Gamestorm!

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!

Gamestorm and here's another piece from Tomas O. Muir!

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.

What are we doing?

Hello all! We've been more focused on our new highly-themed abstract game, Mountain God's Revenge for a few months now. But, recently we've been bringing After the Empire back to the table more frequently as we continue to work with Grey Fox in preparation for an early 2019 campaign. They've been great to work with, giving us the leeway to keep our design ideas intact while helping us to hone a few of the details. The game is more approachable than ever, but still rich and with enough variation and complexity to keep it interesting from play to play. We've been having lots of fun digging back into it with a fresh perspective, and it just keeps getting better. If you want to check out the current state, come find us at Gamestorm in April or shoot us an email!

Report from Gamestorm (aka Did you see us mentioned on Dice Tower!?)

We just got back from our weekend at Gamestorm, which I'll get back to, but first I'd like to share something that one of the great folks I met there shared with us. (Thanks, James!) We were in Vegas recently for GAMA and had a great time. What we didn't know was Chaz Marler from Pair of Dice Paradise was out and about with a camera looking for cool up and coming games throughout the week and would later be posting them to Dice Tower. He stopped by our table and After the Empire made it in to his top 20 list! Thanks, Chaz! You can watch his video and our 38 seconds of fame here!

Gamestorm 2017!

Gamestorm this weekend was great! I haven't actually counted, but I think we hosted around 14 sessions between Ryan and myself. We met so many wonderful people and got some incredible feedback that will help us continue to hone After the Empire as the June kickstarter quickly approaches! It is humbling to meet so many people willing not only to share their time with us playing and giving feedback, but who also go above and beyond to help bring After the Empire to life!

Our good friend Tim Eisner, whose The Grimm Forest kickstarter you should go check out RIGHT NOW, introduced us to the folks from Late Night Tabletop. They were awesome enough to sit down with Ryan and play a full video run-through, which you can see here! They also played The Grimm Forest by Tim, as well as Eridu by our friend Mohammed Ali which we were excited to see!

Thanks to all our wonderful friends, old and new, who we saw or played games with this weekend!