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!

Another piece from Jason Park (interoo)!

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!

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.

A new piece from Ted Ottosson!

Check out another one of our new refugee cards! Ted has really captured the feel we were hoping for on this one!

Some new art!

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!

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!

After the Empire and general new stuff updates

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!

What's been happening?

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!

GenCon50 and beyond!

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!

Final playtest board and Gen Con 50!

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!

It's official - Grey Fox Games will publish After the Empire!

Okay, enough with the suspense. Over the weekend at Origins, we officially finalized what is a very momentous and life-changing agreement for our little design company. We're more than ecstatic to be working with the wonderful folks at Grey Fox Games to publish After the Empire!

This is not only an incredibly great turn of fate for our first offering from Portland Gamecraft, but it comes at the perfect time. In the last several months, we've been spending a lot of our time getting ready for all the logistics of manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, shipping, advertising, sales, promotion, graphic design, final touches, Kickstarter preparations, fulfillment, etc. Basically, all the stuff that we don't really want to do and that takes energy away from actually working on the game itself. Now, we can focus more on exactly what we love doing: working diligently to finish up development and make After the Empire the best darn game we can! So, when it comes out next year, you will be able to enjoy it even more than ever before! And I can't think of a better partner to take care of all that other very important stuff than the Grey Fox team, whose know-how and experience will help us make After the Empire really shine!

We can't wait to be sitting on local game store shelves along side the likes of Champions of Midgard! So, get your finest noble robes, stone-working gloves, sturdy swords, and well-laid battle-plans ready...After the Empire is heading your way!

Exciting news (teaser)!

You may have noticed we haven't written a post in a few weeks. Part of this is because we've been so busy going to conventions like Geekway to the West and KublaCon and meeting all you wonderful folks. Another reason is there have been some very exciting developments for After the Empire, about which we're brimming with excitement, but which we can't just yet divulge.

What we can say is we've been furiously playtesting and streamlining the game to make it the best it can be. We're striving to allow an easier and more enjoyable learning experience for first timers, without losing any of the great strategy, complexity, and variation that's always been why we enjoy playing After the Empire time and time again.

So, stay tuned over the next couple of weeks for us to reveal what we're so excited about!

Geekway to the West!

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!

A quick and un-official play-through video!

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

PDXAGE and our big announcement!

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!

PDXAGE Update!

Hello, all! We have table assignments in place for this weekend, so those of you who are coming out will know where to find us:

Friday, May 5th: Table B (4pm - 8pm)
Saturday, May 6th: Table E (10am - 8pm)
Sunday, May 7th: Table E (10am - 4pm)

Columbia Conference Center
Holiday Inn Portland Airport
8439 NE Columbia Blvd, Portland, OR 97220
http://www.pdxage.com

More information:
Aquire at ticket:
https://www.lanreg.org/pdxage/pdxage4
Scheduled Games at PDXAGE:
http://bit.ly/2ooyJs4
Sign up to play scheduled games:
https://goo.gl/forms/rL4TqfCP9bPBHWF93
PDXAGE Game Library:
http://www.pdxage.com/age/index.php/game-library

Come out and join us at PDXage this weekend!

We'll be at PDXage this weekend from Friday, May 5 around 2:00pm through Sunday, May 7 about 4:00pm. We're not pre-scheduling game times for this one. We'll be running After the Empire back to back, so just swing by to say hi and either jump in or claim your spot for the next game. Come join us and all the other great developers in the DEV section below:

Some of the developers may also be in the nearby FP (free play) tables, as DEV space is limited even for those of us who've registered.

More information:
Aquire at ticket:
https://www.lanreg.org/pdxage/pdxage4
Scheduled Games at PDXAGE:
http://bit.ly/2ooyJs4
Sign up to play scheduled games:
https://goo.gl/forms/rL4TqfCP9bPBHWF93
PDXAGE Game Library:
http://www.pdxage.com/age/index.php/game-library

New Prototypes (and Ryan working hard)!

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!

Iconography!

We already have a great group of graphic designers (Cole Munro-Chitty and Jason Harris) currently working hard on After the Empire, but I just had a great meeting with the newest member of our team today, our friend Zoe Morgan-Montoya! She'll be helping us get many of our home-made icons ready for final test-prints over the next couple months. I'll be sad to see some of my placeholders go (I have an overdeveloped fondness for a couple of them - see below), but having game icons that look like a professional adult made them will be a great improvement!

PS - In case you've seen my admittedly horrible iconography, my personal favorites are Farm (wheat bale with 3 little geese) and Refugee (profile shot of a guy who looks kinda like Beavis' father, or an estranged uncle).

T-shirts, reviews, and local beta-testing!

We finally got ourselves some sweet branded Ts for our convention appearances! Here's a dorky photo:

Also, we're very excited for our upcoming prototype printing (the box above is our current prototype). We'll be sending the newest copies out to some reviewers here in the next week or two!

Also, we'll be needing some blind playtesting help from any who are willing or interested to take After the Empire from us for a day or two to play with your play group and give us feedback. You'll get the game with our current rulebook, and as little further information as possible. We want to know not only what you did and did not enjoy about playing our game and your suggestions, but also especially looking for feedback regarding the rulebook and difficulty of learning After the Empire as compared with cold plays of other medium-heavy Euro games. The rules are pretty easy when we are there to explain the game, but we need to know what happens when it's just the rulebook there to help and no play through videos available. (Of course we'll make a play through video soon for the kickstarter in June). We've made some good changes and simplifications to the rulebook with the last few times we've done this, but we still need more help! Due to having only very few prototypes and lots of events coming up where we'll need them, we're looking for people who are in or near Portland for this, so we can avoid long wait-times (and shipping costs).

Thank you all who've helped us get this far! Let's keep going and make the best game (and rulebook) that we can!