Author: Phillip Melchers

It’s always scary taking that first giant leap into something new. For Phil and I, this is going to be our first leap into game creation, marketing, and sales. Designing the game, box, setting up a website, getting everything together is just actually the back-stage work for the main event. This morning, we decided it’s time for that event.

We’re finalizing the box orders as I type, and as so many of you have been asking us “WHEN CAN WE FINALLY BUY A COPY”… well, here’s your chance.

We’re taking pre-orders for BaRPG!!!!

Visit the Pre-Order page, enter your details (at this time, no purchase necessary), and we’ll put you in a list of First Recipients for BaRPG. Bear in mind the postage fees specified on our Pre-Order page. We’re working to reduce these, so these will be worst-case costs.

Once we have the games boxed up and ready to ship, we’ll e-mail you the payment details (via PayPal), confirm your address, and get your copy of BaRPG your way ASAP!

Once again this is our first Beta version of the game. We’d love to hear your feedback, likes and dislikes, and most of all what kind of fun chaos happened when you were playing with your friends! Send us photos, share your stories. We can then take this with us for the next, fully commercial version of BaRPG, which we hope to release by the end of this year.

We’ll also send you a couple of our business cards with the pack. Give them to your friends you play BaRPG with, so that they can also get their hands on a copy of the game!

Until then, Keep Questing you fine drunks!

~Johno

Just a quick blog post…

Though we’re actually not at home at the moment, we’re in Spain visiting parents/in-laws, as fate has it, this morning our package from the printer arrived.

Fortunately we have some amazing neighbors who are holding our package until we get home.

From the moment we got the message, we were elated, nervous, and super super curious about the cards. Most importantly however, we anxiously needed a measurement so we could finish work on the final box design! Luckily our neighbor checked this for us, and shared the following snaps of our little baby.

 

So we’re all aware that SO MANY OF YOU keep asking us, “WHEN CAN WE GET A COPY?!?!” Well we’re sorry to have to troll you with this again, but seriously NOT YET!!! We need to make the boxes, get the website URL up there, as well as tie some final legal/business knots on this end. So, to kinda quote a certain card…

Least vengeful dainty hand ever though, believe me!

We’re working hard peeps! Boxes are next, alongside some final biz-mumbo-jumbo. But as for how the cards are looking, we’re superty-duperty-pysched!

More updates to come soon!

Until then, keep questing you fine drunks!

~Johno

Well its official everybody. As of yesterday we prepared our game, trimmed its margins, and dressed it up in PDF before proudly sending it off to the printers.  Johno and I are happy to report that our little passion project of almost 1 year is almost ready for the world! We predict that sometime after this weekend we will officially own the first 200 copies of our game. Now all that remains is getting the deck boxes printed and then we are ready for business!

 

First of all, we appreciate everyone’s patience with our game.  If it’s any consolidation, I can report that Johno has been full-on android mode over these past few days in trying to get this project finished. As stated before, there was a problem with our cards margins and while Johno went into overtime to fix this, I began to witness less our usual relationship and more a terrible self-insert fan-fiction that a younger me may have written about Lt. Data. As a fan of Star Trek, I can hardly complain. *Ahem* Fully functional” and anatomically correct…Am I right?

As for me, I have been busy doing the final edits on all of our cards. Though I can say that as a writer I have obviously done my fair share of editing, there’s something about editing a game that feels a bit twisted. Does it have to be grammatically correct?  Well like anything written, most of the time, yes. But though grammar is important, it is not as important as keeping the cards easily understandable and condensed. We’ve often commented on how writing rules is like trying to program a human. When making a game, you got to make your terminology strict and presentation simple. Too many variables and suddenly one person is reading a card entirely different than the other.

 

On that note, maybe that’s how the robot uprising starts. Here’s an idea for a novel: Battlefield Robot. Headline: It was a game of life, but the robots didn’t understand the rules. If only Asimov was still alive…

Whatever happens what’s done is done. The money has been spent. We can only move forward from here.  For now all we can do is bite our nails and hope that everything goes smoothly at the printers. Here’s to hoping that no major typos cross us, and that all the margins turn out perfect. If all goes to plan, then our product should be ready by May 2016.

 

Till then, Keep Questing You Fine Drunks.

 

I’m losing count how many changes we’ve put into this thing. I can recall them if we go through the mountains of textual changes Phil and I have put into the item, character, and rules cards. But actually list them in one go? Impossible. I think we’ve said it before, writing a game is like programming marching orders for the entire animal kingdom.

BaRPG has now come to what we’ve now decided is the final play test. And it’s nerve wrecking coming back once again from the drawing board, knowing what went wrong last time, wondering if anything will go wrong now, questioning if the changes may themselves induce new problems this time round. You’ve got to stop somewhere and just push on forward.

I took the game along on a night stop at work again, and was in luck this time round. We had an extra crew member along on nightstop as part of her work-place training, meaning there could be four players with me observing from the sidelines. Best of all, and I am trully blessed with my colleagues in this, all four were keen to give the game a go. So, for the last time, I pulled our plastic-sleeve-protected home-printed cards out of the ziplock bag, shook out the dice, and placed the pile of cards in the center of the table. Final exam. Did we do enough?

 

I watched as Lisa, Patricia, Sandra, and Alex pulled the pack apart, read through the rules carefully, and set up their cards and take their items. So far so good. The dice was rolled, and Lisa as the BarBarian got both one of the best and worst answers I have heard in play testing history so far. Sober points were dealt, drinks taken, and then the market round opened up. So far great!

This kept up until someone pulled the Trappe card. And before I knew it the group decided it meant Patricia (who pulled it) could swap her character with another player. A bug! Damn! I had to hold the game for a minute, and asked them how they read the card the way they did. “Not In Play” along with the word “Swap” were causing confusion. Fair point, again we’re running into the realm of non-native speakers combined with non-gamers. This needed clarification.

The game continued, and after the typical 4 rounds all four players were throwing goblins, cloaks, and dainty hands at each other. It was the usual hilarity of counter-attacks upon counter-attacks, and something I love to see happen in every play test because it’s exactly how we ended up playing this game with our friends those many many weeks ago. Before we knew it an hour had passed, and we decided to end the game as my fantastic test subjects wanted to go to a few more bars, and it felt like the right moment to finish up. I was elated. Besides the trappe card, everything else was working beautifully, especially the rules card with all it’s updates.

We’re gonna be adjusting the Trappe Card and the Vengeful Liver (because that also contains an element of character recycling). From there it’s the scary step of collating the cards, building them into one single document, and sending it off to the printers. We’re going for 200 copies. At 65 cards a deck, that’s 13,000 cards… I feel sorry for the postman!

Expect more news from us on this soon! Once the decks are in, it’s the box, and then we finally will have our Beta decks for sale! Most importantly we will have something for you guys to sink your teeth into, and we’d love to hear how your games go so we can ramp in better changes for the final First Edition of BaRPG!

Until then,
Keep Questing you Fine Drunks,

~Johno =)

Nothing is scarier than a co-workers opinion. They’re not exactly your friends (although some may be), they’re not always experts in the subject matter at hand (although, again, some may be), and they won’t always sugar coat any feedback (again… you get the drift). Perfect testing ground for BaRPG, worse place to test my nerves at presenting the game to people who may not even be gamers.

I’m fortunate with my colleagues though. Working for a European airline, I have the pleasure of unwinding after long days in hotels with professional and always friendly co-workers. Taking BaRPG along for a night in Hanover turned out to be a great idea!

 

After placing the stack of cards down in front of Kim, Karen, Nynke, and Carl, I sat back, sipped my Weisz beer, and watched the group attack the beast before them. 10 minutes later, Kim as the Drmunk declared the Reception on the other side of the lobby as the ‘blessed artifact’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an aircrew move that fast through a hotel! My personal highlight was when Carl had tried charming PintCess Karen, Kim heckled his attempt with a lavish “You think that’s gonna get you laid?” comment (for all clarity, Kim and Carl are already a couple with kids, making this remark all the funnier).

Back home, Phil and I dove back into our various ODT documents that make up the character, item, rules, and level slider cards (see Phil’s last post, “BaRPG Prototype Beta Deck is Coming Soon!“) We’re realising programming a computer must be easier than writing rules that can, and will, be intepreted by different people in different ways. The joys and eloquences of the English vernacular!

Updated deck in hand, last Monday we hit the streets of Amsterdam again. We’ve gotten better at cruising the various bars and pubs for what looks like a receptive group to (blind-) play test for us. It actually feels a little creepy on our side at first! Fortunately in the Bier Fabriek we ran into Anne, Bassey, Chris and Job, who we’re super friendly and willing to give our game a go in exchange for a round of beers.

 

So once again, Phil and I sat back, notepad in hand, and let the four of them bend over the pack of strange excitement before them. It took about 5 minutes before they began rolling the dice. Interestingly, new errors in interpretation emerged from the rules card, but Phil and I could see immediately how to fix those; we’re getting good at this! What was interesting was this time the game flow wasn’t actually hampered at all anymore. It was like they had their own little variation on how to play the game and it wasn’t disrupting the flow (for those in the know, they we’re actually using the original two step roll that used to be part of the first version of the game! Fancy that!)

Before long, and after Bassey’s attempt at convincing her other three Dutch friends that she couldn’t be a witch because she was English, the game saw it’s first item card being played. Cue the usual mayhem; BrewId Chris made his initial ‘drunken ritual’ move drinking a beer, Bassey got away with mumbling ‘Dutch’ as part of the Ginstrel’s song, and Anne suggested random bar vandalism  as a method to siege a castle.

 

From the outside looking in, Phil and I might as well have been wearing lab coats and standing behind a two-way mirror holding clipboards. The group really got stuck in, and it was a joy to see them really enjoy the game!

45 minutes into the game our good friend Thijs came to join us, and with the groups help, the three of us joined in to continue play at the maximum number of players (7). The game took it beautifully. Flow was still natural, character swaps we’re frequent enough, and the increased number of group activities since our last update with that many players kept everyone involved. It was another success!

 

Back to the drawing board, the rules card is getting a slight make-over. Nothing too dramatic, just something to make the flow between the stages and their integration clearer (read, Johno’s gonna delete a whole lotta boxes!)

One more play through should nail this one. I’m taking the game with me on a long night stop in Cardiff this week again with colleagues. With the new rules card, our trusty notepad, and an eagerness to finally see this game born into the world, we can’t wait to see how it plays!

Till then,

Keep Questing you Fine Drunks,

~Johno =)

As I write this Jonathan and I are currently holed up in our Amsterdam apartment on a perfectly cool and sunny day. Accompanying us are two gloriously spicy Caesars (a purely Canadian evolution of a Bloody Mary) that I have expertly made.  Together we are working on BaRPG.  Whereas I am writing this post, Jonathan is beside me busily tweaking the changes suggested during our latest play test.

I can say with confidence that we are almost there, almost ready to print. This weekend, Jonathan went to visit a friend who lives in Tilburg and randomly stumbled upon the original birth place of BaRPG.  This seems like as good of a sign as ever to begin the next stages of our development.

 

Currently our goal is to have our first 100 decks printed by the end of the month in order to sell them during our road trip (Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Bratislava) which we will discuss in more detail as we figure it out.  What we will ask for now is that you continue sending us emails/messages to show your interest in our product. We will then make an order list of all people interested in getting a copy. Who knows, maybe we’ll go from printing 100 to 200 copies (then we can definitely pay our illustrator)!  Most likely, the deck will be sold for around 10 Euro + Shipping. Early Bird Special Shout out to “Carlos Rosa,” from New Orleans for sending us an email! It really made us smile.

In the meantime we’re going to be doing some more blind play testing around the Amsterdam area. If you are interested and live near us send us a message and we’ll see if we can meet up. If not, we’re probably going to go back to harassing random tourists on Warmoesstraat.

It’s going to be an exciting month for us, and we’re even more excited to see what happens during our road trip in May.

 

Till then,

Keep Questing you Fine Drunks,

 

-Phil