Game Design Weekend!

We had a great time with many other great local designers this weekend, like Tim Eisner (The Grimm Forest & March of the Ants), Ben Eisner (Dungeon Hustle), Ryan Swisher (March of the Ants), Ryan Spangler (Sol: Last Days of a Star), Taran Kratz (Helionox), and others you'll hopefully hear about sooner than later! We play-tested and critiqued tons of our current board game projects, and of course squeezed in a game of Magic. Everyone was great and generous with their time, helping play-test and work on development issues with other design projects. We had some great feedback for After the Empire, and got to pull out an ancient design from 6 years ago. Ryan Swisher and Ben & Tim Eisner were kind enough to cook-up delicious food for the pack to keep us gaming all day and night. We also had a really fun break-out session game design challenge of sorts, where randomly selected groups of 3-4 designers were put together to work with some drafted components and randomly selected mechanics. While we were mostly working on our design chops, strengths, and weaknesses, we actually had a couple promising game designs come out of that experiment! Thanks again to Chase Van Epps and Print and Play for providing the components for us! Here's the one my group was working on that turned out surprisingly playable and interesting:

We While we're not spending weekends hanging out with awesome designers, we're busy working on our games. Here's my photographophic wife helping me play-test a few little tweaks on After the Empire and critiquing my color saturation and lightning choices for some newly printed cards:

Here are a couple good friends helping us continue to develop our more abstract design, Mountain God's Revenge:

We hope you all had a great weekend filled with gaming, too!