Monday, April 13, 2009

Tasty Minstrel Games

In about 8 hours I'm heading up to Las Vegas with my friend Michael and his wife Erin to attend the GAMA trade show. I've never been to such a show, and I understand it's different from the game conventions I go to - it's not about consumers playing games, it's an industry show where publishers sell themselves and their products to retailers or distributors, or something like that.

Michael and Erin have started Tasty Minstrel Games in order to publish board games, and I'm trying to support them as best I can. They are launching with 2 games, my Terra Prime, and Alex's Homesteaders which I helped develop. If things go well, the plan is for me to be the in-house developer for TMG, which is the kind of thing I've been wanting to do for several years now.

I'm looking forward to finding promising games and helping develop them if need be for publication. I've got a few in mind already by some of my colleagues at the Board Game Designers Forum.

In the next couple of days Tasty Minstrel will ave a website with some information about Michael, Erin, and myself, as well as descriptions of Terra Prime and Homesteaders, and a blog for and about Tasty Minstrel and its games. For example, I'll be posting a design summary for Terra Prime - probably nothing you don't already know if you follow this blog religiously, but it'll be a nice, compact summary of all the major milestones in the game's development over the last 4 years or so. I've asked Alex to write something similar for Homesteaders, as it had gone through a lot before I ever saw it. I like reading these sorts of development blogs, so maybe they'll be interesting to other people as well, and will make for good starting content for the website.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Congrats on the new enterprise. I hope it does well!

I think that what you'll find is that designing games is the easy part compared to finding and maintaining a distribution chain! Thankfully, the internet, I think, can help alleviate some of those issues.

Anonymous said...

They're starting with two very good games.

But running a business is hard. It's quite possible to fail with very good games. Best of luck to Tasty Minstrel!