Producing Fun is a podcast about making tabletop games from a product perspective. Chris is the editor of Tabletop Gaming Magazine, the UK’s largest board game, RPG and miniatures game magazine. In this episode we discuss what good tabletop game writing looks like, the ethics and effectiveness of Kickstarter previews and what ‘product’ really means. Listen on podcasting platforms: https://anchor.fm/naylorgames Listen on Youtube: Transcription I'm James. And this is producing fun, a podcast about making games from a product perspective. Welcome to Producing fun. This week I talked to Chris Eggett. Chris is the editor of tabletop gaming magazine. The UK is largest board, game, RPG and miniatures game magazine. And he also runs the publications own podcast. Being at...
I just launched a new podcast about games. Here I explore the thinking behind it and introduce the first episode. Time for something new? For a while now, I’ve been finding myself less and less inclined to spend time writing a blog. This has probably been very clear from how sporadic, in general, my posts have become. My original plan – back at the end of 2019 – was to get back to blogging once the New Year started. I’d really enjoyed writing the pieces that explored the behind-the-scenes story of the Magnate Kickstarter. With a well-earned Christmas break behind me, I was fully planning to get back to proper blogging again shortly after. Of course, there were some un-forseen...
Thinking about running a Kickstarter? Well, 19 months after I decided to self publish my game, Magnate: The First City, I am entering the final build-up of mine. This is the inside story of the challenges, joys, thrills and spills of running a Kickstarter campaign and the nerve-racking final weeks before launch… read on if you dare. “So smart guy, if you’re building up to launch why does this blog count UP rather than count DOWN?” I can think of no better symbol of the sometimes messy reality of running a Kickstarter campaign than the answer to this question. Because of course, a Countdown would be WAY more sexy. We recently announced that we’re launching Magnate in November, but not...
The MDA framework is now well known in design circles. Here I take it a step further putting forward my own riff on the model for tabletop games specifically; incorporating the notion of access and mapping out some critical detail. Why build a model? I have always had a penchant for systems and frameworks. Huge geek that I am, I’ve always enjoyed a good railway network diagram or process map. In my professional life I’m the person who took on the job of mapping out my company’s technology stack’s to give us a comprehensive picture of how it’s 38 distinct components interacted (or over-interacted in many cases!). Such frameworks or models aren’t just fun for people like me though. They...
A group of experienced games journalists are publishing a 250 page hardback boardgame yearbook and it looks very interesting. While books are not really my focus here, it seems like an interesting product of itself with a strong proposition; making it worthy of a closer look. UPDATE: "The Boardgame Book" Kickstarter campaign is now live. Essentially, it's a Britannica Book of the Year for tabletop games: mixing reviews of the 100+ biggest titles of the year and interviews with designers (including big names like Martin Wallace, Matt Leacock and Reiner Knizia). The goal appears to be to create a single compendium which will capture the essence of what was going on in the boardgame world over the past 12 months....
