Welcome to the Indie Tabletop Newsletter, hear from independent tabletop games designers about their current and upcoming projects. Take a look at the games we’ve already self-published and our upcoming Kickstarters, maybe even get yourself a free print n play game. Learn more about this newsletter here.
Check out the latest issue of Tabletop SPIRIT Magazine here.
Designers & Their Games
Crowd Funding Calendar
Looking for a specific designer?
Alice and her sister, Lorina, have received a hastily scrawled note, likely from the White Rabbit, about the need for help in Wonderland. They’ll set off on a journey to rescue all manner of characters from the tale, find pieces of Alice’s story, an occasional tool, and a not so trustworthy cat, because after all, we’re all mad here.
Help Alice and Lorina navigate Wonderland collecting story elements and finding denizens all in the hopes of landing the best score. Also avoiding the wrath of the Red Queen, she’s still mad.
Players will select 1 card a turn from the tea cup shaped selection of cards. There is even a lump of sugar to select. Will the Tea Party and its participants score the most? Maybe the Royal Court is the way to go? Each game 3 of the 18 cards will be scoring cards for the rest of the cards in the Tea Cup layout. Players will find plenty of challenge game to game!
Read More
Play with 1 or 2 players, or even print a second copy of the game to expand the fun to 3-4 players!
Alice in a Wonderland Rescue can even be played with other games in the Rescue series including Safe and Hound and Otters to the Rescue!
For those not aware, Boarders and Black Flags is my pirate themed skirmish game. It’s based around boarding actions made on a ship at full sail such that the deck shifts every round, causing anything that isn’t fixed down to slide back and forth, usually with deadly consequences. Since Boarders and Black Flags is creating a world of pulp Saturday morning serials attacks don’t wound or kill directly, rather they just knock combatants down or over. Units are removed when they skid overboard or are obliterated by massive chunks of sliding debris. The game is all about fighting in and around a deadly and dynamic environment.
Read More
I’d been waiting to get some reviews (previews technically I guess) but now they’re all in, its just down to me shooting and editing stuff, which is a part of the process I’m neither fast at nor enjoy overly. Still, doing many jobs (for some reason I don’t like the phrase wearing many hats anymore) is part of being an indy designer so, back to the editing desk I go.
The Boarders and Black Flags Kickstarter should be launching in the next few weeks.
Once I can get this sound track synched up…
We’ve been working on it for the last couple of years, and finally we’re ready to go! The rules have been tightened, it’s been to several conventions, and the box design is being re-jigged. We’re really hoping to get it made as one of those boxes which looks like a book…
The last few months have felt so busy. Mill has been the main talker-to-people, promoting Loose In The Library alongside Paradice. Jess has been selling Busy Buses, which was designed with a class of 10-year-olds, and getting ready for another similar game design project with a different class. Now that summer is nearly here, we can spend a little more time to get Loose In The Library ready for Kickstarter!
It’s going to be a smallish game, with fewer than 200 cards in a book-sized box. Once again, we have amazing women and literary terrors — although this time there are many challenges set by the senior librarian. If you’d like to follow along, click the link!
Demoing was a great experience – something I’ve not done before so that was very worthwhile (thanks to Dina Said So Studio for opportunity and space!). It’s quite different to playtesting even if it has a lot of crossover in the part about teaching the game. Every demo resulted in a sale, so that was a happy vote of confidence in the gameplay.
Dwarf Union is an asymmetric game about a dwarven mine – players represent the owner, the workers’ union, and other factions, each with their own goals and ways of playing. I’m really excited about how it’s progressing, even though it’s a lot of work. Each time I make a change to one faction another is thrown off balance!
Read More
And finally, Poll & Write USA – my print-and-play game about electoral strategy of the US election – is now available on itch.io as ‘pay-what-you-like’ – meaning you can get it for free if that’s what you want to pay! Click the link to download!
What I’m doing to address this is keeping the parchment look to the board but with painted iconography instead of looking drawn in, I’m hoping for it to be a ‘here be monsters’ style map where you don’t actually expect the art to be to scale. For each of the damage spaces I’ve chosen real world plant foes, those that are poisonous, carnivorous or just super pointy (ouch). Pictured are fly agaric, deadly nightshade, porcupine tomato (yep, that’s a real thing) and a pitcher plant, there are 11 more that will be dotted across the map to damage nymphs as they pass by.
Read More
For the health spaces I am painting in medicinal herbs like echinacea, aloe vera and burdock. The magic spaces will still be from the rivers passing through those spaces but I have painted in the rivers with shades of blue to look a little more lifelike.
It’s important to say I am using the time I had planned into my timeline for this extra work. I padded a fair amount of extra time in case of unlocking stretch goals during the Kickstarter and I’m still on target to be fulfilling Malus Hortus in January 2026.
I had hoped I would have the pledge manager open by now but unfortunately the business information checks on their end have taken a lot longer than expected. Everything has been ready to go for a while now so once they sign off it can go live almost immediately, hopefully in the next week or two.
I’m very excited that Malus Hortus is going to look better than ever, just in time to send all the files along to the manufacturer. Stay tuned for more updates.
I know it’s a bit of a late update but the biggest news of last month has to be how excellent UKGE was. It’s always a highlight of my year and this year didn’t disappoint.
First was some birthday celebrations with a number of the other wonderful UK Indie Publishers, where we ate cake, stole cheese and gifted plenty of gifts that were definitely hats! Was an absolute joy to share my birthday evening with you all. I also turned bright red at the preview show when some content creators sang happy birthday in both English and Welsh!
The show itself also went even better than we hoped it would. The main goal was to try and show off Fetching Feathers as much as we could and I was over the moon with how much of a positive response it received. We had people sprinting first thing to grab one of the limited-edition copies and the demo tables were packed for the whole 3 days. I cannot wait to share the final version with you all soon!
Read More
There are too many other highlights to mention but please check out the Instagram page @UnringedThings if you’d like to see some pictures of the event and festivities.
July is mostly back in the office wrapping up art files, making last minute tweaks and hopefully signing up some localisers for the print-run 🙂 Although I’ve also made some good progress on Game #4 but that will have to wait for next time 😉
Enjoy the sun everyone and in the wise words of Baz Luhrmann, wear sunscreen!
Next up: Dice Tower East! We’re bringing BREAKERS to Orlando, ready to share the game with even more players. If you’re attending, come find us for a demo, we’d love to show you what we’re building and hear your thoughts.
And now for something we’ve been dying to share… We’re beyond proud to unveil the official BREAKERS box art, illustrated by our very own Justin Gerard. Justin’s work captures the pulse of the game: bold, magical, and full of tension. The art brings our world of suits, monsters, and heroes to life in a single stunning image. With Origins behind us and Kickstarter on the horizon (launching September 2, 2025), things are moving fast.
Read More
Be sure to follow us on socials and back the game when the preview page goes live.
Thanks again for being part of the journey!
While Rob focuses on the beautification of the book, knocking out eye-catching illustrations and working on fancy page layouts, myself and Laurie are finishing up the final Situations for Direct Action. With these additions, there’s now twelve full-fledged situations for Crews to tackle on their journey to fight the White Fist! It’s been surprisingly fun finding the balance between different types of situations, and ensuring they add a fair and interesting challenge for players.
Read More
Our new additions add options for players to ‘Mediate’ situations they come across, allowing them to explore non-violent conflict resolution. The image I’ve attached is Rob’s initial sketch for the mediation situations! As you can see, it’s full of tension…
My favourite to work on so far is “Community Tribunal”, where you come across a settlement that is holding a trial for a young thief… There are four possible outcomes based on how successful players are, ranging from complete success to utter failure. Our biggest obstacle was ensuring these two major results felt suitably rewarding/punishing without being overwhelming. Once again, reminding us that a lot of game design is about balance!
The second most important aspect of game design (to us at least) is community! Because of this, we’re also going to be releasing a more up-to-date preview PDF this month, allowing our backers to test out the game so far, give us feedback, or just have some fun! Community involvement not only helps us test in a much higher capacity than we can do on our own, but also gets folks trying the game without our oversight (aka. A blind playtest!) which shows us exactly what we need to change or tighten mechanically to ensure gameplay is smooth and accessible.
We’re having a great time on the road, travelling from place-to-place meeting fellow board gamers, showing our games and just hanging out.
We had a table at the Games & Geek Market in Stockholm a while back. A wonderful market with magic potions, games, clothes, stickers and all sorts of geeky stuff! At a market like this it’s hard to really show off games when you can’t really offer people to try the games. I did however get a lot of practice how to quickly demonstrate the strengths of the games in a couple of sentences. All-in-all a fun time!
The big event however was LinCon. We’ve been demoing at LinCon for a long time but we’re still in awe over the convention. The crew is so friendly and there is always a lot happening. This year we got a great location, right next to the cafeteria so lots of people found their way in for a quick game of Bushido Duels or to sit down for a while to play Perilous Pond.
Read More
We had two kids who really loved Bushido Duels and would return every day to play. It really warms a game designers heart.
Oh… and on that note, the thing that make these conventions so much fun for us is all the people. So many cool people, everyone we talked to were so friendly, funny and cool.
Next destination on our tour is NärCon, one of the biggest Cosplaying events in Sweden (if not the biggest). It’s not focused on board games, but is celebrating everything geeky. It has a real festival feeling and there is so much you can do. Dance, play retro games, Karaoke, visit the artist alley and of course try our games :).
Until next time – Yours etcetera etcetera
