Kickstarter - Eminent Domain

Tasty Minstrel Games has placed Seth Jaffee's Eminent Domain on Kickstarter for preorder.

Having read the rules, this definitely does look more interesting than Dominion, which lost a big chunk of my interest with Alchemy, which I felt was poorly designed. The main deck building mechanic used here is actually pretty clever and feels like it is more long-term than the purely short-term tactical choices given in Dominion.

The use of Kickstarter for this game is of special interest to me. A bunch of first-time publishers have already used Kickstarter to launch their games, but now established publishers are beginning to use it. This will go a long way towards legitimizing the site as a way to purchase new games.

Why do I care about that? Well, I decided that if I have not had a design of mine sold to a publisher by the end of the year, I will use Kickstarter to self-publish. So I very much want to see people willing to preorder games through this site. That's also why I recently incorporated Visible Hand Games and asked for help designing a logo. I am preparing the business side of things to actually publish if needed.

Playtesting Lecture

I was recently invited by Andrew Parks to speak about my playtesting process to his Fundamentals of Game Design class. The video is below.

They Also Have the Ability to Cheat Everyone Else

. . . in real life and in the game.

Disclaimer: I used to work on Wall Street.

Logo Contest Winner

Visible Hand Games has a new logo.

This choice was anything but easy; any of the finalists would have been a fine design, but it was time to make a choice.

My thanks go out to all who entered. I received many great designs from which to choose.

As this content has been going on, I have been spending time figuring out all of the legal parts of setting up a business. It's more complicated than I thought. I would prefer to just spend my time purely on game design, but this is something that will help ensure that my primary goal of seeing people enjoy my games is someday realized.

I still would vastly prefer to have another publisher who actually knows what they're doing print my game, but at a certain point I'll have to move forward on my own.

Update: I wish to give special thanks to the winning artist, Luis da Ponte, who possesses tremendous talent.

Logo Contest Finalists

The finalists have been chosen. One of these three will be the logo for Visible Hand Games.

Vote on entries here.

Update: I've added fake box covers to simulate what the logos would look like.