My friends are good sports. They're the kind of people who are willing to spend an afternoon playing a game that nobody else has ever played before, a game that may or may not be any fun. A game made of marker-scrawled butcher paper, cheap pawns, and misaligned printed cards with obscure, tiny instructions on them. A game where the rules change over the course of the afternoon depending on how well I remember the instructions I re-wrote several times the night before.
I have really good friends. They're the kind of people who can spend a couple of hours stumbling around my hand-drawn map in a confused effort to make sense of how to win a game whose fundamental flaws became evident only thirty minutes after the first card draw. The kind of people who don't say, "will this game ever end?" Friends who can make constructive criticism sound excited, supportive, and ready to buy, while I'm ready to go back to the drawing board.
Although I've designed many games in the privacy of my own little world, only two have seen the light of day outside my own family. One of those quietly sits on a shelf, politely declined by one publisher, a game that just doesn't seem ready for prime time yet, a game that I like to think is in hibernation.
My second game is my pleasant surprise. Demonstrated to the owners of a game company during PrezCon in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this year, it drew the perfect comment during a play-through: "Hey, this game is fun!" Before the afternoon was out, we had a handshake agreement to produce the game. The last of the updates went out to them over Labor Day, and they expressed their intent to get it to the printers by October. I'll pass along the details once the company formally announces the release. For now, call it "Paul D. Owen's Eagerly Awaited Game."
My good friends await eagerly with me.
Bring the hibernation game over next time and we'll give it a whirl.
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