I had a skeleton of this article written up before last night. I figured it would be a fairly simple thing to fill in a few details, double check some numbers, get some quotes and call it a day.
Less than 37 minutes into the Indie Games Night Market, there were still hundreds of folks in line just to get in.
Multiple games had already sold out.
Hosted by New Mill Games
So I scrapped that draft, and started over.
The Event
The Indie Games Night Market was “small” market event within PAX Unplugged, organized and hosted by Daniel Newman of New Mill Games. It was for games that would otherwise never go to production or distribution.
The reasons for that were as varied as the games themselves:
Propaganda is a game about tossing dice and then using photo framing to try and sell yourself as the underdog. The game’s core mechanic and unfortunately topical theming made it difficult for the designer, Chris Lawrence, to pitch it to publishers.
Lab Meltdown is a real time co-operative game with a lot of components. Designer Amelie Le-Roche, who assembles her games out of garage, said it would have been impractical for her to produce more copies than she needed for the Night Market.
In Memory Of is a collaborative storytelling experience about holding a funeral for fictional person. The designer, Tony Tran, felt like it would be too sad an experience for a mass market audience.
And some games, like Skyline, a 1-4 player co-op visual puzzle game, were never made to be distributed at all. Max Seidman and Mary Flanagan made Skyline as a research tool over 10 years ago, and the Night Market proved to be a solid opportunity to dust off and hand-craft a fun game that otherwise wouldn’t have been published.
This is just a smattering of games and reasons, but the Night Market let all of these designs, that might otherwise not have seen the light of day, have a chance to shine.
The Results
It’s hard to see this first event as anything but staggering success. There were over 20 games, and slightly under that many designers. There were some pain points, but both attendees and designers clearly had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the idea.
Folks had started lining up at 6:00 to get in, and by the time 7:00 rolled around, there were five or six stacks of lines filled. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the setup:
Games sold quickly. Different designers brought different numbers of games, so some games vanished in an instant, while other games held onto their demo copy to sell closer to the end of the night. While the event was planned to run until 10:00, things had mostly quieted down by about 9:30 or so.
Pain Points
No first draft is perfect, and the same can be said for events. While things went fairly smoothly for the designers, many attendees who waited in line found that all the games they were looking for had sold out by the time they got in.
I probably should have taken more photos, but that would have required me to actually look up from the event itself.
In addition, the looping structure of the layout and the small corridors for each table meant that there was some bunching up near the front. This resolved itself eventually, but was definitely a bit of a problem at the start.
Overall
IGNM was a pretty incredible event. While I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, it seemed like at least half the tables completely sold out. I’m super excited to see what the future holds for this sort of event.
That said I do feel quite bad for folks on the tail end of the line to get in. Some of these attendees waited 45 minutes to walk into a mostly empty salesfloor.
The designers I was able to talk to were thrilled with the response to their games. Even the folks who had expected to sell all their copies didn’t expect this level of turnout.
There’s a lot that could be said about Japanese indie culture as it relates to fan work, small batch board games, and other differences between Japan and the US. And it should be said by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone like James Nathan, whose has a bunch of great posts about attending the Tokyo Game Market on Opinionated Gamers. (The one above is a really fascinating readabout catalogs, and cultural expectations.)
I had originally planned to play as many of the games at the event as I could, and buy a lot more. Since I managed to get into the event early to help folks set up, and to interview a few people, I scrapped that plan out of respect to attendees who had waited in line. I did manage to get copies of Propaganda, Mutation, and In Memory Of, which I’ll cover at some point in the future.
Thanks
I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took time to chat with me about their games, and their thoughts on the night market, including, but not limited to:
Daniel Newman of New Mill Games, for hosting the event, and chatting with me about his inspiration for it.
Chris Lawrence, the designer of Propaganda
Max Seidman, one of the designers of Skyline
Tony Tran, the designer of In Memory Of
The many, many, attendees who took the time to chat with me briefly about their feelings on the event.
Imagine that I come to you with an incredible idea for a business: buying lottery tickets. You are skeptical at first, but I make the following argument. We’ll only do it for a little bit. If it doesn’t turn out to be profitable, we’ll stop doing it, after a few months.
Oh, except instead of just going to a convenience store and buying Mega-Millions, I’m going to need you to get me a team of artists, programmers, a full QA team, and a publisher, because we’re not going to be buying lottery tickets, we’re going to be making live service games. So I guess in this metaphor, our lottery tickets take likely several hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a year or two to buy.
Let’s look at a few of those tickets shall we?
GUNDAM EVOLUTION just announced its end of service. Also, a bit ago, MultiVersus ended its beta, with a promise to return in 2024. These aren’t the only games, but they’re recent examples. CrimeSight was a paid game, and it was a brilliant deduction game with incredibly clever mechanics that never found a playerbase, and it shut its servers down. Oh, and The Cycle: Frontier, while it sucked, was a good example of this thing we’re talking about, so I guess I’ll include anyway.
As an outside observer, I don’t have perfect insight into what’s going on here, but I can make a guess. If I was in games purely for the money, I get why everyone would want a League of Legends, or an FGO, or a Genshin Impact. It’s tempting! And perhaps even the math makes sense. Maybe if you buy enough tickets, this all works out in the end.
But I can’t help but look at all of this and be mildly depressed. Thousands of man-hours, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tons of effort is being spent on creating games that sometimes don’t even last a year.
And many of these games are good, when you peel back the endless daily quests, in app purchases, and optional addons that cost $30 a piece. They have their own communities and player base, but because they don’t become a massive hit, they get shut down.
It’s depressing to me that video games feel like they’re switching from something like a book, where you can have a cult classic that gets discovered years later, to something more akin to software as a service, where when it’s gone, it’s just gone.
Every time I go to a convention, I promise myself I’m gonna write about everything I saw. And every time I get home, a bit overwhelmed, I cover 2-3 games, and then move onto the next thing.
So this time, I’ll write all it all up right now the bus ride home! But first…
The Non-Games part of the Event
This is a very small event compared to something PAX Unplugged. At its heart, Granite Games Summit is a bunch of folks in a hotel ballroom playing board games for four days straight.
It also has a very cozy feeling compared to other conventions I’ve gone to. The whole thing was very low-key, with plenty of of families and children. In terms of lodging, the Doubletree by Hilton is perfectly average. Still nicer than my apartment. For food, there’s enough stuff within walking or driving distance to be fine as well, but nothing special.
There’s very much an air of trust to the whole thing. One draw of the event is that attendees can bring their own board game collections to be borrowed from. And beyond that, the event organizers also provide an entire game library.
Overall, this is a low-intensity event, offering a chance to play a large number of games without buying them yourself. I don’t think anyone comes to an event like this for any reason other than to play board games. So let’s talk about those games!
The Playtests and Prototypes
Given that none of these games are out yet, I don’t want to say too much about them, and I won’t be saying anything I didn’t already say to the designers’ faces. Still, I spent a fair amount of time on them, so I’d like to talk about them a bit.
Cubism by Resonym A very fun deck builder. The designer is a friend of mine. Still in the tweaking stages, but if you see it at another event, I highly encourage you to try it out. It has a very clever twist on resource generation that I’m not sure I should spoil here?
Cypher Sessions Cypher Sessions is a beat-the-leader matching game about writing rap. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t have too much fun with it. I said as much in my feedback to the designer. I’d play it again if someone wanted to, but I don’t have any huge amount of interest in it. But it’s still in development, so maybe it will end up great!
The Armory The Armory is a set collection buying game about trying assemble collections of weapons and armor. It’s in the early stages, but its core concept does feel fun. There were some lulls and weirdnesses, and the game itself doesn’t quite feel ready for prime time, but I’d be interested to see where it ends up.
A quick note: If you’re the dev of one of these games, and would like me to update this article to link to your twitter or blog, please just send me a message on Twitter.
The Fully Released Games
Here are the fully released games I played. So no punches pulled. I’ll be giving my quick thoughts, and ultimately, answering a single question: Would I play it again?
Dice Forge
Dice Forge is a game about Forging Dice. There are customizable dice that you can snap the sides off of, and snap back on. It’s a heavily produced affair where your goal is ultimately to Get The Most Victory Points, by customizing your dice, and using the resources they generate to buy cards that give you victory points and abilities.
Would I play it again?Yes. I generally enjoyed it, and I’d be curious to try different strategies if I got a rematch.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Hogwarts Battle is deckbuilder with the Harry Potter license. I’ll talk about the game in a moment. First though, I would like to note two things unrelated to gameplay that drove me a bit nuts.
First off, it feels like every other name and item in the game has a trademark symbol on it, to the point of ridiculousness. In addition, all the game’s art has a tone of “on-file style guide movie images.”
Poor Harry Potter, emblazoned with the symbol of ownership by “She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-On-Social-Media” for all eternity.
The end result is that the whole thing has the artistic feeling of licensed children’s valentines from Hallmark, and a tone of tackiness. Someone in the chain of command had a decision to make: was it more important that players be immersed in defending Hogwarts from its villains, or that they know that, should J.K. Rowling’s estate ever wish to make a Peter Pettigrew themed vacuum cleaner, they own the rights to do so. They chose the latter.
Editor’s note:You know, because Peter Pettigrew sucks.
Which is unfortunate, because this game doesn’t feel like it wants to be a cheap tie-in product. Whoever designed it seemed to really give some thought to the characters and items. One small standout function for me was that both Draco Malfoy and Lucius Malfoy have a similar effect, with the elder Malfoy being more powerful. The effect itself is “Not really doing anything bad on their own, but making bad things that happen worse.”
Which at least to me was a pretty good way to encapsulate those characters!
That said, this is not the strongest deckbuilder I’ve ever played, or even the best one I played this weekend. The game has 7 scenarios, all of which are additive as far as I can tell, and I played through 1-3 without being challenged. The lack of any deck-thinning mechanics or way to clear the row of items you can buy to add to your deck can quickly lead to a feeling of bloat with no mechanical remedy.
Would I play it again?Yes, BUT only to beat the game on the hardest difficulty, and see if it gets any more interesting/addresses any of the problems with the deck building elements.
This also would probably be a decent game to play with non-board gaming Harry Potter fans, or maybe your family.
Editor’s note: playing this game at a convention’s library is the best way to play it! You get to try it without giving JKR any more money.
KeyForge
KeyForge is yet another card game from Richard Garfield. I have to assume it was built around the question of “How can we remove deck-building, landscrew, and collecting cards, but still sell you blind box packs?” And thus was born the Unique Deck Game. Each deck is randomly generated in advance for you, and cannot be changed.
Snark aside, I generally like KeyForge. Did it disrupt the big 3? No. Do I only have the game because it’s mostly dead, and I bought a booster box of decks from a discounts bin for $40, when its MSRP is supposed to be about $120? Yes. It makes novel attempts to solve a bunch of problems in the card game space, even if they don’t all succeed.
Would I play it again?Yes. I find KeyForge entertaining, and the unconstructed nature lends to a lower power level than a lot of constructed TCGs. I might get bored at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet.
A Feast for Odin
Feast for Odin is a worker placement game about populating a Tetris grid. Is that an oversimplification? Yes. But this game took 30 minutes to sort components, 30 minutes to explain the rules, and 3 and half hours to play. Whatever I write here will be an oversimplification.
Analysis Paralysis: The Board Game
I would like to make a few quick observations, though. If games are art, and art is subjective, then I subject that I would like to never again be subjected to A Feast for Odin. The game has an 8.2 on Board Game Geek, a number would now be infinitesimally lower if I added my own rating. I found the game to be long, tedious, and I struggled to spot interesting mechanical interactions and failed to be engrossed the game’s theming.
This probably says more about me than A Feast for Odin, but it was my experience.
Would I play it again?No. I would rather do my taxes. It wouldn’t be more fun, but it would be shorter, and at the end at least my taxes would be finished.
Fun Fact: A Feast for Odin is a Euro-game, following the traditional Euro-game model of “Everyone should score about the same number of points at the end, despite the winner having a clearly better position.” I scored 30 points. Both my opponents scored OVER 90, and one of them had also never played before. I am very bad at this game.
Clank
Clank is the better deckbuilder I played this weekend. It’s still not great, but it does do some interesting things. The goal is to get into a dungeon, get loot, and get out. This is compounded slightly by fact that you need to do it without getting burnt to a crisp by the dragon living in the dungeon.
There are really three systems in Clank. There’s the deck builder, where the unique conceit is that you must play every single card in your hand each turn. There’s the board that you move around on. And there’s the Clank bag.
Some cards in your deck will generate clank tokens. These get added to the bag, and whenever various cards show up in the games buy row, the dragon attacks. You pull out a certain number of tokens from the bag, and take damage based on whose color they were. Things get more dangerous as players pick up the loot, giving the whole thing a feel of escalating tension.
Would I play it again?Yes. Each component of Clank is “just okay,” but as a whole, it feels like a much stronger game. Apparently the spinoffs also address issues with the game’s pacing.
Spirit Island
Spirit Island is a co-op settler construction game. Oh I’m sorry, I mispelled that. It’s a co-op settler destruction game. This game also took 3 hours to play, though the setup time was much faster.
I enjoyed Spirit Island far more than A Feast for Odin. At least part of this is due to the theming being far more interesting. “Drive out the invading settlers as a powerful nature spirit” excites me more than “Acquire a cow.”
That said, given that both my teammates had played before, I don’t know exactly how impactful I was to the group. There was also a lot of time just spent resolving various effects, as opposed to using my various powers.
Would I play it again?Yes. I liked Spirit Island, and I’d be curious play some of the more complex spirits, and the ones with different playstyles. It was fun!
Wrap Up
Granite Games Summit 2023 was a good time, and I’d attend a Granite Games Summit again. I do think this is an event best attended as some sort of group, or if you’re already local to try to keep the costs for a hotel/travel down.
The other benefit to attending with friends/family is that you already have a playgroup for most things, and can hopefully find people fill out slots should you need them.
That said, this is a very focused event. It’s about playing board games for up to 4 days straight in a reasonable hotel in New Hampshire, and not doing much else. If that sounds fantastic, awesome. Go follow the convention’s account on Twitter, so you can find out when to buy tickets for next year (they sell out very fast).
This rant is a response to this opinion piece in the New York Times. You can read it if you want context, but your life is likely richer for not doing so.
There, I’ve fixed your writeup for you.
In his piece “AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too” James Marriott includes a quote from Daisy Christodoulou: “ChatGPT sometimes produces superficially plausible essays that fall apart under closer scrutiny. But plenty of humans write essays like that too. In fact, it is one of the criticisms of PPE graduates.”
There’s something ironic in including a quote about things being superficial and falling apart under scrutiny, in an article that feels incredibly superficial, and falls apart under scrutiny. I’d quote more of his article in this response, but that means more people might have the misfortune of reading his 8 disconnected and unclear paragraphs.
Because I’m not James Marriott, and I value the time of people who read my pieces, let me offer my quick conclusion:
Mr. Marriott, you do not have a problem with artists or “creatives.”Nor do your lawyer friends, who have people roll their eyes at them, or ignore them at parties. You have a problem with assholes.
The fact that every artist you’ve ever met fits this profile does say something about the company you’ve chosen to keep.
Anyway, let’s get back to your opinion piece. I’m not 100% sure what your opinion is, which is bad, given that I’ve read your article 7 or so times now. Perhaps it’s that “Artists are a bit too full of themselves, and need to be taken down a peg.” Have I got that right? Have I summarized in one sentence what took you eight paragraphs?
Of course, you’re a professional journalist, and I’m not. Actually, my day job is working for a software company that sells what, at least on some level, amounts to automation software. This is likely why you were able to craft such a wonderful headline that grabbed hands, and filled those “creatives” you wish to see humbled with such rage.
James Marriott’s writeup addresses none of the actual issues many artists and writers have with the current generation of what I’ll lump as “content generation technologies.” He doesn’t talk about how their underlying training data may have been taken and used without compensation. He doesn’t cover how many of these models can be flawed backboxes. He just seem happy that this makes artist artists upset.
And so I must ask, Mr. Marriott, why? Why does it give you such glee that so many might be put out of work? Why is it, that when given space in a publication that more people read in a day than will read anything I ever write in my lifetime, you take that space to make perhaps the most petty argument that can be comprehended in favor of AI generated art and writing?
This is barely an opinion. It’s not even a rant. It’s a whiny self-centered hope that an emerging technology will “make some people who annoy me unhappy.”
I wanted to close this rant out by making some more ad hominem attacks, but unfortunately I can’t. You see, I can’t find any more of his work. When you google Mr. Marriott’s name, you find a comedy YouTuber/musician, with 2 million subscribers, and a few hundred thousand views on each video, and no other articles or writing by the one being ripped on in this article.
Gametrodon condemns the behavior of the abusers at Activision-Blizzard, and the management that enabled them.
The next several months will likely determine if the company has any chance for reform, or will just act to save public face without making any actual commitment to demolishing a culture of sexism and abuse.
