Hey there strategy fans! Wondering what’s happened since last month? You’re in the right place!

Art tweaks

Did you think we were done with the art for True Messiah? Well, so did I–but the tiny, perfectionist homunculus that lives inside my heart convinced me to commission just a few final edits to the game’s holy cities. These were the old ones…

…and these are the new ones:

“Craig,” you might say, “the old ones looked good. Why’d you change them?” Turns out, the original holy city art was similar enough to the temple art that new players were having trouble visually distinguishing them at a glance. Therefore, I had Franklin edit the holy cities to “pull back the camera,” as it were, and show more of the ruined cities surrounding each central temple. Having the central structures of each tile appear noticeably smaller and devoting more space to the actual ruins around them should do the trick, I think.

Also getting a revamp were the game’s coins and health tokens. Over the past half-year, TheGameCrafter switched from a die-cutting process to laser cutting for its cardboard chits. Upon receiving prototype chits made with this new laser-cutting process, I realized that the existing coin and health art did not look so great on any laser-cut chits that happened to be cut off-center. Oops! Luckily, the updated coin and health art fixes the issue, and should look good no matter what cutting process is employed.

Promotion and Marketing

I just got back from PAX West (previously known as “PAX Prime”) Tuesday at about 5 o’clock in the morning, fresh from weeks of preparation and a further 4 days of travel, setup, and non-stop hustle. I was showing in both the Indie MEGABOOTH and in the Blackbox demo area simultaneously, which was pretty (over?)ambitious considering that I was going into this with only a single volunteer, recruited via Twitter, who had never actually played the game before.

At the end of the day–week, really–PAX West proved both utterly exhausting and just as utterly awesome. My primary objective was to plump up the True Messiah Kickstarter Announcement List, with a goal of hitting 600 subscribers (from a starting point of 370 in mid-August). Well! I not only hit that goal, I punched its damned teeth out: as of this writing, the list stands at 694 eager board gamers. If everyone on that list backs True Messiah at the get-the-game level, I should easily exceed the project’s funding goal right out of the gate! (Incidentally: want to bump it up to an even 700? Feel free to add yourself!)

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In addition to bringing my vocal cords to the brink of destruction with non-stop carnival barking and pitching at PAX, I also managed to teach the game to a few fellow game developers (who picked it up like a chimp picking up a banana), and sat down with a few media/journalist types and taught them how to play as well.

 

Speaking of media: True Messiah managed to place on GeekWire’s list of Great indie games you missed while standing in line at PAX West 2016, and pre-PAX, it also got a nod in Inverse’s article on the tabletop revolution, which was pretty neat. I also mailed out a handful of review copies of the game to board game Youtubers, journos and bloggers. We’ll see if any further coverage results going forward!

Oh, and I updated some stuff on the True Messiah page on BoardGameGeek, as one does.

Kickstarter Prep

The True Messiah Kickstarter page is now complete except for the videos. I’m waiting to hear back on a review video, and I’m currently giving my throat a few days to recover from PAX before I shoot the game’s pitch video and get started churning out my own series of how-to-play vids.

It’s strange (and frankly, a little intimidating) to think that I’m less than 3 weeks away from launching this campaign. Here’s hoping things continue to go smoothly. Until next time!