Maquis: 2nd Edition is live on Kickstarter! This one has some new content (missions, spare rooms, and resources) as well as some general clean up of the rules to help explain some of the finer details of the game and improve playability. For our previous backers & customers, the new content is available to purchase as a mini-expansion and you’ll be able to fit it in the original box with some maneuvering. The campaign has gone fantastic so far, breaking our previous backer number record at Side Room Games and it’s on pace to pass our funding level record too! ?
Also, here’s an update on some of our ongoing projects:
Elements of the Gods: The pledge manager on Gamefound is live so if you didn’t get a link please let me know. We’re still in file preparation mode over the next month and should wrap things up by March. Be on the lookout for some pics on a KS update & through our social media outlets!
Black Sonata & The Fair Youth: We’re resolving some of the missing/lost packages from fulfillment so if you’re still waiting for delivery reach out to us and we can investigate. We’re also in the preproduction phase for another print run, so if you missed out on the latest Kickstarter & preorders we’ll have stock soon, likely later this spring.
Mechanical Beast: Still working art development on the tiles and things are coming along nicely! We’re on schedule and looking at an April/May launch date for this one.
Grove: In case you missed our announcement last month, the sequel to Orchard is coming soon! Mark was able to come up with another hit design and I can tell you it’s fantastic. We’re looking for this one to hit Kickstarter this summer so stay tuned. And, if you want to try it out early the print & play files are available on BGG.
As usual, I’ll keep plugging our 2021 54 Card Game Design Contest on BoardGameGeek. There are going to be some awesome games coming out of this one – probably too many for us to publish! Luckily we’ve had good luck in getting entries from previous contests signed with other publishers and I expect that to continue this year. Definitely check them out, give them a playtest (easy print & play builds ?), and provide some feedback. And, if you have a design that’s been tinkering around in your head you should definitely get it down on paper & get it entered!
As always, if you have any questions or issues feel free to drop us a line through our social media outlets or send us an email at support@sideroomgames.com. Until next time!
Dustin
P.S. We have another announcement coming soon on another title we’re going to publish… A perfect fit to our catalog. We’ll let the village know about it once it’s ready to start building… ?
Maquis is coming back to Kickstarter! This will be the 2nd Edition with some new content (missions, spare rooms, and resources) as well as some general clean up of the rules to help explain some of the finer details of the game and improve playability. For our previous backers & customers, the new content will be available to purchase as a mini-expansion and you’ll be able to fit it in the original box with some maneuvering. 🙂
Also, here’s an update on some of our ongoing projects:
Elements of the Gods: The pledge manager on Gamefound is live as of today! Backers should have received an invite this morning. If you didn’t please send me a note and I can investigate. We’re working on getting the files prepped over the next month or so and should wrap things up by March at the latest. Next month we’ll share some of the updates & final versions!
Black Sonata & The Fair Youth: We FINALLY got all of the issues resolved for European backers and games have gotten out to folks. There are still a few areas where delivery is a little behind but they all have left Collext. And with the last-minute Brexit deal it’s a huge sigh of relief for us since things will stay EU friendly. Because of general delays, if folks haven’t received packages by the middle of the month we can start looking into things. By then I’d expect any undeliverable packages to return back to Collext. We’re also in the preproduction phase for another print run, so if you missed out on the latest Kickstarter & preorders we’ll have stock soon, likely later this spring.
Fallen Angels: These also made it to Collext for EU fulfillment right before Christmas and are starting to arrive to the last backers in the EU. Much like above, we’ll give it some time to make it through the standard delivery timelines and then we’ll assess if there’s any issues to resolve. We also still have copies on our site available! 🙂
Mechanical Beast: Here’s some more art in development! We really like the way the tiles are coming together. Still planning for launching after Maquis, likely around the April timeframe.
Finally, I’ll keep plugging our 2021 54 Card Game Design Contest on BoardGameGeek. There are going to be some awesome games coming out of this one – probably too many for us to publish! Luckily we’ve had good luck in getting entries from previous contests signed with other publishers and I expect that to continue this year. Definitely check them out, give them a playtest (easy print & play builds), and provide some feedback. And, if you have a design that’s been tinkering around in your head you should definitely get it down on paper & get it entered!
As always, if you have any questions or issues feel free to drop us a line through our social media outlets or send us an email at support@sideroomgames.com. Until next time!
Dustin
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, you may want to stay tuned over the next week or so… We’re meandering out of the Orchard and have found a lovely little Grove we’re quite fond of… 😉
Now that the contest is officially over and we’re putting feedback together for the entrants I thought I’d let you in on the process and how we decided on our jury prize winners. It was a tough call; we had about 5 games we narrowed in on for the top 2 and played through them again as a group to determine which were the best. Here are my honorable mentions (in no particular order) – all of these were great games and are serious contenders for publication (either by us or some other lucky company!):
Neapolitan Sundaes: Most of my thoughts on this one were captured on my previous blog post. Definitely fun, probably a better cardboard tile game rather than card game, and the theme on this one could be tinkered with. Will keep an eye out for it for sure!
Panoramic: This one is a two player tableau builder where you have the same bidding cards & overall bidding value as your opponent over the course of the game. The best part about this one is how scoring is determined. As you bid & win cards you can either place them in your panorama (or your opponent’s in cases where they hurt their layout) or you can use the card to lock in an endgame scoring parameter. On top of that, when you lock it in you lock out another option. Really keeps the game dynamic and puts emphasis on which cards to go after and when. With some cool original art & graphic design this one could be a great light-weight card game.
Repertoire: In this two player deck-building game about fencing, you are balancing your decisions to either attack your opponent or acquire special move cards to your deck (adding to your repertoire!). As offensive & defensive skills become available to add to your capabilities, you are trying to balance what you have in your hand to either come in with a crushing blow or defend against the same. And as you take damage that can’t be blocked you have to permanently dump cards from your deck, and whoever has the fewest cards at the end of the game loses. It probably needs some tweaking as the first portion of the game is a little slow during the build up of your deck, and it feels like there needs to be a little more offense & a little less defense to increase the tension. But the core mechanics are really good, and the original artwork for the cards turned out great!
Saint Poker & Board Game Smugglers: These were games that used a standard deck of playing cards. And they were some of the most fun we had playing! Saint Poker is basically Texas Hold’em Legacy. After a hand you get to draft cards on the table from other players hands & the community cards to form your hand for the next round. Each round is worth more and more points, and you can retain some knowledge of what cards are gone to help you plan for the next round or two. The right kind of brain burn and it worked really well. Board Game Smugglers is all about bluffing and misdirection, which really hit my wheelhouse. I was just manically laughing about every move, and was yelling at the other guys when they would screw me over. It really didn’t have “take that” mechanics, but it still had that feel. For some reason that’s what made it shine.
There were other good ones too: Quilt 54 was a tile laying game simple to teach but got brain burny as you played; in the same vein as Sagrada. Banquet had a neat way of moving your player card around the board and causing a chain reaction of who goes where. Martian Colony was a cool little eurogame that with a little tweaking on the scoring could be great. But in the end there were two that really stood out:
Building Blocks: This cooperative game is really straightforward. You’re trying to build 4 colored towers from 1 to 7. There are a few more of the base cards but the top 3 cards of each tower are unique. You can skip levels (i.e. a tower that goes 1-2-3-5-7 is perfectly legit) but your score drops for every card you miss. As a group you go through a decision process to see what order you place that round. You then take turns placing whatever cards you can on the tower. Or you can “pass” by discarding cards. And the entire time you basically can’t communicate with each other… AARRRGGGHHH!!!! It’s so frustrating but rewarding at the same time. “Why did you take the first player card!?!?!” “Why did you discard a 5!?!?!” “NOOOOOOOOO!!!!” The game shines when you have to decide on which cards to hold in hopes of getting the perfect tower but also avoid being forced to dump them later when someone can’t put down a stupid 4(!!!). We immediately wanted to play it again when we finished the first time we tried it. And on our last test day we wanted to play it again after we finished… and a 3rd time… and a 4th… It’s just really good!
Fallen Angels: Surprisingly another cooperative game (as a group I’d say co-op games are lower on our list, which is why we were shocked our top two were those types). And it’s really clever. I mean reeeeeeeeeeeeallly clever. Once you set it up you have a handful of cards fanned out so you can see either a) a single symbol or b) a pair of symbols. On the other side of the cards (what your teammate’s see) is either a) that symbol plus another or b) only one of the pair of symbols. On your turn you pick a card and you are trying to deduce what your teammates are seeing on the back of it. They will rearrange their decks based on what they see in their hands so that symbols that match what they see are on one side of their hand and ones that don’t match are on the other side. You then use that information to figure out what is on your card. But it’s mindboggling! Because you only see what they aren’t seeing, and are trying to guess what they can see to narrow down on what you don’t see… Confused? Admittedly, it takes a round or two to wrap your head around what’s happening. And at first, once you get a grasp, it seems easy. But then cards start leaving your hand and the information available starts to dwindle. And then you start having to get help from informants. And then one of your clever teammates saves you by guessing what only you can see based on your “ummmmmmm”-ing and “ugh”-ing. As you can tell, it’s super hard to explain without playing it. But once you do you a) need to take a 5-minute break to let your brain unravel and b) start a new game. And all of this doesn’t take into account the amazing photos & really cool info that John unearthed as a part of the theme. In any case it’s just a winner.
Enough rambling. 🙂 All of these designers are awesome and I’m so happy we ran the contest. It was a challenge to get through all of the entries but I think it really helped us hone our judgement skills as far as thinking about which games were marketable, publishable, needed work, were almost there, etc. I can’t thank the designers enough for putting the hard work and dedication into making their games. We may tweak a few of the parameters for next year’s contest but there will definitely be one!
I’ll be back later this week with some more info on Black Sonata, as well as maybe an insight or two that I’ve run into setting up the company.
