Creature College Weekly Update Week 10 – Competitions, Posters and Goats

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Welcome to our Week 10 News Round Up!

So it’s been quite a week this week. Mostly it’s consisted of preparing files for our printer Wingo in China. This basically entails writing lots of instructions, checking through all the files and ensuring that we haven’t made any of those silly little mistakes that you notice later and think to yourself “Why didn’t I check everything through more carefully?” The last piece to this particular puzzle has been integrating all the feedback on the rules which was finished this morning. Now we’re in full publicity mode of UK Games Expo which happens at the end of this month. Mike Legan, our brilliant artist has been working on poster art which we’ll share later in the Newsletter and we’ve been working on some freebies to give away at the show. The other exciting piece of news is that it looks like we’re going to launch a little earlier than we originally thought. You’ve probably seen the odd piece where we’ve mentioned November but it now looks like we’ll be launching over the Essen Games Show in October!

We also have a winner for our April competition. Frank Auge won our $150(£40) prize and chose Cthulu Wars as his prize which is currently winging it’s way towards him! We’ll post pics of Frank with his prize as soon as we’re able to. We also published our first game review of Greenbrier Games’ Ninja Dice. You can read the review here.

Finally our friends Arthur and Veronica Critchfield launched their game Gruff on Kickstarter yesterday. We were able to drop in on their Skype launch event and have a chat with Brent whilst Veronica drew the most amazing Mutated Monster Goat mural in the background. We just want to say one thing:

BACK GRUFF NOW

Mutated Monster Goats….come on people! Joking aside this is a great game with fantastic artwork and a strong well play tested design. At only $25 for the bottom tier it’s one of the cheaper Kickstarters to back. It’s almost funded already. This will be a Kickstarter that you’re very pleased you’ve backed.

UK Games Expo, 29th – 31st May

So we will have stand 7 in the Library at UK Games Expo this year. We’re going to be playing the first sample version of Creature College, running competitions, collecting for charity (hopefully) and generally having a great time. We’ve started an event on Facebook and if you’re on this side of the pond (i.e. In the UK) we’d love to meet you and have a game!

Just look for our poster…you won’t be able to miss us!

Ninja Dice Review

We love Ninja Dice as a great little filler game for the end of an evening or to take with you on holiday. You can get Ninja Dice from Green Brier games. Read the review here.

Back Gruff on Kickstarter!

This is a game that needs to get backed and then some. Not only does it have Mutated Monster Goats in it, reason enough to back it in our books, but it has fabulous artwork, a great design and compelling game-play. But don’t take our word for it, take a look at the Kickstarter video and the review video below.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/31839895/gruff-the-tactical-card-game-of-mutated-monster-go/widget/video.html

Well that about wraps it up for this week folks. Have a great week and we’ll have more exciting news next week!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 9 – The Eagle Has Landed!

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Welcome to our Week 9 News Round Up!

So this week we’re more excited than a very excited person who’s just won the lottery and got engaged to Scarlett Johansson all in the same week! Creature College is winging it’s way piecemeal to Wingo Games our wonderful printers in Guang Dong Province China as I type! They’ll be creating 5 prototypes for us that we can send out to reviewers, use for marketing and, oh, I don’t know…play even. Mike Legan, our fantastic artist, is busy working on a poster for our marketing materials at UK Games Expo which we’ll share as soon as it arrives. We’re also working on several other games in concept but more on those in future months. We’ve been running our “Name a Creature” Competition in The Boardgame Group on Facebook this week and we’ve had some fantastic entries. Many thanks to Micheal Scott Matecha, Josh Tolpa, Matthew Roberts, Matt Prowse and Ryan Myers for their winning entries and to everyone who took part. We’d also like to give a shout for two games this week. Midnight Zombie Marathon, which has 17 days left to run on Kickstarter and Gruff, a tactical card game involving mutated monster goats which will start on Kickstarter 1st May. We also finished the back of our box this week and we’re very nearly finished with our rules. We hope to be sharing a .pdf later next week.

Last but definitely not least, we’ll be giving away a £80($120) of board games of the winners choice to whoever wins our April “Win a board game competition”, but to make it even more interesting, we’ll add an extra £20($30) to that if we can add another 30 people to our mailing list by the end of April! That’s right £100($150) of games to the winner of the competition in April if we can add another 30 people to the list.

The “Name a Creature” Competition

Well it has to be said that this was a storming success. Unsurprisingly the community on Facebooks The Boardgame Group rose to the challenge brilliantly and we’d like to say a great big thank you to everyone who took part. Thanks to you Snuze Mumblethump, Briney Hydrosnuffles, Ruby Rumblestone, Sparx Franklin and Singe Flappingsworth will all be immortalised on our cards. The competition was such a success that we’ll probably run another of these competitions in the not-too-distant future.

Midnight Zombie Marathon and Gruff

MZM and Gruff are two great Kickstarters. MZM is funded already and Gruff takes off on May 1st. Arthur has done a fabulous job with Gruff and it really is a phenomenal game. We highly recommend that you take a look at it when it launches….mutated monster goats….who’s not going to love that right?

The Back of Our Box!

We shared the design of the front of our box a while ago but Will, our fabulous designer has done his magic with the back of the box as well. He’s created a fabulously sexy image design that we’re very excited about! Drop us a note and tell us what you think! Our rules should be out this next week and well share them with you as a .pdf file!

Win £80($120) of Board Games of Your Choice

Just for April and to celebrate finishing Creature College and sending it to the printers we’re doubling our normal monthly prize from £40($60) to £80($120). This means that one lucky winner will get to choose £80($120) worth of games! Not only that but if we manage to add another 30 people to our subscriber list by the end of the month we’ll top that up to £100($150)!

Well that’s it for this week folks. Have a great week and get your friends signed up to the Newsletter!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 8 – A Blast From The Past

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Welcome to our Week 8 News Round Up!

Well, here we are…only six weeks to go until UK Games Expo and getting perilously close to beginning our sample printing. Just the back of the box to polish, two and a half more battle cards to produce and our rules booklet to design and we’re there! To celebrate we’re offering double our monthly prize so in April you can win £80($120) of games of your choice…ever wanted to have that really big game? Well now’s your chance! If you’re not subscribed to our news letter go ahead and do so and you’ll automatically be entered into this draw and every draw until we launch in the Autumn. We’d also like to give a shout out for Midnight Zombie Marathon, a game currently on Kickstarter. This looks like a great little card game to use as a 30 minute filler and at $15 for US pledgers, well worth a try! We’ve backed it and Aaron will be creating some pledges for those outside of the US that want to pledge – they only need $1500 so help us get them over their funding target! The rest of this week’s update is really a bit of a blast from the past…looking at Creature College from it’s inception to where we are today. We’ll be releasing some of our embarrassing early prototypes and game scribbles and also the first picture of what the game looks like in play.

Win £80($120) of games in April!

Tell your friends, call out the majorettes and the tumbling clowns (even the scary ones that look a little like the ebil clown from the horror movies) and shout it from the parapets (if you happen to have a parapet, otherwise your front porch will do). We’re giving away £80 ($120) worth of games of your choice in April. Some lucky person in some far flung corner of the globe will be getting a mitt full of goodies and all they have to do is subscribe to our newsletter here.

Midnight Zombie Marathon – Help us get these guys over their target

We’d really like this game to succeed. It looks like fun and it’s very nicely produced. I guess it’s their first game and Aaron and guys at Arche Nemesis Games LLC have obviously put a lot of work into getting the look and feel right. So head over to Kickstarter and give these guys some love. Let’s get them over their funding target!

A Blast from the past!

So…how did Creature College start out? The morning after a drunken dinner party and feeling rather hung over but having foolishly agreed to create a game for my mates…this happened:

Yes…these inane scribbles were the first thoughts that made their way onto paper and roughly described the first version of the game. It took about a day to produce Creature College v 0.1 and at that point (before we’d encountered the sweaty armpitted monster of copyright) it was called “Mad Scientist”. I remember having my wife and friends sat around a table cutting out hastily produced cards and tokens. The result of the first version looked something like this (actually this is something like the third or fourth version but the 1st version was too embarrassing to photograph!):

It’s interesting that many of the elements of the game actually did make it through the process of play testing, but a lot of mechanics and items didn’t as well. Money went, we had a points track at one stage and that went too…in fact most of our play testing involved removing things! The first game was a real stinker…it took about two hours to play and was about as exciting as searching your bogeys for little brown bits (I’ve never done this….honest). However through countless play tests and many iterations we’ve dragged the game kicking and screaming into a sleek starship of a game that’s fast paced (45 minutes) and fun with plenty of “oh you didn’t just do that!” moments. This is what it looks like now just prior to our first sample print run:

If anyone is interested in game design and has some questions regarding how we’ve got to where we are then by all means drop me an email at orhan@happyottergames.com. You can read more about our story in the event magazine for UK Games Expo when it comes out and we may reprint the article on or website depending on permissions. Have a fabby week everyone! Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 7 – Enter the Were-Gerbil

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 7 News Round Up!

So the more perceptive of you may have noticed that we seem to have fallen behind by a week on our weekly reports. I would like to be able to claim that our previous week 7 report was caught in an unexpected space-time vortex and sucked into a dimension populated entirely by sheep and people called Eric. Sadly the truth is a little more mundane that I’ve been caught up in far too much work for Creature College and real life has also encroached on my time. Having said all that, it has been an almost bed-wettingly exciting week for us here at Happy Otter Games. First and foremost we had the first images of our box design that some of you may have seen during the week on our Facebook posts, in addition Scott D. Randel was kind enough to send us a picture of him playing “Invasion from Outer Space” which he won in our March “Win a Board Game” competition.

It’s also been a great week for play testing. We went down to Cardiff on Wednesday and met up with Robert Fisher, Scott Robinson and Patrick Barry, a trio of very talented board game designers who are part of the meetup group Playtest UK. Many chips were consumed whilst playing Creature College and the guys gave some great feedback on the game much of which should make it into our sample print. We’ve also finished the draft of our rules and they’ve gone to our designer for the design work. Last but far from least, a few weeks ago Sherri Kopel Haight made the suggestion on Facebook that we should have a Were-gerbil in the game. We loved the idea…so we put him in and you can have a sneak preview of the concept art below.

We’d also like to give a shout out to Gruff from Studio Woe which will go live on Kickstarter on the 1st of May. We’ll definitely be supporting this great tactical card game, mutated monster goats! We’re so in!

Our Game Box Design

The design for the front of our box was finished earlier on this week and we have to admit…we love it!

We decided to let the great folks on Board Game Geek’s Facebook site tell us what they thought of it and we’ve had some great feedback:

 ” It is very cute and clean. Clean is always good and very easy to read.”

” I like it. Definitely catches the eye and makes me want to see how the game plays.”

“Very Appealing, I would pick it up…its eye catching and engaging.”

“clean, polished and above all – readable!”

Our brilliant designer is now working on the back of the box.

Invasion from Outer Space

Scott D. Randel  won our March “Win a Board Game” competition and very kindly sent us this great picture of him playing the game with his friends!

I haven’t played Invasion from Outer Space but by the response this picture received on Facebook it’s definitely worth giving it a go. I may be forced to raid my piggy bank and see if I have a few pounds left in there.

Beware the Were-Gerbil

We love our community, you have some great ideas and you’ll be glad to know that we do occasionally actually listen to them! When Sherri Kopel Haight saw Kevin the Giga Pig on Facebook she exclaimed that if the game had Were-Gerbils in it she was in! Well, never being the ones to loose the opportunity and thinking that Were-Gerbils would be past cool…we decided to put one in the game and here he is…thanks Sherri!

Well that just about rounds it up for this week. Thank you for all your support guys and please do tell all your friends about us and we’ll love you forever!

Orhan.

Happy Otter Games Ltd.

Creature College Weekly Update 6 – Dellcon, Competition Winners and Box Art Sneak Preview

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Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

We’re late this week! I know, I know….the weekly round up normally goes out on a Saturday so what have we been doing with our time? Well as always it’s been a mad busy week, we were fortunate enough to go to Dellcon at the Dellhouse in Malvern, UK over the weekend which meant that instead of writing newsletters we were out enjoying ourselves playing a lot of cool games including Creature College. Our hosts, Kevin and Elizabeth, were fabulous and I can recommend the Dellhouse if you ever want to organise a gaming weekend with friends! We’ve also been working on an article for the UK Games Expo show magazine. It’s all about being a virgin games designer in a cruel world! You’ll like it! Actually our world really isn’t cruel at all, it’s pink and fluffy and filled mostly with cuddly things albeit some of them having huge pointy teeth.

We’ve finished our box art as well and we’ll be giving our wonderful WordPress followers and Newsletter subscribers a sneak preview below! We also have another competition winner! Scott Randel won our March competition and will shortly be the proud owner of a copy of Invasion from Outer Space by Flying Frog Productions. Way to go Scott! We’ll be giving away a game every month until we launch in the Autumn so tell your friends to subscribe to our Newsletter and let’s share the love!

Box Art from Our Fabulous Artist

As an exclusive treat for our News Letter subscribers we’re giving you the first peek at our cover art. We haven’t built all the design pieces around the cover art yet so you’re seeing it pre-production! Drop us a line and let us know what you think!

It’s just possible you may spot one or two of our other characters and creatures that we haven’t yet released any information about!

Dellcon

We’d like to give a shout out for our friends Kevin and Elizabeth at the Dell House in Malvern. They hosted Dell Con 2015 last weekend. We met some cool people, nearly got blown off the top of the Malvern hills (I had to actually hold my hat on), played more games than I can remember including Terra Mystica (my favourite), Suburbia, Alea Iacta Est and Ticket to Ride Europe, and play tested Creature College. I can recommend the Dell House to anyone who is organising a weekend away with their games group.

Competition Winners February and March

Kris won our February competition and sent us a picture of her holding her winnings! Scott Randel took the prize for our March competition and we’re looking forward to seeing a picture of him playing it with his friends!

Have a great week and a safe and happy Easter everyone and we look forward to updating you again after Easter!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 5 – DellCon and Vesper Bunnysnatcher

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

Another busy week here at Happy Otter Games as we work to having an updated play test version of our game ready for DellCon next weekend. We’ve also made good progress on the box art and Will, our designer is primed to work on the design component of the box as soon as the artwork is finished. He has also been busy working on the design for the battle cards which are coming along nicely and should be finished by early next week. We’re very close now to having all our artwork and design completed.

The rules need to be updated with examples and just have a little bit more humour injected into them now that we have the base text complete. We’ve also been running a competition during the week to name one of our creatures, more on that later. This coming week we’re going to start to write a couple of articles for publications on the experiences of a first time indy game publisher so watch out for them in the coming weeks.

Vesper Bunnysnatcher!

Earlier this week we asked our wonderful community to come up with a name for one of our creatures to be included in the game. We’re pleased to announce that the winning entry was from Nikki Boom and Ian Loxam. Who came up with the name “Vesper Bunnysnatcher” for the character in question. As a special preview for our newsletter subscribers here is Vesper Bunnysnatcher in all his OtterColour glory complete with “Pissed Off Bunny” :).

We hope you like your colour version of the creature Nikki and Ian and thank you again for your great entry.

DellCon

So this week see’s our first convention of the year. A small collection of gamers in Malvern sitting in the heart of the English countryside at the Dell House. I think Kevin and Elizabeth still have some space so if you’re interested then give them a call and come along. It will be a very pleasant weekend of gaming. We’ll also have a beta version of Creature College there for anyone who would like a game.

Ninja Dice Kage Masters

We really got into Ninja Dice this week. Our own copy turned up from our friends at Green Brier games across the pond and we decided to give it a whirl at Monday games night. It was a lot of fun with some real “Nooooo!” moments. Definitely a good way to Kill half an hour. The Ninja Dice Kage Masters Kickstarter is into it’s final week so get yourself a copy of Ninja Dice and back their Kickstarter for many happy ours of Ninja’ing (is that even a word??)

Well that about wraps it up for this week! See you again next week with more news and updates.

Creature College Week 4 Update – Game Design Lock Down Mode

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Welcome to our Week 4 News Round Up!

One of the funny things about projects of any sort are that you sometimes get weird lulls in activity. A bit like being in the eye of the storm only with a lot more orange and magenta involved when it comes to Creature College! Week four has been a little bit like that; we’ve finished all the draft versions of our box art and our brilliant artist is now beavering (ottering surely?) away at creating box art so awesome that you may need specially filtered sunglasses just to look at it without being struck blind by it’s sheer awesomeness. Our designer is working on battle card designs and project X is on hold for a few weeks until we get some work done that has to precede it. The end result is that other than the occasional post on Facebook and working on completing the copy for our rules booklet it’s been a little quiet. However there are a couple of shout outs I’d like to do for some of our friends and say a word or two about our March “Win a board game” competition.

Nova Aetas on Kickstarter

Nova Aetas from Ludus Magnus Studio has about two weeks left to run on its Kickstarter campaign. The game is set in the Italian Renaissance, a period I’ve always loved with all its intrigue and infighting. The twist is that the world of Nova Aetas is an alternate Italy where chimeras, sirens and fauns also roam. Part RPG, part board game, part figure game Nova Aetas is undeniably beautiful. It’s worth buying for the figure moldings alone. We’re backing the project here at Happy Otter Games and hope you will too.

Ninja Dice Kage Masters

From a fellow group of board game ninjas across at Green Brier Games, Ninja Dice Kage Masters is an expansion for the popular Ninja Dice game. It has around two weeks left to run on its Kickstarter. I love the idea of Ninja dice that where the dice fall modifies the outcome of how your ninjas battle! Unique and masses of fun! Get a copy of Ninja Dice from Green Brier (it comes in a natty little Ninja bag perfect for impressing your friends at parties) and then back this project!  We’ve already donned our black masks and are practicing our blood curdling cries of “AAAIIIIEEEEEE” having backed the Kage Masters Kickstarter.

Monthly “Win a Board Game” Competition – March

If you’ve just joined our subscribers list through our “Win a Board Game” competition then a great big WELCOME to you. The great news is that not only are you now entered in our March competition but we’ll be giving a board game away every month until we launch and you’re entered into every draw! Our March competition ends on the 31st of March and we’ll be letting the lucky winner know straight away so they can choose their board game. You have to be 13+ to enter and the prize will be up to £40 ($60). Good luck!