Getting back to it!

Hi, Everyone!

There’s been a LOT of stuff going on in 2020…and lots of it has been pretty rough for a lot of folks. It’s been particularly interesting to see the perception of Portland in the media versus what it’s actually like to live here. Our neighborhoods and streets are not filled with rioters or looters. In fact, the “riots” are local people protesting police violence against black people largely within a 3 block area downtown around the federal building, and which must be declared a riot each night usually around the same time in order to “legally” start tear gassing the people. The mini-mart 1 block away isn’t being damaged or looted…it’s just open late and SUPER busy with peaceful protestors buying drinks and snacks to keep up their energy through the long nights. Local Portlanders. Our friends, neighbors, parents, students, and businessfolk willing to take physical and chemical harm to stand up for what’s right, while local and sometimes federal officers work together to suppress the message of the people. Don’t believe the media spin. Believe people who actually live here. It’s a protest, not a riot, and citizens are being assaulted, arrested, gassed, and seriously injured by officers and their “less lethal” weaponry. The long-term effects of all the tear gas will become more of an issue over time. But, but the research doesn’t look good, and there’s a reason using it is a war crime under the Geneva Convention and UN’s Chemical Weapon Convention. Ryan and I unequivocally support the premise that Black Lives Matter, and really wish compassion and compersion, humanity and happiness, liveability and a sense of purpose were the core tenants of our culture rather than greed and conflict, oppression and violence, dehumanization and apathy. In the context of the world right now…our own little cares are pretty small. I am very privileged and lucky to have a safe home and community, family, and the ability to pay my rent, go to work, and buy food without fear. We wish that those things were true for everyone.

In lighter news, After the Empire is supposed to ship in a couple months. So, we’re very excited to finally see this game in real life with no whiteout, taped on updates, or mismatched iconography. We have another game (mostly) signed, but it was recently pushed back due to COVID. Originally scheduled to release Origins 2021, it is now rescheduled for 2022. So, Mountain God’s Revenge is still coming, but it’s a ways out!

During this pandemic, my life has been very busy with my baby girl who’s now 10 months old. In my free time, I focused on designing the solo mode for After the Empire as well as learning how to create a fully-scripted mod for Tabletop Simulator. It’s basically a programming language for controlling the physics sandbox to help players avoid annoying repetitive clicking and dragging. I thought I’d be done by now, but every time I learn a better way to do something, I have to re-do much of my previous work so it’s more stable and works more smoothly and intuitively. It’s a slow learning process, but enjoyable and I’m actually getting pretty darn close to done now!

I have also had the pleasure of joining an online board gaming group, which has been wonderful not only to catch up on a lot of board games I never got the chance to play before, but also a nice social outlet to interact with some great folks. I just got my butt kicked in Potion Explosion…again!

Ryan and I have recently returned to our game design meetings after a LONG hiatus due to COVID. You may see in these photos that we’re making it work outside!

Here you can see Ryan preparing to get crushed by my skills at saving little grimes under the fridge from the Great Moppening! This game, Grime, is one of the games being entered in an online pitch event coming up very soon! Designers are chomping at the bit to get their games in front of publishers, since we can’t have physical conventions. So, the industry is slowly figuring out ways of accomplishing this online. Wish us luck!

Stay safe out there and please treat each other with respect and dignity…even online!

Post-Kickstarter at Portland Gamecraft!

Thanks again everyone for all the support during our campaign. We’ve been going back and forth with Grey Fox getting everything ready and finalized for After the Empire. We’re very excited to eventually get our final production copy, but we’re not quit there yet!

We really wanted to get a single player mode ready for the kickstarter, but there just wasn’t enough time to fully vet it and incorporate it into the campaign. But, rest-assured, we heard you folks who were asking for it and will have a solo mode up and running sooner than later once we can put it through its paces and make sure it’s awesome. Here’s a little photo of me winning by 1 point against the board (I affectionately refer to my solo mode opponent as Ivar, the Worst):

When we’re not working on After the Empire, we’re getting other games ready to pitch for conventions. You may recall Mountain God’s Revenge mentioned in the past and we’re happy to say that we’ve signed an early stages contract with a publisher to develop and make it a reality in 2021. More details on that as it gets closer.

We’ve also been designing another one of Ryan’s new ideas. Working title is Grime. Here’s a sneak peek of me mopping the floor with Ryan below:

Evan has been working on one of his ideas using pieces from Khet. It was originally intended to be a dexterity game with elements of play inspired by The Lost Vikings, but is quickly becoming a strategy exploration puzzle game. Here’s the prototype:

Playtesting!

Since Origins, we've been working hard on our games. We gave our good copy of Mountain God's Revenge at Origins to a prospective publisher, and are cobbling together another working play-test copy to further develop some exciting new ideas.

We've also been working hard on getting 3 Ways to Die ready for an upcoming publisher review and possible signing. This coop zombie map and event deck based adventure game with luck and gambling was originally developed by Evan Halbert and Cris Kelly, now with Ryan Mauk lending his assistance after it was resurrected again from my bookshelf. We're having a lot of fun with this one! Here's Cris and his family during one of our play-testing sessions:

I was also lucky enough to help play-test an upcoming solo version of the board game Santorini. Made by the friendly folks at Roxley Game Laboratory, this is one of my very favorite abstract games. Here's a progress shot of one of my many games ending in defeat:

Things are also hectic here since Origins because Evan is moving (from one part of Portland to a different part of Portland), which includes selling one thing and buying another. These processes are not user-friendly and could really stand some revision and rules updates.

As always, if you're in or around the Portland area, please don't hesitate to join us for our regular play-testing sessions. Hopefully, we'll see you all soon!

Origins!

We had a great time at Origins! Hanging out with friends, pitching games, and playing new ones! We got to hang out with our amazing fellow local game designer friends Tim and Ben Eisner, which is always a blast. We got to hang out and catch up with our friends at Grey Fox, who will be publishing our game After the Empire in the first half of 2019. Josh Lobkovicz, the amazing developer at Grey Fox, graciously took the time to give us some great tips on another project we're working on, but not quite ready to pitch at Origins.

But, we did bring a couple games that were ready to pitch, both of which saw significant publisher interest. You've seen Mountain God's Revenge before, but here's Ryan posing for the camera as we play 3 Ways to Die:

3 Ways to Die (current working title) is a coop zombie map and event deck based adventure game with elements of luck and gambling to keep it interesting! I don't think I've played a game yet where we weren't sure we were going to lose only to narrowly escape with our lives at least once! Each player is generally fighting their own battles and making their own choices of how to best use their resources to stay alive, so the loudest player telling everyone else what to do is not as prevalent here as in most coop games. Evan designed this one with his friend Cris Kelly about 6-7 years ago. We've been having a blast playing it ever since, and Ryan is helping put the finishing touches on it.

Evan got the chance to play the up and coming Fireball Island reboot. The original version helped form some of his lasting childhood friendships (they wanted to come over to play), and is at least partially responsible for his general nerdiness.

If you haven't already seen this, watch us show Mountain God's Revenge to Tom Vasel at 1:22:00. Ryan does the talking, while Evan's injured wrist does the setup!

Game Design Weekend!

We had a great time with many other great local designers this weekend, like Tim Eisner (The Grimm Forest & March of the Ants), Ben Eisner (Dungeon Hustle), Ryan Swisher (March of the Ants), Ryan Spangler (Sol: Last Days of a Star), Taran Kratz (Helionox), and others you'll hopefully hear about sooner than later! We play-tested and critiqued tons of our current board game projects, and of course squeezed in a game of Magic. Everyone was great and generous with their time, helping play-test and work on development issues with other design projects. We had some great feedback for After the Empire, and got to pull out an ancient design from 6 years ago. Ryan Swisher and Ben & Tim Eisner were kind enough to cook-up delicious food for the pack to keep us gaming all day and night. We also had a really fun break-out session game design challenge of sorts, where randomly selected groups of 3-4 designers were put together to work with some drafted components and randomly selected mechanics. While we were mostly working on our design chops, strengths, and weaknesses, we actually had a couple promising game designs come out of that experiment! Thanks again to Chase Van Epps and Print and Play for providing the components for us! Here's the one my group was working on that turned out surprisingly playable and interesting:

We While we're not spending weekends hanging out with awesome designers, we're busy working on our games. Here's my photographophic wife helping me play-test a few little tweaks on After the Empire and critiquing my color saturation and lightning choices for some newly printed cards:

Here are a couple good friends helping us continue to develop our more abstract design, Mountain God's Revenge:

We hope you all had a great weekend filled with gaming, too!

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!