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!
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!
Just in case we thought perhaps we’d been dreaming all this time, Grey Fox Game recently teased about the upcoming release in their newsletter! Here’s what they said:
“We're excited to announce that our first major project for that year will be After the Empire, a game we've been developing for quite some time now.
After the Empire is a worker placement game set in the Middle Ages where you fortify your castle against invaders, all while competing for limited resources and recruiting those left without a home as a result of the ongoing wars.”
“As you can see from the prototype, this game will have a big-time table presence and really delivers on creating the kind of engaging, immersive experience we specialize in.
More details to come!”
We’re super excited to be working with Grey Fox, and look forward to getting this game to you all!
We’re also bringing our new designs with us to PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia at the end of November! Shoot us an email if you want to meet up with us check out what we’ve been working on!
Hi, everyone! We've been having a great time lately playtesting and developing our new lineup of games! We went to PAX Unplugged in Philly recently, which was awesome! We got to hang out with and bounce ideas off other awesome Portland-area designers Tim and Ben Eisner of Weird City Games, with hits like March of the Ants and The Grimm Forest, and Mohammad Ali, another up and coming designer! We pitched several of our new games and had significant interest from publishers. We are in early talks now with a publisher to work with us on what we're tentatively titling Mountain God's Revenge! It's a heavily themed abstract strategy game that will eventually have awesome art, rather than white hexes with black strips and red dots.
What about After the Empire? Yes, that's still our #1 board game baby! It was tentatively slated for a quarter 2, 2018 kickstarter by Grey Fox Games, known for awesome games like Champions of Midgard. They recently sat down to plan out their production calendar for next year and after deliberation have decided that to do it right and make After the Empire the best game possible, that timeline will be pushed back to quarter 4 of 2018 or early 2019. Obviously, we were very anxious and excited for the upcoming kickstarter, and this wait will be difficult for us. But, we are also excited for making sure After the Empire gets done well and is as amazing as possible. We have full confidence our friends at Grey Fox will do an outstanding job. So, we are truly sorry for the wait, but we believe it will be worth it!
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!
We're finally home back in Portland and exhausted, but it was an incredible weekend filled with so many wonderful folks who took the time to sit down with us and play After the Empire at our first major event! We even had someone try to buy our current prototype set as is! No need to wait for final edits, art, or a box with a logo...just sell it to me already! It was pretty humbling how overwhelmingly positive all the feed back was, but we also learned a lot! Thanks so much to everyone at PAX west!
