last minute play-testing with you in case we totally missed something! We don't have a booth, so be on the lookout for us or just shoot us an email if you'd like to meet up and get a sneak peak or play-test. Here is our last play-test board by Print and Play in Vancouver, WA before Grey Fox helps us clean it up and make it all shiny, professional, and otherwise amazing!
Don't forget to come find us this weekend in Missouri!
"Four days of peace, love, and board games in St. Charles, Missouri, May 18th-21st at the 13th annual Geekway to the West!"
Come join us for a wonderful weekend of gaming! We will be at the Geekway prototype event on the tables in the lobby area near the library Friday night from 6pm - 9pm. Aside from that, we'll just be setting up wherever we can find a spot. See you there!
We are still waiting to put much information out about the actual game mechanics until we're 100% certain we are finished tweaking rules. This is so when After the Empire is released there will be no confusion when anyone tries to lookup resources and finds any older materials that may be outdated at that time.
But, we also understand that we need to put a little something out there, so people can get an idea of how to play this game, so they can tell if they might be interested. So, We made this brief little video last month with the sub heading "In-development rules as of 4/4/17" showing one round of the game.
Also, you get to see Ryan and Evan supporting their local game store (of which Ryan is co-owner), the Portland Game Store.
Here's the link: https://youtu.be/3mG6XHRtPyM
We really enjoyed our time this weekend at PDXAGE (sadly, the last). We had the pleasure of playing After the Empire with so many wonderful folks! It was great to catch up with our old friends and meet so many new ones to help us work out a few more kinks!
The folks at Blue Heron were kind enough to loan us one of their wonderful plastic dice and bits trays (see below) to help keep our play space organized!
A couple of the great folks helping us to put the finishing touches on our game before we launch our Kickstarter! Check out those stone walls! Impenetrable...well, at least until the Trebuchet shows up.
And the wonderfully supportive folks from Daily Magic Games came and gave me a run for my money in a 4 player game! If you don't already know, they are very active and generous in building and growing our entire gaming industry as well as the local gaming community in Seattle and Portland. Oh, plus they make awesome games! You should check out their live Kickstarter for their newest project, Sailing Toward Osiris, here!
Okay, so what's the big announcement? We've finally chosen our official Kickstarter launch date: August 16th, 2017!
A few of you in the know may be thinking "wait a minute, you said JUNE!" It's true, we had been shooting for mid to late June up till this point. And, it served us very well as a goal-post to help drive progress forward at a strong pace. We sat down for our Monday meeting determined to finalize our launch date. We considered many factors. There were of course a few non-game-related ones, including my upcoming honeymoon trip to Scotland. Scotland!? Awesome, right!? Except Evan would've been gone for 10 days smack dab in the middle of our previously estimated campaign time. And, of course, there was finals week for Ryan (good luck!), as well as various other of life's many important non-game-related things. But, with proper planning, those were all surmountable challenges to a successful Kickstarter in and of themselves.
The real reason is: we were rushing to get everything done. Don't get us wrong, we're not slowing down one bit as we finish up all our remaining graphic design and information presentation challenges. But, we are going to make sure everything is in place and ready to not only make a successful Kickstarter (with your help!), but most importantly, to make the best darn game we can for ourselves and for you all. We'll get in those last few playtests of that one little rule tweak, double check the placement of that one little icon, make sure the stone wall pieces fit together all nice and cuddly, and triple check that our rulebook can be read and understood by people who didn't make the game.
We believe After the Empire is already a great game as it currently sits on the table. And, it's only going to get better with the proper time to smooth the last rough edges. We strive to make the best game we can, a game we're proud of and stand behind in the years to come. Thank you all so much for your time, your enthusiasm, and your support! Let's make After the Empire known across tables everywhere!
We just got our new prototypes in! It feels pretty awesome to have a stack of After the Empire sitting on my desk.
Here's Ryan working hard on making some 3D printed walls perfect before we ship a copy to one of our reviewers!
And here's what it's looking like if I spread some game components out right before we play! I put a few cards out face up from the decks for you to see, but I didn't want to cover up our game board too much. With the kickstarter coming up in June, we still have a lot of preparation, but I'm very excited for how it's looking right now!
