December 2023

In November we launched a short Print & Play campaign on Kickstarter and it’s still live now! Anxious Unicorns Poop Gold (yes you heard me right) is a hilarious party card game for 2-6+ players with expansions and for only £2! Play card combos and create the funniest sentences to gain extra points and turn order, whilst utilising risk v. reward tactics to gain the upper hand. The campaign also gives you access to our previous PNP titles ‘Voids’ and ‘Attack of the Intergalactic Gherkins’, as well as our free PNP ‘GHOATS’! The files will be sent in early December in time to build the game for the festive season.

In other news we’re also working on ‘Murder at Marlborough Manor’, a hidden role/social deduction game, which we hope to release in 2024. This sees a group of Victorian party-goers attempting to solve a murder, whilst the murderer lurks amongst them! Follow our socials to see more as the game progresses.

Anxious Unicorns Poop Gold Kickstarter

The Gamers, the Dice, and Us! We’re all seeking that Rainbow Connection! Come along on a journey of connecting with games, games that connect dice, and games that might help connect with others. Roll and Write Revolution has the Rainbow Connection: 4 games, $4! In this package, you’ll receive files for TrainBow, a roll and write train game; Landing Strip, a roll and write sequel of our earlier Plane games; Unicorns Love Rainbows, a party game of acting out your cards to find connections and score points; Rainbow Airlines, one of our classic roll and writes is back.

Our first party game!!: Unicorns Love Rainbows! They also love Cupcakes, sometimes they love both. Help Unicorns find Rainbows, Cupcakes, or both in this fun and funny party game! The players each draw a card then act out their card to other players to make those connections. Link a hungry Unicorn with a Cupcake and you both score a point! Find a Rainbow for the speedy Unicorn to go for a jog and score a point as well! Or even go for 3 points with connections between your Unicorn who wants it all and other players who have a Cupcake and a Rainbow! Grab a new card and keep the fun going!

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Lay scored cards down portrait for 1 point, landscape for 3 points. Play till 5 points, then give it another go! But remember if you can’t make a connection, you’ll need to draw a new card. But that just means more options to act out! There are also separate rules for 1-3 players to engage in rapid-fire real time play of playing cards from their hand to a face up row of cards. Can you be faster than your opponents? If you want a physical copy in a box, please search for ‘Unicorns Love Rainbows’ on The Game Crafter.

TrainBow is a roll and write game of collecting goods, shipping goods to stores, and making connections along a rainbow track. Each turn 2 dice are rolled, players play simultaneously, either connecting the dice to form one big action with potential bonuses or 2 smaller actions.

Landing Strip is a roll and write game that utilizes two dice to have the players help guide the various airborne travellers in to land safely. Dice may be combined for a larger value or used for a smaller value. The players will have to be mindful of each traveller seeking a path as paths overlap and leaving one where it was can disrupt the path of another.

Rainbow Airlines is back! In this roll and write game, you and your fellow travellers have hit a snag. The airport has cancelled all of the flights – all of them! Now you are stuck in beautiful Hawaii with no way to get back to that boring job. But wait, there’s hope! A special airline *just* opened its doors with a unique deal. If you and your fellow travellers can prove your mettle at building planes and getting passengers on board, you may just get back home!

Kickstarter link

Guess what? Our game officially has a name now – “WaterSafe”! 🌊 We were bouncing around a few ideas, and this one just felt right. Let us know what you think! Should we keep it, change it or have you got an idea? Oh, and get this—the box is designed to fit snugly in one hand. Perfect for some laid-back holiday gaming!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year filled with joy, laughter, and, of course, some epic board game fun. Now, here’s the scoop: the game won’t be in your retail hands until next year, but we’re gearing up for one heck of a ride. “WaterSafe” is making waves, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

Come January, we’ll be hitting the road for playtest sessions, open demos, and hanging out with board game clubs. Your thoughts and feedback are like gold to us as we fine-tune gameplay, graphics, and all the cool details.

So, stay tuned for updates! Here’s to an awesome Christmas, a Happy New Year, and loads of game nights in our future.

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Happy December all! As we enter the most wintery of winter months, I think it’s always nice to reflect on the highlights of the year. First and one of my favourite yearly events has to be UKGE23. It’s hard to describe in words but there’s something more magical about the experience each year I visit. There’s few times where you’re surrounded by so many like-minded and genuinely lovely people and you really feel this buzz across the 3 days. From an exhibitor point of view it’s also quite special seeing people enjoy playing your game. It makes the whole roller-coaster of Indie Game Publishing/Design worth it.

Another highlight for me is having designed Unfringed’s second game, Molehill Meadows. After a few months of creative drought and struggle to nail down a new design that worked it was very rewarding to prototype something that clicked not only for me but also for our first playtesters. I can’t wait to show more off in the New Year and fingers crossed we can have it in some capacity for UKGE24. Visiting Essen to talk to other publishers about the game also provided excellent feedback and discussion to help shape it into the game it is today.

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From a Zuuli point of view, there’s been a few highlights including how much people loved our first Unicorn promo, being able to reach a larger international audience with an implementation on BGA and also signing off our first international license with Zuuli hitting the Korean market very soon!

None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the amazing support network around me and of course the ever-increasing Zuuli fans that not only enjoy the game but also help share it with friends and family! As a bit of a thank you we’re offering Free Shipping on all orders from our official store, from now until Mid-December.

That’s all for now. I hope you all have a fantastic holiday season and catch you all in the New Year!

Limited time free shipping!

It’s coming up to Christmas and we’re about to take delivery of our order of Classis Caetera in a couple of days. I’ve decided to self fulfil, so that should make for an interesting festive season. Classis is still open for late pledges on GameFound, so if you want to pick up a copy of SSO with its latest expansion at the reduced Kickstarter price for Christmas, the chance is still there and will be for a little while longer.

Our older games like Moonflight, the deck unbuilder, and Turing, the pocket sized image interpretation game are also available from our website and make great gifts. Turing is a great multiplayer game for the post dinner Christmas table.

I hope you all have a great festive season.

Our website

Christmas Gifts – Much like November, December will largely be focused on fulfilling Christmas gift orders, and, you know, trying to get more ☺️. I love when gift orders start coming in, I enjoy every part of the process, I especially love making bespoke presents like the custom Board Game Survival Kit labels or getting someone’s favourite colour exactly right before gift wrapping it so that it arrives perfectly with its intended recipient.

Last year my biggest sellers were mini dice sets with their handmade bags and Board Game Survival Kits, this year Tri To Win is really giving them a run for their money, it seems to have had a big boom on Etsy in the past month, it makes me so happy that my first ever game design is still so loved.

With that in mind, if you have some special gamers in your life to buy for this Christmas please consider my handmade games and gaming accessories, they can be found on this website, the link below and on Etsy if you would prefer that.

Last order dates for Christmas gifts* – UK – 18th December, Europe – 12th December, USA – 13th December, RoW – 10th December

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*These are the last dates that are likely to reach you by Christmas Day, orders after these dates may still make it in time, likewise delays could also happen with the above dates.

Tabletop Spirit Magazine – In the latest issue of Tabletop Spirit Magazine, (number 22) I talked about what indie games I wish I could play this Christmas in my regular article called Indie Talk (page 32). This time around I also had a wonderful interview with Guy Allen called “So You Wanna…. Build a Boardgame Prototype”(page 20) Malum Hortus featured heavily in the article whilst I explain how I go about hand crafting prototype games, please check it out in the link at the top of this page.

Atikin Games shop

We’re thrilled to have just wrapped up our fourth successful Kickstarter campaign for our new project, The Morrison Game Factory! We finished the campaign with just over 2500 backers and over 300% of our funding goal, and can’t wait to get this game into your hands! If you missed the Kickstarter, you can find out how to preorder the game on our website.

In the meantime, our freight shipments for Threads of Fate are currently en route to their local destination hubs all over the world. We expect fulfillment to begin in December, and most backers can expect to receive their rewards before the end of 2023.

In other news, PostCurious has just begun a new partnership with Allplay, who will be gradually taking over our web store and shipping operation, starting with the US, Canada, and Australia/NZ. Having this aspect of distribution off our hands should allow us to spend more time doing what we do best—making games!

Come see us in Philly at PAX Unplugged Dec 1-3. We’ll be in booth #4111!

Preorder The Morrison Game Factory

We are so excited to announce that we recently started shipping out Cake of Doom to our backers! We’ve already heard from a few people who have been having a great time taking over the world and drooling at cakes.

It’s been a fantastic journey, we’ve learnt loads and met some truly awesome people! We are very grateful to everyone who backed, who gave us advice and who supported us along the way. We know this couldn’t have been possible without our designer Rob Ingle, and our manufacturers, DiceSport and Blue Castle Studio, so a big thanks to them.

Do reach out with any stories, funny moments or experiences you’ve had with Cake of Doom, we really enjoy hearing about it, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @cakeofdoomgame.

Cake of Doom Kickstarter

We ran our latest FlickFleet Gamefound campaign for a fifth(!) expansion to the game last month. It adds a new pirate fleet to the game and comes with more wreckage for people to cower behind and the pirates to mine for spare parts. The campaign was our third best (breaking our 5 campaign run of better and better campaigns 🙁 ). With even more heavily subsidised international shipping, it’s a great way to get your hands on the base game and any of the previous 4 expansions. The pledge manager is now open, until about 21st December, so if you’d like to late pledge you still can! We’ve also had FlickFleet featured in the Winter 2023 edition of Senet Magazine – it was a great review from Matt Thrower. My favourite quote from the review was ‘… this is a fast, fun game that can be enjoyed as a points-based pick-your-own fleet skirmish or via a series of scenarios, giving it plenty of variety and letting you launch your missiles in a pleasingly authentic way.’ We’ve had a massive rush of website orders this month too – not sure if the two are related!

Late pledges still available!