Welcome to the Indie Tabletop Newsletter, hear from independent tabletop games designers about their current and upcoming projects. Take a look at the games we’ve already self-published and our upcoming Kickstarters, maybe even get yourself a free print n play game. Learn more about this newsletter here.
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Please take a look at the campaign using the link below, tell your friends and consider what your gaming buddies might like for birthdays as they come up this year 😉. Any help towards these stretch goals is much appreciated as I would love to be able to offer more colours going forward, remember, every little £1 pledge really adds up by the end of a campaign.
For anyone who doesn’t know – In 2021 I launched and funded this little kit full of components to allow board gamers to play as many games as possible as their favourite colour.
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I figured people who loved purple, orange, pink, less ordinary colours would really love it, and I included red, blue, yellow and green for completeness and because I could. Boy, was I wrong, with the exception of purple (because it’s incredibly loved as a colour) those four main colours have been my biggest sellers and these little kits have continued to be loved.
Back on Kickstarter – I’ve created a fourth type of kit that contains just about everything you’d hopefully need called ‘Ultimate’ and I’ve created a new way to allow backers to have custom labels with the silver of the tin showing through, which I think is a nice touch. I love letting backers have their say, which is why the larger kit sizes were brought in for the first campaign and new colours are being added as stretch goals for this new campaign, all voted on by the backers.
Your Kit Your Way – The one thing I’ve always wanted for The Board Game Survival Kit is that players get the perfect kit for them, this means that as well as your colour, you can choose the type of kit (which components are included), the size of the tin, the type of label it will have, any extra components you would like and even whether your kit will be shrink wrapped or not!
New Products – In January I released my new ‘caged dice’ necklaces that are available on the shop on this site. I’m also working on another type of dice necklace to add, more dice earrings and more of the large dice bags that fold out to be dice trays.
Events – I’ll be at Paradice in worthing on February 11th, if you’ll be there, please come by and say hi. A friendly face is always lovely to see. I’d love to find some smaller events like Paradice near to me that allow exhibitors so please let me know if you’ve found one!
Three new games-on-cards are coming to Kickstarter on 7 Feb. They’re all A5 cards with gorgeous artwork. One card is a solo race against time, featuring flowers and bumblebees! The second card is a simple logic puzzle about cakes and tea — prefect for Mother’s Day. The third card is a harder logic puzzle, this time about four adventurers in a dungeon…
You’ll also be able to buy all our previous greetings cards too — especially useful if you live outside the UK.
The EU rewards will all be going at once as for the first time ever we’re using a fulfilment company (the combination of Gamefound collecting EU VAT and GamesQuest shipping DDP means that for the first time since Brexit our EU backer won’t get hit by handling fees and VAT payment on delivery).
While Paul’s been wracked with flu I’ve been frantically playtesting the new Scenario Booklet and getting that printed, so there’s only one outstanding piece of the puzzle now – the laser-cut and etched big boxes that are shipping to us shortly from LaserOx in Hungary.
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We’re also finally nearing the end of the development of our new website – clicking the link might take you to the new one!
Exciting times!
The Score is a brand new kind of storytelling game that combines a bit of improvised roleplaying with a carefully seeded deck of prompts to create an exciting thrill-a-minute heist movie. The rules are so simple you can learn them in under a minute and the game really does take just 18 minutes to play – or less. We’ve been developing The Score for over two years and now we’re bringing it to kickstarter. Join us now to get this beautiful but tiny game in a beautiful boxed set: a storytelling game you can fit in your pocket and take anywhere, but that looks like a work of art you might want to steal…
Ahem, this first slide shows the major focus points of the studio this past year. As you can see the most resources have been consumed by Perilous Pond, and only a tiny 10 percent has been put into marketing of Bushido Duels. More about that in a later slide.
Moving on to the progress of Perilous Pond. As you can see in the line graph here on the right we had quite good progress during the spring culminating in two successful demonstrations at the conventions LinCon and NärCon. We got some valuable feedback, a lot of happy play-testers and properly printed dice arrived. The pie chart on the bottom shows the percent of players liking the game. It’s not really much of a pie, more like a cheese wheel perhaps. What we try to say is that everyone liked the game.
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During the second half of the year progress slowed slightly, or perhaps we can say it plateaued. We started strongly with getting boxes for the preview edition but then we had a real hard time to get hold of the dark yellow crystals we needed for the preview editions. As you might remember we had to raid the Schwartzwald forest for their supplies…Boy was that an adventure!
So to summarize the progress, all components needed except for English rule book. Good play-test and finally lots of fun. We are actively looking for reviewers.
A final slide now, Bushido Duels in 2022: A success despite the lack of focus. We’ve been able to get a significant number of boxes in player hands and on major store shelves. For example the Swedish geek culture giant SF-bokhandeln.
Bushido Duels has still gone home well at conventions and at the Christmas market and looks to have a bright future.
Thank you for your attention and let’s make 2023 an even greater year!
What do you think? Will this work when I present it to the board next week? Maybe 15 slides isn’t enough…20? They should be rather stricken by just how sharp the image quality is on this thing…
I’ve also started testing my next game, working title “Otter Strike”. It’s a co-op card game with in-hand sorting mechanisms. In the first iterations, the otter agents manoeuvred on a map, but it took away from the card play. On the photo, you can see the latest iterations, which is cards only. For my prototypes, I use standard playing cards, sleeve them and insert my printed own cards to be able to shuffle well and iterate quickly. First play tests are promising. If this promise keeps up, I plan to use the profits from my first Kickstarter to illustrate the cards and box for a potential first printed game. If you’re an illustrator and would like to collaborate, feel free to reach out 🙂
In preparation for the campaign we have been sending review copies to our favourite reviewers in the tabletop gaming space. Even though it has only been a few weeks, we have already got reviews on Cake of Doom. Read all of our recent reviews on our website.
We have also been attending events at D20, Tanuki and will soon be heading to Paradice Board Gaming Convention in Worthing on 11th Feb.
We want to share our new game mat design with as many people as possible. We know it will make the game even easier to learn and play – and offer an add-on that makes the gaming experience feel even more special.
Crumbs! is a solo/cooperative 18-card puzzle game for 1-2 players designed by J. Antscherl, illustrated by Rory Muldoon (Skora, Tinderblox, Voyages), and published by Minerva Tabletop Games (Swatch) launching on Kickstarter this summer.
Stack ingredient cards to make sandwiches matching a customer order and reset your actions. If your actions reach zero without having made a sandwich, your customers get tired of waiting and leave, losing you the game. Complete a number of orders (depending on your difficulty) to make it through the lunch rush and win the game!
Click the link to view the Kickstarter preview page and save the project, receiving a notification when the game launches.
Shipping: Those two issues meant that we couldn’t follow our shipping schedule. We had organized to have our games on the ocean before the Chinese New Year celebrations; however, their new pickup date is in early February. Being conservative, the games will arrive at the backer addresses around 3 weeks earlier than promised in our Kickstarter campaign.
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Legendary Edition: The past two months have been busy with fine-tuning the design of the game box and insert trays (photo). The most challenging task was to adjust the laser-cutter to cut and engrave the different types of wood without burning the wood too much and leaving ash marks.
What’s Next: We will have the final pre-manufacturing prototype of the Legendary Edition ready by the end of February, and then start mass-manufacturing. This will take us about 2 months during which we’ll contact all backers who get a custom-made variation of their game. Next to that, once the factory-made games arrive in New Zealand, we’ll assemble, pack, and ship all Castleshire upgrade kits. We will also contact our retailer backers and existing retailer network to confirm their orders. A busy February is lying ahead.
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