CardRunners Delivering, West Texas Railways Backerkitting, and Travis PhDing

CardRunners Delivering

About 30 minutes ago, these showed up at my house. And I am thrilled.

This means the 101 copies of CardRunners that were purchased are heading out into the world (as soon as the rest of the shipping supplies arrives this week). Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered a copy! I ordered a few extras (about 20) that are in the Press Pot Games store already for $19USD plus international shipping. Once these copies are gone, that’s it (unless some cool publisher decides to do something with it, which isn’t in the works).

Some people asked for a Print & Play file since overseas shipping can be prohibitive. You can find it here. Thanks to D. Newman for making them for me. Send him cookies.

West Texas Railways Backerkitting

West Texas Railways is ready to go on Backerkit! (Update: Some people are getting weird 404/error messages, while some are getting through just fine. I have a message out to Backerkit to see what’s going on. Sorry!)

It’s a $3 print and play, flip and fill train game about laying track, purchasing shares, and building junctions. I’m crowdfunding it because why not? It is 100% ready to go and will come in Letter and A4 sizing.

• Backerkit will launch Tuesday, September 19th and run until September 26th. 

• All you need to play is half a deck of cards, a map per player, and a writing utensil.

• It’s $3. That’s it.

• Despite being a print and play, flip and fill, it’s a shared incentives game. At the end of the game, you calculate each of the six companies’ values (across all players) and then divide by the number of shares you own. This means it can somewhat scale to larger player counts (like 10 or more). I’m not sure I’d suggest playing this with 50 people, but technically you could.

• I am going to send out an invite reminder link via Backerkit, so I apologize if you get notified about this stuff twice.

Travis PhDing

For those of you who are unaware (and care), this semester of grad school has begun. I am 57 hours into a 78 hour PhD program, which means I’m getting close (only three semesters left)! I have pushed out a lot of projects over summer, but now between full-time work and school, it’s time to slow down just a smidge.

I have a couple playtest copies of games showing up in the next few weeks, so when CardRunners is shipped and the WTXRW campaign is over, I can start focusing on the 18-card games I’ve been poking at:

• Jazz: a 3-4 player cooperative numbers-on-cards game about being in a jazz band

• “Spirits”: a 2 player cooperative limited communication/hidden information game about a human and a spirit trying to connect to one another.

• The Struggle is Real: a solitaire game about trying to get out of bed in the morning. This is an old design that needs some substantial work, but I can’t get past the theme.

As always, thanks for supporting small-time, indie creators. I know there are a bunch of us out here, but we do it because of the neat things we get to make.

Talk to you all soon!Travis