TempleCon 2014

TempleCon is this weekend! We're mostly going to spend our time in the board game room playing all the free board games we can get our grubby little hands on. If we're not shopping or going to the show, we'll be playing all those giant expensive board games we're not sure about buying. Just drooling over the best of the bunch. Over the past few months a list has been forming of 'must play' games while we're there. Click more to see the list!

Why the long silence?

Well, It’s 2014. Some old projects have ended, and some new projects are about to start. It’s an exciting time, and things have been happening. Unfortunately this blog has been the thing to be put on the back burner. Thanks for sticking around, I have not abandoned writing about games and gaming. There are exciting things coming up, and I want to share them.

Hearthstone; the death of CCG's.

Hearthstone is a good game. It's great fun. Quite enjoyable. You should play it. But when the meta game changes on a weekly basis, what's the point? A deck that was passable good last week looses frequently this week. Why does the meta game change so rapidly? The game was created in the age of streaming internet.  We watch, content, pick up some deck ideas, play those. Wash, rinse, repeat each week. The real question "Is that fun?"

Razer Makes Progress.

A year or so ago Razer took out a full page ad in the New York Times stating that 'pc gaming is not dead'.  Thanks.  In my opinion it was an overly expensive ad marketing to the wrong audience.  Kind of weird to review a game companies marketing strategy, but it's one of my more popular posts.  Razer has since starting doing some more creative, more targeted advertising, which addresses many of my concerns.

5 Risks No kickstarter ever lists, but should.

Recently Reddit, and Penny Arcade Report cited a Kickstarter Campaign which was successfully funded, but failed to deliver the product.  Based on comments and  tweets the game had a lot going for it.  Backers say that the game mechanics were done, that playtest had gotten to final stages.  But the game was still not produced.  There are rumors that they were attempting to start a company using funding from the project.  The kickstarter campaign clearly states that it is to produce a board game, not found a company.  Unfortunately a project is not a company, and if I had to guess I would assume that not understanding this point led to their downfall.

3 Game Production Resources

A quick post today with some links to resources for producing a physical game.  Having started making a card game, which has the potential to be a physical game, it would most likely be a good idea to have some resources around for physical production.  Maybe my game will never make it that far, but maybe yours will.

Play Test Round 1

The Design of my card game is going well.  This week the call volume is high which means time to buckle down at the day job.  Working on this is going to get put on hold.  Lunch breaks are 30 minutes, and I'm picking up extra hours.  No downtime to spend working on Dormouse Games, let alone a personal side project like this.  But over the past couple weeks some play tests were done, and some lessons learned.