The Game Crafter's Hall of Fame represents a list of outstanding individuals that got their start in our community.
We are pleased to announce that Danny Devine has been inducted into The Game Crafter’s Hall of Fame.
Tell us about yourself and how long you’ve been designing games
My name is Danny Devine. I am 30 years old and live in Sparks, Nevada (Near Reno) with my beautiful and supportive wife Rachael, our 2 year old son Dustin, and our hyper wiener dog Lola. I am a Graphic Designer/Illustrator who moonlights as a Game Designer, or a Game Designer that moonlights as an Illustrator, I haven’t decided yet.
I have been designing games as long as I can remember, but I never really took it seriously until about a year ago. I would spend a week on a game, convince my family to play it, and then throw it in the closet with the others until I needed parts for a new one. I eventually discovered a group of guys at work that enjoyed playing board games and I quickly formed a “Game Group” which I had never been a part of before. At some point it came out that I design games in my spare time, I brought a couple in and it has been amazing ever since. I not only discovered a group to play games with, but a group that was willing to try an unfinished, potentially broken game and give it honest thoughtful feedback. Their support has made a huge impact on my designs.
Please describe Mob Town
Mob Town is a 2-4 Player area control game featuring hidden agendas, set collection and exciting last second victories. Every game starts out with a randomly generated town that practically builds itself. Players take the role of rival Mob families trying to achieve their specific goals before the Law shows up and ruins their plans.
The illustrations and artwork look great. Tell us more about it!
Thank you, I did all the artwork myself. Like I said above, I am a Graphic Artist by trade which definitely comes in handy when designing my own games. I love creating and designing new characters and will often tailor my games to fit that in.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it somewhere?
I didn’t, and I regret this. I have recently been getting into social media and am now trying to be very open with my new designs on sites like BGG and Twitter. Mob Town started out as a very basic and standard medieval theme. Knights and Archers trying to take over Castles and Forests, stuff like that. I showed this early prototype to a good friend of mine, Bill West. After one play through, Bill said “This game would be better with a Mob theme”. That’s all it took, it was off to the races from there. I had reached out to Bill because of his expertise in writing, I knew with his help we could translate my chicken scratch rules into something humans could read and understand. With a solid theme in hand, cohesive rules, and as many playtests as I could muster, a fun solid game quickly emerged.
Did you already have the idea for Mob Town in your head before our Map Building Contest?
I had the idea about a month before the contest, as well as the first prototype. When I saw what the new contest theme was, it was too perfect a fit to pass up.
What made you decide to enter your game into the contest?
As I said above, it was just perfect timing. The game I had already started developing was a perfect fit so it felt like it was meant to be.
Would you have been motivated to work on the game as much as you did without the contest?
No, I don’t think I would have. The contest and encouragement from my friends were the only real motivators. There was, however, an interesting development pretty early on in the process. An early version of Mob Town found its way into the hands of Phil Kilcrease at 5th Street games; he showed a really strong interest in the game and kept in touch with me while I finished up the version of the game for the contest. His interest in the game gave me the turbo boost to get it done! I just signed with 5th Street this week and they will be publishing Mob Town as the 7th game in their line-up. I am beyond thrilled with this; Phil and 5th Street do amazing work, so I know I am in good hands!
Has winning inspired you to enter more contests or design more games?
Winning has definitely motivated me to make more games, and to actually share those games with the community. I have already started my next game, currently being called “Ghosts Love Candy”, 2-6 players play as ghosts with an incredible craving for candy, which they can only eat by temporarily possessing unsuspecting Trick-Or-Treaters on Halloween. It’s going to be very light hearted and easy to play. I have full intentions of releasing it here on Game Crafter in the future.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter has had on your success as a game designer?
It has had a huge influence. If I had not stumbled across The Game Crafter I don’t think I would have found the motivations and desire to not only finish a game, but to get it out of my closet and into the hands of people that love playing games. The Game Crafter is an amazing service that is constantly getting better. Thank you for existing!
What’s next for you?
I am going to be working with Phil at 5th Street to make some updates to Mob Town before it’s published which will include a theme change and most likely a title change to reflect that. I will also be working on Ghosts Love Candy in my downtime to try and get that going as well. Please follow me on Twitter @3ddevine for updates and info on Mob Town, my other projects, or if you have questions or just want to chat about games.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this?
By now you know that you need to playtest, playtest, playtest, but it is worth mentioning again because it is that important.
My advice would be to play as many games as you can and research or watch videos on games you haven’t played before. It never hurts to know what’s out there and what others are doing, you will get inspired and see mechanics in ways you didn’t think possible before. Read rule books, read designer blogs, listen to podcasts about game design (there are more than you think). There is a lot of information out there, go out and find it.
On that note, I would also point out that Networking is important as well. I am relatively new to it myself, but I have already seen some amazing results from using social media. I have talked with designers I admire, found a group of game designers that meet once a month less than 2 hours away from me and generally have a great time discussing my favorite hobby with like-minded people. Put yourself out there, you will be surprised at the difference it makes.
We’re pleased to announce that Chris and Johnny O’Neal at Brotherwise Games have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Tell us about your company, Brotherwise Games. How long have you been designing games?
Brotherwise Games was founded by (wait for it) brothers Chris and Johnny O’Neal in 2012. Like many dedicated gamers, we’d been “designing” our own games for years; playing around with ideas, improving on games we liked to play but found some faults with, and generally dreaming about how much fun it would be to bring our own games to life. A few years ago a job move brought Chris to southern California where Johnny already lived, and we decided to pursue game development in earnest. Of the various games that we’d been percolating over the years, Boss Monster showed the most promise as a game that we could fully develop and seek funding for.
Chris is a Ph. D. in Biology and a teaching consultant at University of California; Johnny is a brand manager for a major toy company. Tell us more about how those disparate careers have impacted your work as a game designers.
Tabletop game design is one of those few careers where there’s not much in the way of formal training available. Like most designers, we learned about games by playing them — a lot of them. You’d think that Chris’s background in science would make him the more analytical of the two designers, while Johnny’s background in marketing would make him more aware of the “feel” of a game. This isn’t always the case, though. In developing Boss Monster, Johnny tended to take a more quantitative approach to design while Chris focused more on the game’s feel and theme. For each Brotherwise Game, one brother serves as lead designer with veto power over the other brother. This is important for ensuring the project moves forward, but also important in that it allows each brother to bring different things to project. As co-designer, Chris could react to Johnny’s design changes without having been there for the computation that went into balancing each change. This method worked well for us.
Please describe Boss Monster.
Boss Monster is a tabletop card game for 2-4 players that puts you in the role of the big baddies of videogaming’s golden days: the bosses lurking at the end of the dungeon.
In Boss Monster you build a side-scrolling dungeon of different room types and try to lure hapless heroes into your dungeon. Different hero types are lured to different types of room, and at heart Boss Monster is a bidding game where you the resources being bid on are heroes. But you use your rooms to kill those heroes as well, and if your dungeon isn’t as attractive as it is deadly, the heroes will make it through and deliver wounds to you, the Boss. Spells and room effects allow you to interfere with other Bosses’ dungeons and tactics.
8-bit and 16-bit pixel art has become popular in the past few years. What made you decide to take that direction with your artwork?
Like many games, Boss Monster went through uncountable iterations on its way to a final product. The game had its roots in a popularity-based game Johnny created years ago, in which the game’s currency was friends. Not surprisingly, that didn’t feel right for us and the game morphed into a more sword & sorcery feel. At some point, the “side-scrolling” mechanic became a permanent part of the gameplay and we realized that the game had organically come to mimic the layout of the 8-bit and 16-bit video games of our youth. It was a natural decision from there to invest heavily in the retro-gaming feel of Boss Monster, a decision which was clearly a good one as many people are brought into the game based on the artwork and nostalgia alone.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
Design journal? That sounds like a smart thing to have done…dang. We did not keep a detailed design journal, but we did keep a pictoral representation of the game and it’s iterations. This is something we recommend to all designers. A journal can seem a bit daunting to stay on top of, but whipping out your phone camera at every play testing session and documenting what you see is a useful way to keep what worked and didn’t work in mind. We have not published these photos, and likely won’t, but we did put some of them in our Kickstarter-exclusive strategy guide.
You pitched Boss Monster on Kickstarter, and were successful. Tell us about the project of setting it up, getting backers, and ultimately fulfilling those orders.
Running a successful Kickstarter is a full time job. We can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t do it if you don’t have 8 hours a day to commit to it. As partners we were able to split this 8 hours up, but we were still exhausted at the end of the month. Setting up the campaign online, making your videos, setting your pledge levels, crafting your stretch rewards, sending out press releases, managing your social media connections, posting on the comment boards, creating daily updates, and all of this while also working on polishing your game and getting it ready for print – these are just a handful of the ways you’ll spend your day running a successful campaign. We’re now in the fulfillment process, which feels AWESOME! I can’t overstate that. For those of you reading this and dreaming about making a game that people will play and enjoy, it is indeed an amazing feeling.
You raised over $200,000 on your Kickstarter. At what point did you know this was going to be hugely successful, and what do you think aided you in raising so much money?
We can’t say enough good things about our Kickstarter backers. They took the game and made it a mission to get it funded, and then some. There are a lot of tabletop games on Kickstarter now, and we’ve received a number of questions from other designers about what we’d done to raise $215,000 for Boss Monster. The answer is, we’re not sure. It helps that Boss Monster is a great game, but there are lots of great games on Kickstarter that don’t raise the money we did. It helps that Boss Monster had an iconic feel that people resonated to, but we see lots of cool-looking games on Kickstarter that don’t do as well. It helped that we worked like maniacs to get the word out (we sent out over 200 press releases in the first two weeks alone), but lots of games get the word out and don’t get funded. Kickstarter is a very nebulous beast, and we advise anyone looking to Kickstart their game to follow a couple rules: 1) Get your pledge tiers right. Low entry costs and progressively cooler “super-size me” tiers got backers engaged and then had them coming back to give more money later on. 2) Kickstart to publicize your finished game, not to fund an unfinished one. Backers want to know they’re gambling on a decent chance the game will actually be finished and delivered. Close-to-finished, polished games do better than in-development ones. 3) Treat your backers like what they are: partners. We spent countless hours listening to our backers’ suggestions, trying to involve them in the process, and cultivating their sense of ownership of the game. We owe these guys huge, and we know it. We want to live up to the faith they‘ve put in us.
Now that you’ve run your first successful Kicstarter project, do you have plans to do others? What would you do differently than the first time?
As successful as Boss Monster was, the reality in tabletop gaming is that indie designers like ourselves will always have a tough time maintaining the capital necessary to independently publish games. For the foreseeable future we will be Kickstarting all Brotherwise Games titles, starting with the next round of Boss Monster expansions.
Obviously, the Boss Monster Kickstarter was extremely successful, and I don’t think we’ll change a lot about how we run our campaigns, but we did grossly underestimate our potential, and that meant that we were always playing catch up to a campaign that was running wild. We’ll set our sights even higher in the future.
Is Boss Monster going to be available in retail stores? If so, where can people buy it?
Yes indeed, Boss Monster will be available in your friendly neighborhood gaming shop in the summer of 2013. We’re currently talking to distributors about making this happen.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
We can’t say enough nice things about The Game Crafter. Brotherwise has a hard-and-fast rule of game design: always play test with the closest thing to polished that you can. We used TGC extensively during our playtesting and prototyping process and we truly believe that while pencil and paper can get you a long way in designing the mechanics of a game, you won’t really know how it feels to play a game unless you can approximate the final product: TGC lets you do this better than any other method.
We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank TGC publicly for saving our bacon. One of the many hasty promises we made to our backers was to have early prototypes of the game in the hands of backers (who pledged for them) by Christmas. We naively hit TGC with an order of about 200 games in early December. I’m picturing the massive face-palm JT did when we hit him with these orders. Nevertheless, he went out of his way to hire extra help and delivered ALL of our orders before the holidays. It was epic and a real testament to the dedication the folks at TGC bring to this business.
What’s next for you?
Work, work, and more work. As we are discovering, the table-top games business is a tough one, and not for the faint of heart. Both of us have families and full-time jobs to attend to, so Brotherwise work happens in the evenings and early mornings. We’ve got two Boss Monster expansions in the work, another Brotherwise title in development, and some super secret projects we can’t talk about yet (always wanted to say that). We think the future looks bright for Brotherwise and we’re having the time of our lives.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
Just this, there is absolutely nothing different about you and us. We’re not any smarter, more creative, or more persistent than you. If we could pull this off, any dedicated game designer can. Good luck, and visit us on the web at www.bwisegames.com!
We are pleased to announce that Mark Major has been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Tell us about yourself and how long you’ve been designing games.
My origins as a game designer go back to elementary school. While I think it’s normal for kids to design simple board games around that time, I filled an entire pad of graph paper with my ideas for a console RPG. I made maps for games like Doom and Quake when I got older, and in college, I took classes in computer science and graphic design. But the game bug never left me. Later, I got a job at Nicalis because of my independent mod of a platformer called Cave Story. I was also working on my own original board game ideas on the side, and last summer, I launched the design label Whirling Derby as a way to get all the games I’d been prototyping out to the masses.
Please describe Jupiter Deep.
Everyone plays as an emergency rescue robot, dispatched to evacuate the Jupiter Deep colony before a bunch of creepy tentacle aliens destroy it Your goal is to work together and rescue 28 colonists, but it can be a difficult task to keep them away from the infectious creeps and also keep the colony’s critical systems from falling apart. You get ability cards to help you do things like move the colonists around or fight off creeps, and they can combine in interesting ways. People really get into the whole theme of the game, and they get excited about the robot abilities like Juggernaut and Rocket Boots. The game really stresses the importance of teamwork and being willing to listen as well as command; too many cooks in the kitchen is the surest way to lose spectacularly. Also, for some reason “For the Greater Good” comes up a lot in my board game Meetup sessions. I’m not sure why that is!
The artwork is outstanding. Tell us more about it!
The card designs were created using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, which are programs I had learned when I was studying graphic design in college. The illustrations on the cards, tiles, the instruction sheet and the box were made in a modeling program called Blender, which I’d been using in video game design. I basically modeled one big set of the colony, then modeled the robot, colonist, and creep figures. I rigged all of those and posed them running or flying or shooting with props like the sniper rifle. Once I had the models done, it took a couple hours to set up and render each image. It was really an interesting process for me, because most video game work I do requires low poly counts so the game doesn’t slog down, but since print doesn’t have that limitation, I got to get much more elaborate with the designs.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it somewhere?
I’m afraid I’ve never been prone to recording my processes for posterity or for any kind of social media, but my wife will take pictures and screenshots of works in progress and post them on the Whirling Derby Facebook (facebook.com/WhirlingDerby) and Twitter (@whirlingderby) every once in a while. I’d really like to get better at that, though.
The process of making Jupiter Deep was a really crazy experience for me, though, because practically everything about the mechanics worked out from the start. My wife and I played it with each other several times, and there was a point where I wanted to test a rule change, so tried a solo session where I emulated more players. It lasted 4 hours, so that change didn’t make it into the final version. Once I had the rules working for two players, I went to Friday Night Dice, which is a great board gaming Meetup community in the Los Angeles area, and we found out the rules scaled up to 7 pretty much flawlessly. From there, I created the artwork and playtested around more. What was interesting from that point, though, was that my playtesters assumed that some of the decorative images on the tiles had special functionality. So I listened to them! I added negative effect cards to the game with Setback cards, and that turned out to make it a much more tension-based experience.
Did you already have the idea for Jupiter Deep in your head before the Co-op Design Challenge was announced?
Though I tend to have a lot of concepts floating around in my head at any given moment, I actually came up with Jupiter Deep from scratch for the contest.
What made you decide to enter your game into the contest?
I have another cooperative game called Diabolical Incorporated that I had been working on for a good 5 or 6 years now, but I’ve had problems increasing the challenge during play. I saw the Co-Op contest as an opportunity to create a different cooperative game from the ground up, and hopefully give me some ideas on how to fix the problems with Diabolical. I also left for Gen-Con in the middle of the Steampunk Game contest (the contest before this one), so I was also really eager to see what kind of game I could come up with when I had more time to work on it.
Would you have been motivated to work on the game as much as you did without the contest?
The contest was an excellent impetus to make another game. I also enjoy the material and mechanics constraints, because I find that it gets me designing with a certain direction in mind that I might not have taken otherwise, and the results are really interesting. I think it’s fair to say that without the contest, Jupiter Deep wouldn’t exist.
Has winning inspired you to enter more contests or design more games?
I was super excited to win the contest. I really appreciated the feedback from the judge. And my wife has been telling everyone about my “award-winning” game now. The Game Crafter Community is full of great designers, so I’m definitely looking forward to playing the entries from the next Map-Building contest, and seeing what The Game Crafter does next.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter has had on your success as a game designer?
The Game Crafter is a powerful enabling factor for an independent designer like me. Without The Game Crafter, even producing these games would have been impossible. I get to worry about the design, not jury rigging game components together, and that’s a big thing for me.
What’s next for you?
Oh, it’s hard to say exactly which project of mine is going to be the next big game I drive to completion. Right now, the likely candidates include a 4x game I’ve been concepting out with Chris Leder, and a deck-building game based on my wife’s webcomic, Sombulus (sombulus.com) Outside of creating something new, it is also time for me to start revving up the marketing engine on Jupiter Deep and my other games like Zerpang! (Zombies Elves Robots Pirates Aliens Ninjas and Gunslingers). I will either be pitching them to publishers this year, or I might tackle a Kickstarter campaign sometime up the road.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this?
Every skill you have helps in game design, because everything can be the basis of experience for a game. Design is about creating an experience, so before anything else, know what that experience is and be realistic about whether you can deliver that or not. Don’t be afraid to cut material out of a game that doesn’t reinforce that experience.
Also, spend a lot of time with your games. Make them shine. Playtest them. Making games and getting them out in front of people is exciting, but don’t let that excitement make you settle for second best. If you know you can do better, take the time to make it better.
Tell us about Louis-Nicolas Dozois. How long have you been designing games?
I’ve always been interested in games and creating them. Even as a kid, I loved recreating games I had played, tweaking them and coming up with my own. By the age of 13 I had started to program and was making simple computer games, again, mostly trying to recreate the types of games I was playing in arcades at the time. By the end of high school, I had decided to focus on my art and animation, which lead to my current career as a video game artist. I got back into board games, and designing them a little after college about 9 years ago. It took until last year for me to publicly release my first board game, though.
Your game, Shake Out!, has been recently renamed to Roll’n Bump. Tell us about the rename and why it’s happening.
Funny, that’s probably the question I get asked the most by people who know the game as Shake Out! but it’s just part of the publishing process. The publisher simply wanted to come up with a name that better described the game play.
Please describe Roll’n Bump and how is it different from Shake Out!?
It’s a game that combines dice rolling and set collection. The core game play is similar to that of Yacht style games where players roll five dice up to three times while setting aside dice showing favourable results. The big twist is that all the players are competing on a same board made up of cards showing different dice combinations. Players stake claims on cards using the dice they’ve rolled in the hopes of not getting bumped off so they can be collected for scoring. It has the simplicity of play of a typical dice game but is a little more tactical and much more adversarial. As for what’s different between Shake Out! and Roll’n Bump, not much actually. When negotiations were started with the publisher, the only change they demanded was for the game to be adapted to support up to six players. I came up with an alternate board set up to accommodate the extra players and also took the opportunity to tweak the two player rules to keep the game more competitive despite having less opponents. Otherwise, it’s the same game.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
Not per say, but I do maintain a blog where I review games, talk game design and discuss ongoing projects. I have several posts up that touch on the journey from Shake Out! to Roll’n Bump. You can find it at louardongames.blogpot.com
You’ve been picked up by a publisher. Which publisher? How did that come about?
Les Jouets Boom, inc. out of Montreal, Canada are publishing Roll’n Bump. I was a total chance meeting. I was exhibiting at the Ottawa Game Summit last February and a representative from Boom was running the 7 Wonders tournament. I had a nice table set up to sell copies of Shake Out! which caught his eye. I got an email the following Monday saying he had tried the game at the office and they wanted to sign with me. You would expect to meet a publisher at a bigger show like, Spiel or Gen Con, but not at something like Game Summit. It’s was a very pleasant surprise.
Where can people find Roll’n Bump if they wish to purchase it?
I’ve only had locations in Quebec confirmed so far. Distribution their is pretty much province wide though, so if you find yourself in “La belle province” then many stores carry the game. If you are looking for a copy, you can always ask your local games or book stores to order some in. It’s distributed by Ilot 307 and they service all of North America. It’s also available online through the book store chain Renault Bray.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
In a time where my interest in board game design was waning, The Game Crafter came along and gave me a whole new reason to care. I think TGC has done for board games what distribution models like the iTunes App store have done for video games. The Game Crafter gives independent designers a way of reaching an audience that simply didn’t exist before hand, and that is super exciting. I would also propose that TGC had a good part to play in Shake Out! getting signed. A nice, professional looking game will always be more attractive to publishers, and since I was already selling Shake Out! online, the publisher was much more confident that an audience for the game was out there. Finally, The Game Crafter makes it so easy to send out review copies and good press can make such a huge difference to the success of any product.
What’s next for you?
I do have a few designs on the go at the moment, but all too early to share, unfortunately. I can say that I would like to tackle something with a little more meat and gamer appeal next. One thing is almost guaranteed it’ll come to The Game Crafter first.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
Test the crap out of your games with as many people as possible to make them good and solid. There are so many things about the success of your games that are out of your control that you should focus on what you can control: the quality of your games, and getting them out there and talked about. So, make great games, make them look as good as you can and send them out to every reviewer that will take them. If you are looking to get picked up by a publisher, you have to set up meeting and go to conventions to meet representatives. The advantage of going through The Game Crafter first is that you will have nice, professionally produced games to show and an easy way to send the publishers more copies if they need them. If your games look like finished products, this makes them much more attractive to publishers as they seem like much less of a risk for them to take on. And above all else, make the games you want to make. In the end, designing games takes a lot of effort, and when the work piles up it’s your love of the game that will give you the strength and perseverance to forge ahead.
So there you are in Barnes and Noble minding your own business and what do you see? TGC Alumni Flash Point: Fire Rescue!
May all of our 20,000 users achieve that level of success!
Tell us about Grey Gnome Games, where the name came from, and how long you’ve been designing games under that label.
The name Grey Gnome Games came from playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger and how I always liked to play as a gnome. Gnomes always seemed like the underdog race and I guess I felt sorry for them. I still always choose to play a gnome in any game that offers it.
I created Grey Gnome Games a bit over a year ago as a place to work on some of my role playing game ideas. At first my goal was to write a RPG book and I even had most of it written, but last spring I turned to my other passion, board games instead. I had been designing board games for a long time, but none of them got much further then the pizza box stage. I soon found that I enjoyed designing board games more than writing RPGs so I shifted all my attention in this direction.
Finishing a project that I start had always been a thorn in my side and a shortcoming of mine. So, I set off to design something small, to start off, that I knew I could push myself to complete. This is when I started working on Plague and now that I have finished it I am thirsty for more.
Please describe Plague: The Card Game.
Plague the Card Game is at its core a trick-taking game in the likes of Hearts or Spades. However, there are a few things about Plague that separates it from any trick-taking game I have seen.
First of all, there are only three suites and unlike any other trick-taking game, each suite has the ability to be the trump. It uses a simple rock-paper-scissors mechanic where each of the three suites can trump one of the other suites and are at the same time vulnerable to being trumped by the other suite.
The other major twist to Plague is the scoring system. In Plague, when you take a trick you place the card that won the trick on top and then place the whole trick in front of you. Each card has a Victory Point score indicated on it. At the end of the round players add up these Victory Points to determine the winner. There are also Plague cards that can plague the trick and these nasty cards remove points from a players trick.
All in all Plague a quick game that can be played in as few as 10 minutes and is easy to learn but hard to master.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
I do have a website at GreyGnome.com. Here I posted updates and artwork as I was working on Plague. I guess this could be considered a journal of sorts. I am using the site in the same manner as I now work on my next game, posting pictures and describing the game basic mechanics for all to view.
You pitched Plague on Kickstarter, and were successful. Tell us about the project of setting it up, getting backers, and ultimately fulfilling those orders.
I cannot praise Kickstarter enough. It might not be for everyone, but for someone like me, who likes total and complete control, it is a perfect match. Setting up the Kickstarter campaign was a learning experience for sure. I spent a lot of time looking at other projects to see what worked and what did not. I read a ton of articles and blogs to learn the ins and outs. Here are just two of the many things I learned that I will pass on here:
1. Get Reviews. If you are an unknown like I was going into my first Kickstarter campaign, I cannot stress enough how much a review from an unbiased reviewer can be. Kickstarter is based a lot of trust and if a potential backer sees that a reviewer they know likes your game then they are much more likely to back you. I got reviews from The Gamer’s Table, The Dicetower Review, and Cyrus aka Fathergeek.
2. Do the math. Take note that Kickstarter takes a 5% cut off the top and that Amazon Payments takes another 3%. That can make or break you. Also consider shipping. Make sure to factor in every single cost of producing your game from start to finish, before you make your pledge levels. There are quite a few sad tales out there of folks getting burned because they thought it would cost a lot less to make and ship their game then it ended up costing.
Now that you’ve run your first successful Kicstarter project, do you have plans to do others? What would you do differently than the first time?
I do plan on launching another Kickstarter campaign. My goal is to have it up in December at some point. The new game I entitled Zogar’s Gaze and it is a classic fantasy themed dungeon crawler that uses just cards and a handful of dice. It uses a press-your-luck mechanic and each player has both a secret race and class that both have separate win conditions. First player to achieve both of their win conditions wins the game. There are quite a few other twists and turns but what I like the most is that the game is very balanced and the game almost always seems to end in excitement. It really instills a sense of panic in the closing few minutes.
For my next Kickstarter I will not be pawning off T-shirts, key chains, or coffee mugs. I will streamline the campaign and will have only a handful or so pledge levels. I will also have an early birds special where backers can get the game for $6 less if they back early. This seems to really work out well for many campaigns.
Is Plague available in retail stores besides The Game Crafter?
The First Edition of Plague has a home on The Game Crafter. There are a handful of brick and motor stores that have copies of the Second Edition of Plague on their shelves. Many of these are overseas. However, copies can be picked up at Funagain Games if you want the full Kickstarter version with all the bells and whistles. However, the First Edition has all you need to play and is almost half the price. The choice is yours.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
The Game Crafter has been a huge driving force for Plague and for Grey Gnome Games. I produced my prototypes here to send out to reviewers and I even produced the cards, the booklets, and all the gold doubloons for my Kickstarter versions of the game here as well. JT, really stepped up and reached out to me and his support and the generally awesome customer service at TGC has me hooked. With the new bulk pricing here, I will likely be producing much of Zogar’s Gaze here as well if I get funded.
One other aspect of The Game Crafter that cannot be ignored is the amazing community here. The Chat room is almost a second home for me as I bounce ideas off other designers or simply listen to others talk about their projects. It really is almost like a family and everyone is cheering for the next guy to succeed. It is an amazing thing.
What’s next for you?
Well, as mentioned before, my attention has now drifted from Plague the Card Game and over to Zogar’s Gaze. Now that I have one game done I am hungry to complete more games one at a time. I am also working on compiling links, articles, and other resources that I would like to provide to other designers looking to maybe run a Kickstarter campaign of their own.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
I think the best advice I can give is to finish ONE game if you have not already. Once you do it, you will want to do it again. Focus on one project and pour yourself into it. Also, I would like to think that I prove that you do not have to be a known designer to have a little bit of success in this industry. You simply need a good design and a lot of drive.
Tell us about TalkingBull Games, where the name came from, and how long you’ve been designing games under that label.
TalkingBull Games has been my design label for about two years. I first came up with the name TalkingBull while I was working as an Army Recruiter in Jacksonville, FL. I was looking for an online name and figured that I basically talked ‘bull’ all day long and the name was born. When I began designing games, I just continued with the name I had previously chosen and went from there.
Two of my greatest interests are history and science fiction. When I design a game, I try to incorporate one or both of these themes with as much detail as possible. So far, most of the design work I have done under TalkingBull Games has been historical in nature. I have several history-themed games in the works as well as a couple of space battle/sci-fi games on the way.
Please describe Pieces of Eight.
Pieces of Eight is a pirate-themed card game that pits 2-5 players against one another in a contest to see who can earn the most booty first and retire. Players bring on crewmembers to help in raids against Forts, Towns, and Ships to help build the captain’s treasure! Each player builds their crew by hiring some of the foulest, dirtiest, and roughest pirates they can find. From raids to ships, forts, towns, and each other’s vessels. Players choose from one of ten famous Pirates; each with their own special bonuses or traits that can help the player to his goal. Each player’s experience will be different in this game of piracy upon the high seas.
I have since released an expansion called “Pieces of Eight – Buccaneers” and am currently working on another called “Pieces of Eight – ARGHHH!“ I have a lot of fun designing these cards and love playing the game with my friends.
You designed Pieces of Eight while overseas on your tour of duty with the United States Military. Could you describe what that was like, and how it helped or hindered you?
Usually when I am deployed, my entire time is consumed by work. Most soldiers will tell you the same. We tend to work about 12-18 hours a day depending on what our actual jobs are, so there is little time to do anything else. Most troops tend to sit around and watch a couple of TV shows in their off time before they start again the next day. That’s certainly what I did on my first two deployments to Iraq.
On this most recent deployment to Afghanistan, I had something that wasn’t available to me before: The Game Crafter! With the site, I was able to focus my time off into something constructive and fun. I would get off work and spend hours working on rules, drawing cards, and playtesting with my troops with as much time as we could manage. Not only did this give me something to focus my attention on other than my job, it actually helped me get through the deployment a little easier. I had something fun to look forward to each night, and I found myself discussing the rules and various cards with my troops whenever we had a break from the chaos. I can actually look back on the deployment somewhat fondly because I was able to create something fun and enjoyable instead of just sitting around and watching old tv shows I had already seen before.
One of the ways that I was helped by being deployed was that I had dozens of soldiers, sailors, and airmen at my disposal who were willing to pose for cards and help me to playtest. Almost all of the cards I drew for the game that features a person are depictions of the men and women I served with in Afghanistan. This close-knit group of people helped me a great deal in my development of the game, and I am very appreciative of their helping me finish the project.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
I do maintain a design journal. It’s a notebook that I carry with me everywhere… and if I don’t have it on me but I get an idea, I email it to myself before I forget. I must have hundreds of emails that I have sent to myself with notes. I never thought of publishing my design journal though… it’s a hodgepodge of irrelevant notes and scribbles that would probably only make sense to me.
You pitched Pieces of Eight on Kickstarter, and were successful. Tell us about the project of setting it up, getting backers, and ultimately fulfilling those orders.
Kickstarter is an amazing tool for independent designers to help fund and launch their creations. I discovered it through a similar site, Indigogo, due to a movie project by The Angry Video Game Nerd which I supported. I saw in Kickstarter an opportunity to help me fund my game and also as an impetus to finish my project.
Getting the campaign set up was a pretty big task. I did a lot of research before I launched, and I still did a lot of things wrong that I probably should have done differently. It is truly a learning process when using crowd funding, and I did learn a lot. I looked at about 50-60 other campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful, to determine the best way to proceed and launched after I revised at least a dozen times. The most important thing I can say about running a Kickstarter campaign is that you need to be in constant contact with your backers. Keep them interested by posting updates and stories about how the project is going. You can’t just launch the campaign, let it run, and hope for the best. It is something that requires constant attention, or it will likely fail.
When it came to fulfilling orders, I was in a relatively weak position. If I were stateside, I would have done bulk-ordering to save money and then shipped each backer their respective rewards individually, but since I was in Afghanistan, I had to send each person their game(s) directly from The Game Crafter. This was more expensive overall, but I did account for this prior to launch, and I had enough money to cover it. Make sure when you start a campaign that you allocate for production and shipping costs when determining how much money you need to raise.
Now that you’ve run your first successful Kickstarter project, do you have plans to do others? What would you do differently than the first time?
I am working on another Kickstarter project at the moment in support of a Civil War game I am developing. I will continue to use Kickstarter to help fund my projects until something better comes along. It’s an excellent resource for all of us. Even if you don’t have a successful campaign, you still generate interest in your project and products. It’s a great marketing tool whether it works to achieve your financing goal or not.
One of the things I will do differently for this next campaign is that I will have better defined rewards. I have found that some people offer ‘early bird’ rewards which seem to help their project out a lot. Offering the game at a reduced cost to the first 25+ backers brings in a lot of money early on which helps to generate interest. I will definitely be doing this on my next project. I will also make a video, which is something I was unable to do for my last campaign.
Is Pieces of Eight available in retail stores besides The Game Crafter?
I wish it was, but at the moment, it is only available on The Game Crafter. I haven’t put forth the effort necessary to really market it to publishers yet and should really get on that. I know from talking to others that it is not an easy thing to do, but I will eventually market the game to retailers.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
I would not be a game designer if not for The Game Crafter. It’s as simple as that! I had ideas for games I wanted to create floating around in my head for years with no feasible outlet with which to produce them until I discovered The Game Crafter. Once I found the site, it’s like a door was opened, and I could finally create the games I had been thinking about the way I wanted them. The ability to customize a game so completely and only have to pay for one copy at a time is the greatest advent for a game designer I have ever seen. I can’t thank The Game Crafter enough for giving me this outlet for my creativity and offering the ability to play the games I have always wanted to play.
What’s next for you?
Right now, my focus in on a Civil War card game called “The Blue & The Grey”. I initially tried to develop it as an Axis & Allies-type board game, but found that it didn’t work and was way too expensive. I have since redesigned it as a card game and am really excited about it. I have drawn about a dozen or so cards thus far and have begun the initial stages of playtesting. This will be my next Kickstarter campaign so please look out for it!
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
From what I have learned from this whole design process, the most important thing you can do is playtest your game extensively. Give it to people who know absolutely nothing about tabletop games, and see if they can play it without your instruction. Try to get them to break the game… basically, find holes in the gameplay that will require adjustments to fix. With that, you need to be flexible. I have designed games with mechanics that I thought were original and amazing that just didn’t work at all. A small change to the rules might require a complete change to all of the artwork on you game, and this can be exhausting and time-consuming. When it comes to writing rules, try to anticipate the questions people might ask and explain it to the best of your ability. Remember, something that makes sense to you as the designer might not make any sense to a player, so you need to have other people review your rules. Also, remember that a concept that you might find entertaining, might not be very marketable. For instance, I love to sit and play a game for hours… So when I designed Pieces of Eight, it took a good 2-3 hours to play one game. This just didn’t work. After I got some reviews that mentioned this as one of the main detractors, I redesigned the game so that it can be played in a much shorter time, and this has helped to increase the game’s popularity and also has made it enjoyable for more people.
We are very pleased to announce that Chris Leder has been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Tell us about yourself.
My name is Chris Leder, age 35, and I am a game designer. I live in Plainfield, Illinois (about 45 minutes outside Chicago) with my wonderful wife Becky, my teenage son/playtesting extraordinaire Alex, my wunderkind toddler Jensen, and two dogs named Abbey and McCartney. I have tinkered with game making since the late 1990’s, but only with the advent of The Game Crafter service and stars aligning recently have I really taken it seriously.
Please describe City of Gears.
City of Gears is a 2 to 4 player medium strategy game which combines elements of worker placement, area control, and dice rolling. Thematically, it is the story of a fantastic automated clockwork city which was built by a brilliant and wealthy man at the turn of the 20th century to be a beacon of technological advancement and hope. Things took a tragic turn, the city was never completed, and it has been sitting dormant for 50 years, waiting to be activated. The players take on the roles of powerful companies whose factories use automaton workers to reactivate the vast machinery in a race to lay claim to the city and gain all the glory.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
I did not, but the game changed drastically from the early stages to the finished product. Originally, it was to be called “Captains of Science and Industry,” and it was much more focused on dice rolling (to satisfy the design challenge guideline). At that point, I was influenced heavily by the game “Lords of Waterdeep,” so worker placement was also a big factor. Players were rolling special Science and Industry dice and attempting to win either an Industry victory (by building a Perpetual Motion machine) or a Science victory (by discovering the Key To Utopia). As playtesting went on and the game iterated, I found that I liked the workers to actually move, rather than just being placed. I also came up with the idea of the city being brought to life, and that took me on a path to what City of Gears would eventually become. As with all my games, I create and print up prototype copies on regular paper or cardstock using the myriad extra components I have from past Game Crafter productions. This allows me to playtest games like crazy, make edits, reprint, and playtest some more, all without spending a lot of money. This may sound bizarre, but my playtest prototypes are all made using Microsoft Excel. I love it. Once I feel a game is close to ready, I spend the time on fancy artwork and create it using The Game Crafter.
Did you already have the idea for City of Gears in your head before the Steampunk Design Challenge was announced?
Not at all. I had not participated in any design challenges prior, but I was interested in the Steampunk theme, so as soon as it was announced I committed myself to submitting a game. My familiarity with the steampunk genre was not vast (aside from TV and movies like Wild Wild West and Sky Captain), so I spent a lot of time reading up and choosing the aspects that I wanted to incorporate.
What made you decide to enter your game into the contest?
All along, my feeling was that if my game was not ready, or I wasn’t happy with it, I would not enter it. Luckily, I gave myself plenty of time to playtest and refine. I had folks testing the ever-improving Excel version of City of Gears for weeks, while I created the artwork. It all came together well, and despite some last-minute tweaks, the game was ready in plenty of time for the contest.
Would you have been motivated to work on the game as much as you did without the contest?
I stay at home with my toddler, playing with him and chasing him and watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with him, so it leaves me very little time to tinker with games. That is, unless I have a big motivator, which the contest provided. During naptimes and free moments, I refined the game. The contest was a great reason to push myself to see if I could make a worthy game with limited time on my hands.
Now that the contest is over, I see that you’ve released an expansion called City of Gears: Justice and Might. Tell us about that, and also let us know about any other expansions you have planned?
The original City of Gears features some player interaction, both in how you attempt to control spaces, and how you use the bomb results on the dice (which can blow up opponents’ gears or workers). The Justice and Might expansion heightens the conflict considerably, giving players more reasons and better means to stick it to one another. This expansion is easily integrated into the base game, and it can easily be removed if players don’t want as much conflict. The City of Gears game is part of a whole narrative, and there are many stories to tell. I have a second expansion planned, which focuses on some pretty fabulous tech that was hidden within the city by its creator, Sir Esmund Fynglass. Beyond that, the framework is in place to expand the universe even more, with stories and more games of different types.
Has winning inspired you to enter more contests or design more games?
I will take each contest as it comes and decide if I have the time and drive to move forward. I was on the fence with the next challenge (the Co-Op Challenge), and even began fleshing out two very different games, but in the end, I chose to take a break. I’m glad I did, too, because now I have the privilege to judge that contest! It felt amazing to win, mostly because there were such good entries in the contest, and I’m glad I was counted in that group.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
I cannot overstate how important The Game Crafter was to me. I first heard of the service just after the Beta for the site appeared. I was thrilled at the prospects, and created a brand new game called Main Street America just to try out the service. The game itself was just okay, but receiving the freshly-produced game (in a box with Order #109 printed on it) was amazing. I have had new games flowing on The Game Crafter ever since, and I have been a witness to the vast evolution and commendable customer service TGC has provided over the years. This past summer, meeting the creators of TGC at GenCon meant the world to me, because it validated that these were passionate people who care deeply about their service and community that uses it.
We hear that one or more of your other games is being picked up by a publisher. Tell us about that experience. How did you go about getting a publisher? And when will your games be available via their label?
This is one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me, and I can’t believe the circumstances that made it a reality. I had developed two family dice games, Roll For It! and Trainmaker. Even though I felt they were ready for the big leagues, I just couldn’t devote any time to getting them out there due to my hectic schedule as a retail manager at a certain big box electronics company. Well, the universe finds a way, right? A great new game shop, The Wandering Dragon, opened in my town, and I got to know the owners, Laura and Kevin. After a while, I showed them Roll For It! and Trainmaker and they immediately said that I needed to meet their friend Ray Wehrs, a man with years of experience and knowledge in the game world whose company would be perfect to produce my games. Around that time, I suddenly found myself with no job due to restructuring, and I had time on my hands. I decided at the last minute to go to GenCon and I reached out to Ray at Calliope Games to see if I could demo the games for him there. He was very friendly, and agreed to meet me. They really enjoyed Roll For It! and Trainmaker, and I saw at once that this was the perfect company to produce these games. Roll For It! from Calliope Games is being made ready for retail, and it will be in stores near you early next year (Hint - keep an eye on Kickstarter towards the New Year!). Trainmaker is a little further from ready, but with some modifications, I think it too will find its way to retail shelves soon.
What’s next for you?
Now that the game design bug has bitten me, I can’t imagine a time when I won’t be working on a game. I have a backlog of games in various states of creation, from concept to playtesting, including an amusement park deckbuilder and an epic apocalyptic civilization RPG. I’m excited to see Roll For It! hit the shelves next year, and I am eager to get more of my games (including City of Gears) published and on gaming tables around the world. I have built relationships with many of the users of TGC, and I’m hoping that we can foster a system whereby we send each other our games to test, so more of us can get published. Finally, I’m still looking for a job, so if anyone knows of a good one near Chicago, drop me a line!
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
I have three pieces of advice that have helped me.
Playtest, playtest, playtest. There’s no better way to build a good game than by getting as many people as possible to play it. Play it with friends and family, sure, but also get it on the table with complete strangers. Tell them someone else designed it so that they will be honest with you about its flaws or opportunities. Make sure you have thick skin, and listen to the feedback. You won’t use it all, but you should appreciate every single thing people tell you.
The first version of the game you get from The Game Crafter will NEVER be the final version. There may be design quirks (color, spacing, etc) that you need to physically see to realize. The best thing TGC has done recently (apart from the greater shipping options, the long-awaited cardboard parts, the cool grab bags, the useful color filter when proofing, and the neato classic game parts) is force designers to wait 10 days after buying a copy of their game before they can hit “Publish.” Why is this the best thing? Isn’t it cruel?? No, it’s because the designer needs to get the game and look it over (and surely make a few modifications) before it’s ready to sell. Very smart move! Take advantage of that first look at your game and make sure it’s perfect before unleashing it.
Finally, if you are going to demo your game to a potential publisher, The Game Crafter is your best friend. When I tell people I’m going to demo a game for them, they expect to see black-and-white designs and home-printed sleeved prototype cards. For them to instead see a full-color professionally-printed demo game creates an extremely positive first impression, and it gets you off on the right foot. I’m not saying that you can’t move forward with a homemade prototype, but spending the time and effort to have it made with The Game Crafter makes a big difference.
We’re proud to induct Xavier Lardy into the Hall of Fame for getting his game Haunted into mass-production. Please join us in France as we talk to Xavier about his accomplishments and the future.
Tell us about yourself and how long you’ve been designing games.
Well, I’m 41 years old and I live in France near the french alps. I don’t have kids yet and work in the bioacoustics field (the study of the sounds of the living). As long as I remember, I use to design games when I was a kid, by merging existing games together. I was fascinated by the beauty of boards, box covers and not concerned at all by playability (my friends were very patient). I even worked in the videogame industry for a while. I really started to design board games when I was 33 years old, and it all started with a bet!
Please describe Haunted.
First I’d like to say that Haunted is the name of the game that was once published at deviantArt for print & play and TGC for POD ; and Phantom is the name of the game based on Haunted that is currently published by Ludonaute and distributed in France and other european countries by Asmodée. In a nutshell, Phantom is a two player card game, in which you haunt rooms and summon ghosts to scare the members of the family that lives in the house. It’s a duel between two vengeful spirits, one being an indian, the other one a settler. Usually, the game lasts about 30 minutes and has a great replay value.
Did you create a design journal for your game? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
At first, I didn’t created a design journal, but kept track of all the prototypes and rules. For the collector of Haunted I published a retrospective at deviantArt, in french and updated it for the Designer’s Diary at BGG, in a shortened version. The complete version is readable, in english, at deviantArt : (Beware : there are 9 chapters, covering about 8 years of patient game design).
This table however retraces the evolution of all the different game components : monsters, characters, rooms, items and areas. I think it gives a good grasp on what game design really is.
Are there any caveats or tips you could share with other designers looking to make the same game in multiple languages like you did?
Before Haunted, I only had the experience of asking friends to translate as much as they could the rules of Barbecue for the print & play version at deviantArt. The game was translated in about 12 different languages, including Chinese and Russian! For Haunted, it was a rocky road (or I might say, a raging river). The first thing to know, is that I started from and original French version, and did a first translation of the (quite long) rules. I asked two friends fluent in English to spellcheck it, and I thought that was it. Que nenni! Before publishing the game at TGC, I asked the members of the forum if they could do the same. Here I moved from a simple translation, to rich formulation of game rules, with specific idioms, and actual attempts to understand how the game was played before committing to a specific name or term. Thankfully, at the end, both the cards and the rules were about 99% correct!
Congratulations on getting Haunted picked up by a publisher! What is the name of the publisher that picked up Haunted, and how did that come about?
The publisher is Ludonaute, from France. They previously published games with alot of strategy depth like Offerings (Offrandes), Yggdrasil and Shitenno. Phantom is the second game of their new collection called Ludobook that features a novel in both French and English, and a card game. The Ludobooks explore the traditional popular genres in litterature. The first one, Crimebox on is about murder and investigation. Phantom is a about paranormal and ghosts. The publisher discovered the game at deviantArt, downloaded and played it. They loved it and we quite quickly discussed about a potential publishing.
Did publishing on The Game Crafter first help you get publisher interest?
Indirectly, yes. I mostly use TGC for POD services in order to print several copies for collectors. I did it for Barbecue, for Haunted, and recently Galipotes. It was nice to give a good copy of the game to the publisher thanks to TGC!
When and where can people buy Haunted now?
Due to publishing contract, Haunted has been removed from both deviantArt and TGC. The game was released in France on september the 10th, during the Monde du Jeu (World of Gaming) in Paris. I know it’s distributed in both game stores and libraries. I expect the game to reach other European countries for Essen and maybe raise interest of a North-American publisher! Anyhow, it’s still possible to order the game directly from the publisher if you live in western Europe.
Have any publishers in North America shown any interest yet?
Not yet, but Essen is getting close, and the first sales are quite motivating! The game story takes place in the southern part of America, at the beginning of the previous century. It’s like Poltergeist or Amityville meets Gone With The Wind (in my eyes) so I think it’s a good fit for North America.
Do you have any expansions planned for Haunted?
Not exactly planned as a release, but many ideas were removed from the final game due to manufacturing constraints. Anyhow, Ludonaute came up with a nice idea for the launch of the two Ludobooks : Crimebox features an additional character card, Cymon Kraft the photographer, named after the designer of the game, and Phantom features three additional character cards, named after AnneC, the novelist, Denis, the illustrator, and me.
Has getting picked up by a publisher inspired you to design more games?
Fortunately, or unfortunately, no. I design game for my own pleasure, and the delight of players I meet at gaming tables. Also, some of my games were previously picked by publishers for test, and only Phantom made it to the shelves. So even if I’m happy to see a publishing project coming to fruition, I focus on having a successful collaboration with the publisher’s team. I know it takes time for me to have a good game, so I prefer to follow my path on my own, even I sometimes it’s a deadend. Nethertheless, I learned alot while working with publishers on previous publishing projects. It’s invaluable.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on your success as a game designer?
I think the first influence TGC had on my perception of game design was to discover that I was not alone! (Though we’re still not legion, and far less common that musicians or illustrators). It also expanded my view of the gaming culture, that became far larger than the one I was used to. It really helped me to have a collector edition of my games without bankrupting myself!
What’s next for you?
Like many other game designers, I’m spending alot of time on my other games. The ones that draw my attention these days are Galipotes, that I hope will be release at TGC in the coming month, and also Maswana, that is actually being vetted by a French publisher. Aside of this, I’m also professionnaly working on a videogame about species using echolocation (sonar) to navigate and hunt in the dark.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
With great pleasure, I’ll try my best! Well, if you’re a beginner I’d recommend to carefully analyze the games you like, and understand how the theme, the mechanic and the component relates together. It’s also a good practise to test a game you don’t know, for general culture. Also, develop a skill to observe how the players play your prototypes for the first time, especially out of you circle of family and friends, and if they keep coming back. If you’re seasoned, you probably know all that so I’d suggest to think about your audience alot before you dive into testing. Sometimes you have to reposition your game because an unsuspected audience shows a tremendous interest in it, but it is actually too far from their usual gaming tastes. This could be done with shifting either the theme or the mechanic. Finally, find courage to overcome the difficulty of actually building the prototype, with time, you’ll probably start to like it!
Thanks alot JT for giving me the opportunity to share my experience with the members of TGC! You provide a tremendous service to the game designers community.
We couldn’t be more proud of what CW Karstens and Diamond K Games have accomplished using our service. We’re very pleased to induct Diamond K Games into our Hall of Fame. Here’s an interview we did with CW Karstens of Diamond K Games about his induction.
Tell us a little about Diamond K Games.
Diamond K Games was established in 2009 for the games I designed and published using The Game Crafter Print On Demand service. The games published by DKG tend to lean on the Eurogame style with some Ameritrash thrown in for the fun factor.
Please describe Dragon Valley.
Dragon Valley is Diamond K Games’ first mass printed board game. Dragon Valley is a bit of a tower defense board game that uses the “split something and the other person picks first” method to acquire towers, troops and enemies. Dragon Valley was About.com’s Best Strategy Game of 2011.
In Dragon Valley, players take turns dividing items such as knights and archers, building materials for blacksmith shops and towers, special powers and even attackers. The attackers consist of dragons, orcs and battering rams that emerge from mountain passes into each player’s lands. After dividing, other players select the group of items they prefer and leave the remainder with the player who did the dividing. After that, players use special cards to interfere with each others plans. The last step each round is for players to setup defenses, destroy the attackers or laying siege on the orc strongholds scattered throughout Dragon Valley.
Tell us what inspired you to create the game.
Dragon Valley was originally a stand alone expansion to Field Hospital, DKG’s published game through The Game Crafter. The original premise was that each player was setting up a military base in order to control a mountainous region. After many playtest attempts, it appeared that my audience was not into war games using a mechanic of divide and choose. I changed the theme to dragons and orcs and even though this also didn’t seem to be logical (fantasy players also tend to like dice rolling attacks), the response was overwhelming.
Did you create a design journal for it? If so, did you publish it anywhere?
I have some parts of a design journal on the Board Game Design Forum.
Please describe the process you went through to become a successfully funded Kickstarter game.
In 2011, at the request of many play-testers, I created a Kickstarter campaign for Dragon Valley. A key point to my success was that I already had an audience for the game. That audience was larger than just people I came in contact with. Having The Game Crafter prototype versions, I was able to get a lot more copies out to different game groups in the US. Once the KS campaign began, many playtest/demo players backed it within a day or two and helped promote the game. About 4 months of preparation went into getting the art, banner ads and videos done. I posted the steps I performed on BGG.
After you were funded, what was involved in getting the game out to those that funded you?
I was lucky to team up with Game Salute. They received the entire order of copies and packaged them for individual mailing to the Kickstarter backers. They also handle the store distribution for the remaining copies after Kickstarter rewards were delivered.
Where can people buy the game now? And in how many countries is it available?
Basically, any store that uses ACD Distributors can carry Dragon Valley. If your local store doesn’t have a copy, ask them if they can get it in or order directly from Diamond K Games at or from Amazon.
How many sales have you had so far, including the number of games you have to ship due to the Kickstarter campaign?
The print run was 1614. I sent out 305 Kickstarter games and about another 500 games have been sold since.
Could you describe any influence The Game Crafter had on the success of Dragon Valley?
The Game Crafter’s influence on Dragon Valley goes beyond just being used as the prototype service. As I had designed games since I was 9 years old, TGC was the catalyst of going from designing games just for myself and friends to designing games for the general public. Also, using the Print On Demand methodology to publish games, I was able to incrementally learn all the skills of what it takes to publish a game as large as Dragon Valley.
What’s next on the horizon for Diamond K Games?
We have a large number of prototypes we are working on. We are still working the order in which they are published as they are all progressing at different speeds. For a current list, checkout the BGG Geeklist. Feel free to read up on each game and let us know which one(s) you would like to see first.
Any last words of encouragement or advice to all the designers reading this who would love to experience your success?
Advice 1) Having a dream is important. Just as important though is to have solid goals. The best way to reach those goals is to create a plan. Make a list of all the things you think you need to get done and ask advice from people who have been there. Refine your plan as needed and review it every morning. Check your progress.
Advice 2) Don’t be afraid to show people your game and rules. The more people you show, the safer you are as more people will vouch for it being yours. Also, the more people who give feedback on your game, the more likely you are to get feedback that will help your vision. You will also hear more things you don’t want to hear, but find out why you don’t want to hear them. Sometimes those things need to be ignored, but oftentimes they will help, even if indirectly or on a future project.
NOTE: CW Karstens will be at Gen Con Indy 2012 next week demoing Dragon Valley. If you’re going to be at Gen Con, sign up for a demo!
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