DR Games

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...

I have had a long time to think about my own creative ethos such as; being creative, open minded, inclusive, chase an idea and develop it, try not to fix on your first idea and such. I want DR Games to embody some of this. So, I conceived of three principles that I hope all my games will reflect and embrace, helping form a recognisable brand. The three principles are: Narrative. I am keen to have to have a story for every part of any game I create. In my mind elements of a game need to be created for a reason and that is often story driven. In fact, I want this narrative to continue through the game, so the players end up making their own stories after it is out of my hands. It’s that sense of emersion I want to imbue in my games, one that comes from the story. At the same time, I think that doing this makes everything make sense, increase peoples’ chances of remembering and makes it more fun! Streamlined. I have seen many complex games over the years and although som...