DR Games

This post has been written while I have been experiencing my first Kickstarter, as a kind of record of the learning experience, especially as it now appears that the Kickstarter will likely be unsuccessful. So, I am also trying to be self-reflective as I’m still learning and this is by no means a perfect guide as to how to succeed, but I hope to learn my lessons for the next one and that is reflected here. Having created the concept and developed the game rules (as documented in my last blog post) I was faced with probably one of the most important aspects of the project and that was how to present the game to the world.  By this stage I had already made a number of mistakes, some of these I’ll document in the next post and some in this one, but I was solely focused on how this game would look. Obviously, I knew how the tiles would look but how about how the box would appear? What graphics would I use on the box cover and how about infill and flavour art for the Kicks...

Working as a cartographer over the last couple of years has opened me up to lots of worlds. Fantasy realms and sci-fi settings that are story driven, and full of detail, have generally been my domain. This has included dungeons, tombs, settlements and worlds. Within the last category I arrived at creating a series of land hex tiles showing villages, towns and cities, fields, forests and mountains. I was pleased with how they turned out, and how they were received on Twitter, and it was only a small step to cut them out and mount them on card. This resulted in something more substantial, an actual game component that seemed to be demanding rules and additional components. Now this is, I guess, a stage that many people find themselves at. An opportunity presenting itself and where to take it? So I took a step back and over the following few months just let the concept grow in my mind. One thing I knew was I wasn’t keen on creating a complex game. I am personally interested in simple...

How do you announce the launch of a Kickstarter? Well here goes…let me introduce Expansionist. This is what I have working on for the last six months and it’s now on Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drmgames/expansionist-a-table-top-game-for-pioneers Yes, it’s a tabletop game where you build settlements and expand beyond the mountains placing hex land tiles and event tiles to either upgrade your own settlements or download grade your opponent’s. Its evolution began with my map drawing at Dark Realm Maps. I’ve always drawn a wide range of maps and one of my ideas saw me creating land tiles. They seemed to spark people’s interest and I thought how cool this would be as a board game. I’m going to talk more about the Event Tiles in a later post, but I came up with a mechanic which was based around them. On the face of it, it was straight forward but threw up a deep cycle of positive and negative placement tiles that quickly grew a matrix of t...

How we manage our leisure time has definitely changed over the years. This I guess isn’t new news, so to speak. We are all aware of the Netflix phenomenon and boxsets and series binging. In fact, it feels like if you can’t have the whole series now, all at once, it causes a frustrated condition that I’m sure they’ll name at some point as a medical condition. I recently started watching Picard on Amazon and actually quite like only having one episode to look forward to a week. But at the same time it is nice to have all the episodes available especially for the Expanse! And even if we have only one episode to watch a week we can watch it when we want. But there is so much choice how can you run out! I hear people saying yet I think another effect of having everything at your fingertips is we become fussier. I have little patience for a series that doesn’t grip me straight away, which I’m not sure how I feel about. This is another reason why we run out of things to watch, creating...

Board Game Stats Sheet Considering I’m creating a board game, and plan to do more in the future, I thought it wise to have a look at some of the stats of other successful board games. This table is just some of my research, but I thought it would be interesting to share here. These numbers are taken from Amazon and Board Game Geek (BBG) and so can vary and play time can stretch or shrink. Name BGG Ranking Amazon Price No Players Play time Ages Talisman 1397 £46.08 2-6 90mins 13+ Wingspan 25 £52.99 1-5 40-70mins 10+ Ticket to Ride 157 £30.95 2-5 30-60mins 8+ Settlers of Catan 355 £37.33 2-4 60mins 10+ Monopoly 18476 £21.99 2-6 60mins 8+ Dune 834 £40.0...