Creature College Week 3 Update – Tackling the Rules

Welcome to our Week 3 News Round Up

As always it’s been another really busy week! We were very pleasantly surprised at the beginning of the week to be contacted and invited to attend a mini-con called Dragondaze which takes place in Newport, Wales on the 19th of September 2015. We’d really like to give a shout out for Dragondaze as all the proceeds from this event go to help Bernado’s young carers, a really worthwhile cause. We were also very fortunate to be introduced by our media studio to the folks at Greenbrier Games, they have a wealth of experience in launching Kickstarter campaigns and had a lot of very good advice. We’re looking forward to having a closer relationship with Greenbrier as we move closer and through our own Kickstarter campaign.

Ninja Dice

Greenbrier also have a current Kickstarter campaign for an expansion to their Ninja Dice game. You can find the Kickstarter page here. They’re a great company and this is a very slick game so head over to Kickstarter and give these folks your support!

Design Work

It’s been a huge week for design work. Our incredible board game design ninja “Will” has been hard at work and has completed the designs for our mission cards, ability cards, research lab cards and game boards. We’ll be sharing some of this design work in our monthly news letter so go ahead and subscribe if you haven’t done so to get an inside view of the world of board game design.

February’s Board Game Competition

Our board game competition this month was won by Kris Kosche from Germany. As soon as she’s decided we’ll tell you what game she went for! If you missed it don’t worry, there’s another chance to win this month. All you need to do is subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll be automatically entered into the draw.

Rules Booklet and Cover Art

So we’re taking a big step towards a finished game this coming week as we’ve started the box artwork and we’re working on the rules booklet. Nearer to our launch date we’ll release our rules on our website as a downloadable pdf. Until then we’ll be releasing snippets of information or if you want to find out exactly how the game plays come along and find us at one of the conventions listed in our events calendar, we’d love to see you!

Project X

We’ve made some great leaps forward on Project X in the last few weeks but we’re on a little bit of a hold now as other work takes priority to prepare us for UK Games Expo in May. Keep an eye out here though as we will be releasing more information about Project X as the year moves on.

Creature College Week 2 Update – Anime Con and Designs

Welcome to our week 2 news round up

It’s been another exciting week for us here at Happy Otter Games. The highlight of the week has been an invitation to take part in London Anime and Games Con on the 4th and 5th of July. That finishes up our round of games conventions that well be going to starting with Dellcon in March and finishing just before our Kickstarter goes live with Essen. For more details take a look at the events page on our website. Come and find us at any of these conventions and we’ll be happy to play a game with you!

Art & Design work

Our design work has come on leaps and bounds this week. We’ve now finished the design for our mission and ability cards and our designer has started work on the research lab cards. We’ve  officially finished over half the design work and we’re well on the way to hitting our end of April target for having a ready-to-print game. Our artist has been working on the Plasma Canon battle card towards the tail end of the week and this weekend is a milestone as we start work on the box design.

Play-testing

With the completion of much of the design and artwork we’re ready to going into our final phase of play testing where we share the game more fully with an extended group of play testers. At this late stage the game plays pretty flawlessly so we’re expecting this to be mostly small alterations to balance more than anything else. There are two play testing groups we know of that have volunteered to help with this final phase but if you’re in the UK and you’re interested, let us know!

Project X

We can’t tell you much about project X other than we saw some of the first footage from the studio we’re working in with in Montreal and it blew our socks off! We can’t wait to show you some teasers but that will have to wait until the summer!

The monthly competition

February’s win a board game competition is nearly over but it’s not too late to enter! Just subscribe to our news letter and you’ll be entered int a draw to win a board game of your choice up to a value of £40 ($60).

Creature College Week 1 Update – 22 Cards in!

Welcome to our Week 1 News Round Up

It’s been a busy week here at Happy Otter Games, but through a haze of coffee and small nibbly things we’ve made some great progress! Creature College has a card deck containing 2×27 creature cards and as of today we were officially 22 cards in. Only five left and we’re done on our creature deck. We’ll be introducing you to more of our cast of monsterousness over the next few months. We also finished the creature card design work so now we have both our Creature Cards and Player Mats finished. As always a new game is never really finished until it goes to press so there may be some small changes as we enter the final stages of our play testing!

Essen

We finally booked Essen this week after far too much time procrastinating. The folks over at Spiel 2015 were fantastic and talked us through the process of booking a prototype stall (significantly cheaper than a full publisher stall). For those that don’t know Spiel 2015 is probably the biggest game show in Europe and takes place in Essen every year.

Legal Stuff

We’re also a fair way along our trade marking adventure with all our early submissions being excepted so barring any disasters our branding is here to say.

Project X

We can’t talk much about Project X other than to tell you that it’s going to be awesome! Project X made some leaps and bounds forward this week.

Well that just about rounds it up for this week. Have a great last week of the month all you lovely people and subscribe to our Newsletter to have a chance to win the board game of your choice in February (£40($60) limit).

Orhan.