December 2024

My name is Courtney Laschkewitsch, and I am an up and coming game designer in Northern California! I am passionate about creating fun small story-driven games. I have put out my first fully developed game and Kickstarter this November/December, just in time for the holiday season! It is a print and play, roll and write, draw and color!

You have entered your neighborhood Christmas lights competition and you are spending your time buying, drawing, and coloring your property with holiday lights and decor! Go to the Mistletoe Marketplace or Tinsel Thrift to get a leg up on your neighbors!

Or – you can bribe, brawl, and sabotage your neighbors (in Clark Griswold fashion) as you battle for Christmas glory.

Kickstarter link to Christmas Game

Sale! – There’s still time to get yourself a great deal during the Atikin Games 5th Birthday Sale! You’ll find some wonderful Christmas presents with up to 20% off in the shop and there’s now the option of getting a gift card, just in time for the holidays!

Introducing board gamers hampers! – I’ve been putting together tabletop gaming themed hampers that include an Ultimate Board Game Survival Kit, tote bag, bookmark, keyring, button badges, the choice between my three mint tin games (Feline Felonies, Canine Capers or Mini Memory Mischief) and there’s the choice of having more meeples or more dice and having jewellery included or not.

I hope people will love the meeple holding dice design I made for the front of the box. The hampers come in really nice solid magnetic boxes so I wanted to make the box itself a beautifully designed keepsake for the gift receiver. At the moment I have a purple one listed, I plan to gradually add blue, yellow, green, red, orange and pink as well as offering a much bigger hamper that’s generically board game themed rather than centred around a player colour.

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I’m starting with the colours that have been the most popular for The Board Game Survival Kits, although as always, I’m more than happy to do custom orders and swap out items for others or to do other colours on request.

There’s more – As well as the addition of a gift card and hampers to the store I’ve also added beaded meeple necklaces, mini D20 cufflinks, more button badges and more mini dice bags with mini dice sets.

Christmas is coming – The meeple and D20 Christmas tree decorations have been doing amazingly, I’m on my third batch of making more stock at the moment, I hope to see many photos of trees adorned with them over the coming month.

Happy Holidays everyone! See you in 2025!

Atikin Games new arrivals

Politics is a waking nightmare for those of you living in the USA, and we know you are facing fear and grief. Left of Centaur is a silly little game about politics in a fantasy world that might help you take your mind off all of that. Randomly generate a room full of dedicated (if sometimes selfish) political movers and shakers and take turns trying to pass bills to fund your special interest without destroying the country (much). Left of Centaur is our totally free Halloween release, something we do every year on the spookiest of days. Previous entries include the ENnie-nominated Two Faces and the award-winning Princess Die.

You can also find Left of Centaur as part of the Tabletop Stocking Stuffers bundle, which will feature 50 games at an incredible price!

West Wing meets West Marches

The Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Game Design is officially available at CRC press. This has been a few years now of research and collaboration with my regular design friend Mike Hutchinson, but its finally here. Based partly on the 258 videos on game design (I can’t believe it’s been that many) on our YouTube channel and a lot on our collective experience having designed a few award-winning games together. It’s an in-depth look at what these sorts of games are, how they’re designed and where new ideas can be tried for them. It’s intended to be for existing designers looking for new inspiration, newer designers looking for clear and careful guidance through the process of designing such a game and fans of minis games who want to go a bit more in-depth into understanding the design of their favourite games. We’re immensely proud of the game and I’m extremely excited to see it turning up in the hands of fans already.

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It’s been a busy few months generally. Our YouTube channel and Podcast Rule of Carnage continues to go from strength to strength with subscribers continuing to come in. My Patreon, where I offer free games and design essays, has been picking up members and I’ve been sorting out the last few details on several games coming out in the next six months. Until next time when a few more games should be out in the wild, merry Christmas to you all.

The Fundamentals at CRC Press.

With the Away Team Bingo campaign behind us (it’s now available along with our other two print at home roll and write games in our web shop), it’s time to focus on the next FlickFleet campaign which will be coming early next year. FlickFleet: Box of Xeno Flicks 1 is the first expansion for the two new alien species introduced in FlickFleet: Xeno Wars – the Hive and the Storm. It’ll be another ‘Box of Flicks’ style campaign where backers get to vote on which ships make it into the box. Introducing a raft of new ship types and fun new abilities, it starts the process of bringing the Hive and Storm fleets towards parity with the, currently much larger, three human fleets. Follow along with the campaign to see what makes it into the box!

Follow along now

Wow, the beginning of November already feels like a long time ago! In the last month I’ve run another Kickstarter – for Poll & Write USA, which is (in the words of Jo Kelly) “A neat distillation of the Poll and Write system into a fierce head-to-head dice drafting game. Excellent stuff.”

And Poll & Write 2024 (UK edition) has gone live on PNPArcade, a great source for print-and-play games! It’s just £7 there, a bargain for 1-7 players to roll and rewrite the UK general election, playing the role of any of the 7 parties featured! My aim is also to get the 2019 UK edition of the game and the USA edition completed for backers well before Christmas. You can search for Poll & Write on Kickstarter to late pledge!

Poll & Write from Samphire Games

Roll and Write Revolution is celebrating 4 years this month. Our first Kickstarter campaign for Standing Stones launched in December of 2020. Since then we’ve made a few games *cough* *cough* maybe more than a few.

Thank you to all of the wonderful folks who have backed games and had words of encouragement. We do it all for you! It has also been amazing to help a number of designers get their game ideas finished and published in the last year. We are looking forward to collaborating with outside designers again in 2025.

That said, no Kickstarter this month. Or next either. We’re taking a break to polish the 2025 slate of games to deliver on the promise of making the best games possible and getting them to you in the print and play format. If folks want to check out past projects, they are available on thegamecrafter.com just search roll and write revolution.

Thanks again! Happy Holidays!

TGC page

A huge thank you to everyone who backed Ministry of Lost Things: Lint Condition on Kickstarter! With over 4,000 backers, the final results of the campaign totally blew our expectations out of the water, and we’re so thrilled our fans are as excited about this game as we are. In case you missed it on Kickstarter, the game is available to pre-order on Allplay. We’ll be heading into production in the coming weeks!

Now that the Kickstarter has wrapped, we’re diving back into design on a couple of our other projects in the works. We’re also developing a second edition of Adrift, which is currently sold out in the US. This should be ready to ship in 2025, at the same time as Lint Condition!

In the meantime, come catch us at PAXU! PAX Unplugged is an annual board game convention in Philadelphia. This year’s event will be running Dec 6-8 and PostCurious will be exhibiting at booth 2707! If you’re attending, come by the booth and say hello, check out our other games, and chat with us about puzzles. 🙂

Pre-Order Lint Condition here

The most wonderful time of the year!! Happy Holidays to all of the wonderful board game fans that follow this newsletter.

In the world of Unfringed I’ve been busy beavering away on my 3rd game and really hoping to show this for the first time at Airecon next year. Compared to the first two games, which mostly came together across a couple of evenings, this 3rd game has gone through a lot of iterations to give it that Unfringed sprinkle of magic. I feel now like it’s really close and just needs a little more playtesting and tweaking and I’ll have another game that I’m proud to put out into the world. I watched some really good videos on the process of prototyping and its similarity to a search algorithm and maybe it’s because I’m a software engineer in my day job but it really clicked with me and helped bring a lot of focus into the process. I have a few other prototypes that also work okay but none that yet feel special enough to publish.

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It’s hard to know whether that’s because I put a lot of pressure on myself for the game to be “perfect” or whether they’re generally not up to scratch but overall, I continue to enjoy the process of finding ways to bring players together around the dining room table and solving some interesting puzzles.

I mentioned it briefly earlier but I’m very much looking forward to coming back to Airecon in 2025. This time I’ll just have a demo table for the new game rather than selling, something I’ll be doing for the first time so please do swing by and give it a play. Hopefully this will also give me some more time to properly take in the amazing atmosphere that Airecon creates and play some new games with friends and fans in the evening.

That’s all for now and see you all in the new year! I hope you all have a fantastic holiday season and that 2025 is the start of a wonderful year for you all.

Grab Unfringed stocking fillers here

We’ve got two bits of exciting news for you this December! First off, we’ve got a 10% off sale on all products in our online store for the festive season! If you fancy picking up the cute but cutthroat Pugs in Mugs as a stocking filler, or Earth Rising to get the family saving the world together over Christmas, now’s the time! Sale ends 27th of Dec.

And second… Sound the trumpets, raise the banners, and grab your bows, friends! The ‘Why We Fight: Direct Action’ playtest kit is now here! While technically version 1.2 of the game, this will double as our quick-start game edition once it’s fully released. We’ve been playtesting and adjusting the game online and in-person since the last version’s release in May, so pretty much everything has had an overhaul! You could say it’s a real… game changer 😉

The core basis for the game and how the characters work all remains the same, but if you want to read the nitty gritty details, the full update can be found here: bit.ly/YWFupdate1point2.

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We’re not anticipating anything major to be changing with Direct Action after this stage, so future updates will be looking at the core Why We Fight book and its developments, along with our progress towards our BackerKit Crowdfunding campaign, which we aim to launch in March! In the meantime, join us for monthly playtests on Discord or play it solo from our itch store and let us know what you think.

Head over to our store