On The Horizon

This last year has been very busy! Most of the fruits of that labor are still a ways off from getting in players’ hands. One party game is currently on hold (lousy tariffs!). My big strategy game should be crowdfunding early next year. Around five different rulebooks with my editor credit should come out over the next year or so. I’m almost ready to offer that service more broadly with rates, etc.

I’m very much enjoying helping friends with their games. This year I was an Unpub mentor for a very cool guy from New Jersey, Marcus Berdeguez. He has some great, simple designs and a super spirit & work ethic. It was a treat to consult a little bit on my friend Uri’s game Person Do Thing. Uri is the sweetest and funniest guy I know in game design. Most recently, I edited the rulebook for my buddy Ned Damon’s cool Rex Regnat, a trick taking/Palace card game on the founding of the Polish Constitution. He’ll be selling that at PAX West.

Which reminds me, my local friend Jono (co-owner of DVC Games) and I had our game Medusa’s Garden selected for PAX Unplugged’s Indie Game Night Market. It’s a very silly party game that no publisher was going to touch. We love MG dearly and have worked on it for 1.5 years now, with lots of testing in big groups and at conventions. The final version will be super streamlined and easy to jump into. We are working on production now. I have around 100 hand mirrors in my house (Dollar Tree shipped 2x too many!).

I have two new main projects that are ready to pitch: a kids game with Gabe and his wife Sabrina, and a strategy game with Jono. Are You Ascared Of Monsters, Too? is a super cute deduction game where kids and their families match funny character traits between monsters to make friends with them. Gabe and I brought on Sabrina first for her art, and then realized we could make the art an essential gameplay element—which would require a ton more drawings to test. She agreed to a full designer credit, as well, and stepped up to playtest, etc, the whole nine yards. It’s been a real treat to work with them BOTH this time. And her art is fantastic. One of their playtesters seriously got a tattoo on his leg of one of the funny monsters she drew.

At the complete other end of the pool, Go-Tairo is a political strategy game based on the history of Japan in the regency era. This is fascinating material—it’s the same story that the popular TV show Shogun is based on. Jono has wanted to make a game about this history for a long time. We were working with a central mechanic: a game where the number of winners starts high, and can be diminished over time, plus some shrewd card play—and Jono reckoned that gameplay would fit the story. We’ve had some big breakthroughs along the way (especially after Unpub in March!). I like to compare this version to a mini-Dune, like the old ’79 game. The game is too big for DVC to produce, so we will be pitching it shortly.

On the horizon, I have two big and very exciting projects that I’m working on. I don’t want to give away too much right now. Suffice to say, if they work as intended, both have the potential to add a new genre/product category to gaming. Which is a crazy thing to claim, but there you have it. One is a tactical game similar to XCOM. I’m honored to be co-designing with Nicholas Yu on that. The other is a very accessible RPG, and again I’m honored to work with a very creative co-designer, Gene Koo. I’m hoping to have more to share on those within a year. Until then, I’ll continue to relish the sustaining joy of this creative work—more than the eureka moments, more than signing a contract—the friendships.