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?
Ministry of Lost Things is a tabletop puzzle adventure series from award-winning game publisher PostCurious. Blending escape rooms, board games, and interactive fiction, each M.O.L.T. case contains a standalone tactile mystery. Finders Keypers is the second episode in this exploration of the Elusiverse: a parallel world where every lost item has a story.
In Finders Keypers, Jenna loses the carabiner holding all her keys and keychains. Almost immediately, her life starts falling apart. She can’t get into her home, ride her bike, or take the bus… and the loss is even jeopardizing her relationships! On top of that, she’s mourning the loss of several sentimental keychains that are basically irreplaceable. Can you help Jenna avert a low-key disaster?
Finders Keypers features five chapters of beautifully-illustrated, whimsical puzzle gameplay. The components include an assortment of journal entries, witness statements, and documents, accompanied by an abundance of odds and ends. Back the game today for a free bonus puzzle, and a 10% discount off the retail price!
After releasing 3 Print-n-Play games, we are almost to the Kickstarter launch of our first physical product, 14ers! Inspired by my wife’s love of climbing peaks over 14,000 feet, 14ers is a quick tableau-building card game for 1-4 players about Colorado’s highest mountains featuring local art (zero AI here) and an FSC-certified eco-friendly production. We recently got pre-production copies from the manufacturer and have had a lot of fun sharing them with content creators and taking them to events!
Our Kickstarter campaign will launch on Tuesday, October 21 and you can follow along here! I can’t wait to see how the launch goes and share even more cool things with you here!
We’re also into the main phase of manufacturing and shipping the rewards for our last FlickFleet campaign too. We’ve shipped almost all the playmats, and are now on the deluxe rewards for the UK and rest of world. Paul shipped over half of those before he set off on holiday and he’ll be finishing those up and then moving on to the US rewards (which we’re sending via sea freight to allow us to cover the tariffs as we promised during the campaign, before the whole tariffs mess that’s been going on over the last few months).
If you’re interested in print at home roll and write games (which you can also play on a tablet!), then you can find our four at the link.
Welcome to Five Years After, the next game from Steve Dee and Tin Star Games. Five years ago the world was destroyed. Humanity encountered a near-existential threat. This isn’t a world of action and gunplay however: Five Years After takes its cues more from 28 Days Later and 1980s nuclear stories like The Day After and Threads. Starting from a broken world and broken people, Five Years After then does something no other RPG has ever done: it walks backwards in time, pulling the curtain back with it to see how civilisation fell and how the people gave way when it did. From Five Years we go to five months, then five weeks, and so on, back into the past.
Five Years After is now in layout with sneak-peaks available at conventions around Australia and in the Tin Star Games discord. The book will be a beautiful hardcover with a unique design that will stand out as something very special in your collection, and only 500 will ever be printed. Pre-orders will be available in October.
We’re also getting ready for Spiel Essen, where we’ll be sharing a booth (4E220) with fellow indie designers from Norway. If you’re attending too, we’d love to meet up, swap stories, and chat about game design, production, or anything else indie and board game related!
If you’d like to support us ahead of Spiel, a thumbs up on the BGG Spiel Preview list would mean the world to us 🙏
So, what kind of game is Mimir’s Challenge? It’s a 30–60 minute strategy game rooted in Norse mythology. Players gather materials, forge artefacts, command armies, and battle for area control across the nine realms. It’s quick to learn, rich in player interaction, and full of tactical depth.
Read More
If you’re curious to learn more, Jørgen has written a designer diary (which made the front page of BGG!), and BoardGamingRamblings recently released a great overview video that dives into how the game plays.
The process so far has been full of surprises, challenges, and late-night spreadsheets — but also moments of real joy. We’re proud to finally see the game heading into the hands of players. Thanks so much for being part of this incredible indie community — we’re excited to see where the road leads from here!
The next couple of months will be very busy & exciting as we´re releasing quite a few new games: Arkwright Anniversary Edition by Stefan Risthaus with all new graphics and art, Angel´s Share by Scott Almes, Dolcissima Vita by Giansimone Migoni, La Cosecha: A La Granja Game by Isra and Shei & ode. & Mike, Quebec (new edition) by Philippe Beaudoin and Pierre Poissant-Marquis, Schrille Stille (new edition) by Peter Wichmann, 1837: Saxonia (an 18xx game) by Wolfram Janich.
We are always looking for language partners for our games outside of English and German language.
Some of my favourite parts of the game are things I changed to make it plastic free, the standees slot very nicely together with the greyboard bases, I like that they still fit in the box without disassembling them after every game as well. There are also beautiful wooden dice, although sharp edged so I’ve asked for them to be rounded edge dice for the production version. Oh and the black cotton bags are such a nice replacement for plastic zip lock ones.
Read More
Another big change from the prototype copies I made is the dual layer player boards, I had them as a stretch goal on the campaign that we didn’t reach but managed to include them in the final components list along with a scorepad. It has already been a joy coming back to the game and seeing the last scores on the scorepad, determined to try and beat them.
Christmas – It’s definitely that time of year! I’ve already been selling my D20 Christmas ornaments so I’ve started to make more of both those and the meeple ones. This year as well as the individual ones I’ll make sets of 4 or 6 as they’ve been popular and I’m sure some people would like matching sets of them.
Search by Designer