Guild of Thieves Update #5

It’s finished. Well, it probably won’t ever be completely finished. I’m sure I’ll have rule tweaks and maybe even expansions, but in my mind Guild of Thieves is finally finished. I feel like I’m a board game designer now. Sure, it is just a web-based published game, but I still feel like I’ve accomplished something; similar to how I’d feel if I build a kitchen table or wrote a book. I’ve created something that I hope others can enjoy and the first to copies on in an USPS truck coming this way. I’ve still got some pictures to take and upload in order to officially make it available to the public, so expect a sales pitch soon.

If you haven’t followed my Guild of Thieves (GoT) updates religiously, you can go back and read them. What are you still reading this for?!....... I imagine though, that you didn’t follow them and that you aren’t going to go back and read them, so instead I’ll go ahead and just give you a brief history. I got the idea for the game in August 2011, so it has been nearly a year now to see it come to fruition. My idea essentially came from two great games I enjoyed playing, so it isn’t ground breaking, but it is different. First is Dominion, a game where you purchase cards that are in stacks on the table in front of you to add them to your deck. Second was Hey! That’s My Fish! a game about penguins moving on hexagon pieces picking the pieces up to score points. I wanted to combine the two, the deck-building of Dominion and the using a pawn to move to a specific space of Hey! That’s My Fish!.

So I came home and put together a prototype out of index cards with just letters on them and zero theme. I then began thinking this might be something, so I decided to look for self-publishing options and found www.thegamecrafter.com which was awesome! I could publish my game, for pretty cheap, if I switched to regular cards instead of hexes (at that time it would’ve cost around $163 per copy of the game for hexes). So I did and around the same time I switched the theme of the game from the Fruit theme (I know, fruit, seriously Adam)  I was working with after my lettered index cards, to the Magical Arabian theme it currently has. I asked Jeremy Montz if he would be interested in doing the art, which he agreed to do, and we were off! It took longer than expected for me to narrow down what cards to put in the base game (I have 3 others that have been play tested and I kept out of the game for one reason or another) and it also took Jeremy a bit longer to come up with the original art and graphic design. Then, to top it off, I switched a card out the last moment and went to text based instead of icon based game play.

So now I’m down to the final steps before it is available for purchase. I’m selling it at cost, because this isn’t a money making venture as much as it is just trying to accomplish something. I’ve got to determine if I want to make a website for Ekka Games, the name of the company I’ve decided to publish GoT through, once the first copies arrive I need to make a YouTube “How to Play” video, and then I’ll be sure to post here on the blog, on Facebook, and Twitter that the Guild of Thieves is available! Then I’m already in the process of working on my next design, which needs a way better name than the current name of City Planner.