The latest news and information about game design contests sponsored by The Game Crafter.
The Cards Against Humanity guys are sponsoring a game design contest. Send ‘em a TGC prototype!
Hey everyone!
I just did the random drawings at Random.org. Originally we were only going to give away 1 $100 gift card for TGC shop credit, but we received enough and so I wanted to give some runner up prizes! It’s more fun with more prizes!! So we have 1 grand prize of $100 and 2 runner up prizes of $25 of shop credit.
I’d like to congratulate the following winners:
Grand Prize Winner: Joel Hobbs (aka Joel Hobbs)
1st Runner Up: Scott Swisher (aka sswisher)
2nd Runner Up: Scott Hardin (aka Ridiculous Goatee)
Congratulations to all winners! The shop credit has already been applied to your accounts and will be used automatically during checkout on your next order. Thanks again for your support!
It’s official, The Game Crafter has received over 20,000 orders for custom board games and card games, game pieces and parts, boxes, and playing cards! To celebrate, we wanted to give away 20,000 pennies ($200 USD) worth of TGC shop credit. We entered the customers who placed orders #19995 thru #20005 into a drawing and used Random.org to generate 2 random order numbers and select our winners.
We would like congratulate Loren Overby at Atomic City Games and Kirsten Bonanza at Create Better Impact Games for being selected as the winners to our 20,000 order contest! Each of you received $100 of TGC shop credit to your account and it will be applied automatically on your next order(s).
Congrats to our winners and a BIG Thank You to all of our customers and community members for helping us reach 20,000 orders. This is just the beginning folks. The future is bright!
It’s hard to believe that The Game Crafter is going to reach its 20,000th order in the next few days! After all, when we launched this service (as a beta) back in July of 2009, we weren’t even sure there was a market for print on demand game publishing.
We started out with a humble offering and an open mind. We knew we wanted to offer a service where anyone could make their own card games and board games, but we wanted a great community surrounding it. We invested a lot of time and energy into building the foundation for our community but we knew it would pay off down the road. Today, The Game Crafter has almost 25,000 users and is one of the top online communities for tabletop game design. Momentum is on our side now and the future has never looked so bright!
To thank our amazing community of supporters, we wanted to do a little contest to celebrate our 20,000th order! So we’re going to give away 20,000 pennies ($200 USD) worth of TGC shop credit! Here’s how it works:
The customers that place orders #19995 thru #20005 will be placed into a drawing where we’re giving away (2) $100 TGC Gift Certificates. We will announce the winners on our news page shortly after order #20005 is placed and the credit will be applied as shop credit to their accounts.
As with any contest, there are a couple rules: Only 1 entry per person is allowed (so placing additional orders will not get you additional entries in the drawing). If an order is placed within the range of #19995 thru #20005 and is cancelled, the order will no longer be eligible to participate in the contest or receive any prizes. If ineligible orders occur, we will select additional entries from orders after #20005 (#20006, #20007, etc…) until we reach 11 entries.
Good luck everyone!
Danny Devine, the recently announced winner of the Map Builder Design Challenge, has agreed to be our guest judge for the Miniatures Design Challenge. So now you know who to bribe! =)
We’re pleased to announce that Mark “Shmitz” Major of Whirling Derby Games, and who is our guest judge for the Map Builder Design Challenge has determined the winner. But why spoil the surprise. We’ll let him tell you in his own words:
Judging this contest was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. I wish I could have chosen even more entries as finalists, because there were just so many compelling takes on map building, so many different interests piqued. But the batch of finalists I have were all wonderful games, and it was even harder to boil that down to just one single winner. Each game did something different that I really enjoyed.
So, after a lot of play time and a lot of consideration, I have chosen Mob Town by Danny Devine as the winner of the Map Building contest.
The map building aspect of the game is really interesting, and not something I’ve seen elsewhere. The random layout of each city is almost programmed into the cards. Each property card has an arrow that tells you which direction to place the next one. The result is that most cities have an almost organic shape to them. However, and this is about the only criticism I can direct at the game, sometimes the results are a little too random. Two of the games I played had Entry points nearly disconnected from the rest of the city, making it very hard for more than one player to get a foothold. I think one extra “Empty Lot” card in the resource deck would probably mitigate that problem though.
The presentation of the game is excellent. The illustrations and graphic design are attractive, and communicate the information well. The layout of the play area displays everything nicely. When we had Mob Town on the table at board game meetups, we frequently got people stopping by to check it out. It’s also the only game we had people pick up and want to play while we were playing a different game.
The best word I can think of to describe the design of this game is “elegant”. The rules are relatively simple and easy to pick up, but at the same time they offer a lot of depth. And the mechanics of the game are married to the theme almost perfectly. Every aspect of the gameplay cries out “mobster turf wars”. In another game poker chips might seem like a cheap component, but here they are perfect. You gather your henchmen, you take over territory, your agendas shift, and conflict escalates as it gets tougher and tougher to make your moves on your opponents’ territories. This is YOUR town, and Danny Devine has done a fantastic job giving you something to fight for.
So congratulations Danny! The rest of the finalists also did amazing work though, and I will be leaving reviews on each game’s store page in the following week. Thank you all for making excellent games.
Danny will receive 100,000 crafter points and $50 in shop credit. He’ll also be inducted into our Hall of Fame, and a copy of Mob Town is already on its way to The Gamers’ Table. It’s yet to be determined whether he will also join us at our booth at Gen Con or be the judge of the Miniatures Design Challenge, but we hope he will.
Thank you to all who participated in this contest. Want to get in on the action? Our Miniatures Design Challenge has only just begun!
Okay, several of you have asked us to add a raffle to the current Indiegogo campaign we’re running. So we’ve added one to see how it goes!
To participate, you need to purchase the new perk called “1 Entry: $100 Gift Card Raffle”. For each $5 Entry perk you purchase you get 1 entry into the raffle. The winner will be selected/announced when the campaign ends!
(if there are lots of people participating in this raffle, we may add additional raffles!) Let the fun begin… good luck!
PS - please share this raffle with anyone you think may be interested! We are only $1108 from our $7000 Shrink Wrap Goal!!! Woohoo!
Our guest judge, Mark Major, has decided upon his list of finalists for the Map Builder Design Challenge. They are, in no particular order, as follows:
Congratulations to all of our finalists. Mark will spend the next several weeks playing each of these games to determine a winner. Good luck.
For those of you who didn’t make it into the list of finalists, Mark has created a great document with notes on his scoring and what he liked or didn’t like about your games, with the goal of providing you helpful tips to improve your game.
It’s time to have fun with miniatures. It doesn’t matter whether you make the next great zombie crawl with our selection of zombies; or hack and slash RPG with our adventurers, trolls, orcs, elves, and dwarves; or a massive world war using our tanks, ships, planes, or other items from our list of vehicles; or even a great crafting game with our selection of tools; we just want you to make to make the next great miniatures game.
Rules
To qualify, your game must comply with all of the following rules:
Notes
You retain all rights to your game and are welcome to sell it in our shop before, during, and after the contest, regardless of the outcome of the contest.
Prizes
The winner of this contest will receive:
Good luck to all of you!
Here are your Map Builder Design Challenge entries:
A big thank you to all of our contestants for participating. In the next couple of weeks our guest judge, Mark Major of Whirling Derby Games will have some tough choices to make to narrow this list down to just a few finalists.
* We will leave it up to our guest judge whether to allow this entry into the challenge. The author created a new/updated game which replaced his existing game (Chance of Zombies).
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