January 2013 started big with Unpub3, where Attatat was well received by the play
testers. One of the players who sat down for a round was Dan Yarrington of Game
Salute. His constructive suggestions to
our Attatat prototype led to a longer
face-to-face discussion that ended with a request for a copy of our
self-published Fill The Barn for
evaluation for a distribution agreement. Needless to say, I drove home in a
great mood Sunday night. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I
hadn’t been home from Unpub3 for 12 hours when we received the Monday morning email
notifying us that Casual Game Insider magazine was reviewing Fill The Barn in their Spring 2013 issue
and would add it to their list of recommended casual games. The hardest part
when you get that kind of news from a quarterly magazine is staying quiet the
next 3 months until the publication.
Three weeks later Game Salute formally offered HoopCAT Games
a distribution agreement for Fill The
Barn, opening the door to distribution channels and a trade show presence
that previously had been out of our reach as a two-person husband/wife home
business.
April brought the South Jersey Unpub, and the debut of our
new cooperative prototype game FireBreak.
I was extremely nervous about the first play of this game anywhere other than
our friendly family game table. While our sons really enjoyed game, that was no
guarantee that anyone else would. I prepared myself not to be disappointed if FireBreak received a cool reception.
Instead, we were genuinely yet pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic South
Jersey play test response and further Unpub Minis into the spring. As had happened with Attatat, it was the Unpub response that caused us to realize that Firebreak was actually a better game
than we gave it credit for. Ever since,
we have been working to get the balance right.
April also brought the long-awaited Spring 2013 edition of Casual Game Insider with its review of Fill The
Barn. While we already knew the
thrill of positive online reviews, there was still a feeling to hold that shiny
magazine in our hands and see page and ink given to our game in the review
column.
In May I paid a visit to Washington DC and the Labyrinth Games & Puzzles
middle school game club along with fellow Unpub designer Matthew O’Malley for an
experiment in junior play testing. It
was truly a fun afternoon, as well as an opportunity to see how children would
respond to FireBreak. My favorite quotes
of the afternoon were the references to “barbequed elk” as those middle school
play testers worked to save the wildlife preserves from the spreading flames.
We had more fun with child gamers in August with a Fill The Barn championship as part of
the Juniors Events at the annual World Boardgame Championship. We had no idea what type of participation to
expect, so imagine our surprise when 25 children filed into the room! We had a
two-hour window to teach them how to play, play the opening round of five
5-player games, then the championship round. Aiden with an “e” from New York won
the trophy (we also had an Aidan with an “a”, so that’s how we distinguished
them). The children had fun playing; we had fun hopping between tables to
referee. Will we do it again in 2014? Absolutely!
Our one letdown of the year came as Autumn approached and we
realized that we would not publish Attatat
in 2013. Fill The Barn had taken us
only 10 months to self-publish from first test play to when the first copies
were on a store shelf. However, being the first game we made, its production
received 100% of our attention during that period. With Attatat,
that could never be the case, since some time still had to go to Fill The Barn marketing and sales, and
other portions of time were going to FireBreak.
Harder still, Attatat did not fit a
mold of run of the mill components of game board and cards, adding a slight extra
challenge to figure out the most cost-effective way to manufacture. Slowly, we
arrived at the conclusion that despite our inclination to self-publish, our
games might be more successful if we focused on the game design and looked to
more-experienced publishers to worry about the just-as-important details like
art, manufacturing quotes, and marketing.
The Unpub Zone at the Congress of Gamers in September was a
chance to put the latest version of Firebreak
back on the table, as well as a revamped version of Attatat that replaced the numbers with Egyptian-themed pictures. The
FireBreak feedback from the late
spring Unpubs had been that it was too easy. Sometimes a designer can
over-correct, and the version we showed at Congress of Gamers made it overly
hard with a win rate of only 30% for the day. This was the day that Bruce Voge
of The Party Gamecast made his valiant last stand using his yellow meeple to
defend the airport from the flames. And yet the amazing thing about that day is
that the more our players lost, the more they wanted to play again to try for
the win.
Our October good news came when we learned that an article I
had submitted to Casual Game Insider magazine had been accepted for the Winter
2014 issue. It was thrilling, yet once again we had to mute our public
enthusiasm for the 3 month wait until the actual release in January.
Our efforts to get Firebreak
properly balanced by Unpub4 took a slight pause for Dice Hate Me Game’s
announcement of the 54-card design challenge during Unpub4. I had already been
toying with an idea for a 55-card game to launch on the Unpub circuit in Spring
2014. After an emergency meeting of the
executive leadership of HoopCAT Games (my wife and I), we decided to accelerate
the next idea to meet the challenge deadline. And thus Lady of the Diamonds was born in November.
In contrast to Firebreak
which has undergone 9 months of endless playtest-adjust-repeat, Lady of the Diamonds came together
faster than any other game idea I’ve worked on.
The mechanics worked with very little adjustment from almost game one,
while the scoring system fell into place (with some excellent suggestions by my
wife and younger son) after only a few test plays. The HoopCAT family loves this game. My go-to gamer
play-tester wants a chance to play it more, while some non-gamer friends we
squeezed a play test from described it as “fun”. The design challenge has some
pretty stiff odds with over 40 submissions.
Yet even if it does not rise to the top of the competition, expect us to
keep Lady of the Diamonds on the
playtest circuit in 2014. This one is a keeper.
Just as 2013 began on a positive note, so it also ended
well…with an offer to regularly contribute guest blogs to Casual Game
Revolution! So starting in January 2014, the Casual Game Revolution blog is
where we will be posting any thoughts on family & casual gaming. We’ll still use the HoopCAT blog for posts
that focus more on our games or our company.
We move into 2014 with 3 strong prototype games: Attatat, FireBreak, and Lady of the
Diamonds. This makes us very eager
to see what our 2014 end-of-year blog will say 12 months from now. Until then,
Happy New Year, and remember throughout 2014 that often what you play is not so
important as whom you play with.
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