New Experiences

Published: Mon, 09/19/16

Hey !

The chaos of Gen Con is now a distant memory, but many exciting times are still ahead! Gloomhaven is still plugging away at the printers, and I grow more excited every day, thinking that in about two short months, it will be in the hands of thousands of people, and all of them will get to explore its many nooks and crannies. For me, and perhaps for you as well, these next two months could not pass quickly enough.

Except that these next few months are still jam-packed with a multitude of other important stuff going on. For starters, I'm finally going to Essen Spiel! I tried really hard to go last year, but it just didn't work out, This time it is a done deal, though. I'll be demoing an actual production copy of Gloomhaven (though I unfortunately won't have any for sale), and I'm excited to talk to and hang out with all my European backers.

Just a quick note that if you are going to be at Spiel and have any interest in helping out with the booth to run demos, let me know. I could always use more help!

Greetings from the Great Wall of Scythe at Gen Con!

But let's move on to stuff not covered in Gloomhaven updates. For starters, how's the new game coming along?

It's going great. It has been a difficult and tumultuous road, but I have finally arrived at a design that I am very happy with. Like, very, very happy. The design still requires a lot of balance, and there are some edge-case situations that require elegant solutions, but that's where larger-scale testing comes in.

That's right! I am nervous and excited to announce the start of blind testing for my new project. If you'd like to participate, go ahead and make your way over to the play testing survey and fill it out.

Oh, you want to know more about the game before you fill out the survey? Fair enough. Basically, it is a game about the original construction of the city of Gloomhaven. Very much Euro in design, it is a competitive game of city-building, tile placement, worker placement, and auctioning. Each player controls different basic resources, so all players must work together to create more advanced resources and deliver them to different building on the map, all the while making sure they get the largest credit for the construction.

If you can't tell, there are a lot of different elements to the game, but I think they work really well together. I've written a number of blog post about it over the last few months if you want more details.

Oh, you want to know the name of the game? Yeah, that makes sense. Everything feels more real when you can give it a name. I'm not 100% happy with the name, but right now I'm calling it "Founders of Gloomhaven." We'll see if it sticks. I am certainly open to suggestions.

Other than that, I've been working on some extra content for Gloomhaven that I'll be releasing in PDF form sometime after the game is released, but you'll just have to wait to see what that will be. One of the goals of it, though, is just to encourage players to toy around with the system and come up with their own content.

I think that's about it, though. See you at Essen Spiel!