PaizoCon 2008

Thursday, May 1, 2008

This past weekend, roughly thirty adventurous gamers descended upon the LaQuinta Inn in Bellevue, Washington to participate in the first annual PaizoCon. In attendance were several of our messageboard family's most visible personalities, including Lilith, Chris Mortika, Pete Apple, Grimcleaver, Timitius (who put together the event), Russ Taylor, and many more. Paizo itself made an appearance Saturday, with Lisa, Vic, James, Wes, and Erik (along with Open Design's own Wolfgang Baur!) answering questions and joking around with everyone at the Game Industry seminar. Josh, Corey, and I stayed shyly in the back, while Cosmo sneaked around the room snapping pictures, including the four presented here.

After the seminar, the Paizo staff mingled with the con's excellent attendees, and eventually a number of Pathfinder RPG games broke out (run by Wolfgang Baur, Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, and Russ Taylor), as did demos of Titanic's upcoming Yetisburg and Falling, as well as Kill Doctor Lucky and Key Largo.

Here's a look at the entire room, including the panelists, during the seminar.

Here's a look at everyone during the seminar.

From left to right: Lisa, Vic, Erik, Wolfgang, James, and Wes, with Lilith off to the right reading off questions.

From left to right: Timitius, James, Jason, and Mike.

To see all of Cosmo's pictures and to get a glimpse at what the elusive bronze dragon editor looks like in his human form, check out this page. For a different perspective, check out Timitius's pictures. For a detailed recap and a chance to weigh in, check out this thread on our messageboards.

Mike McArtor
Editor

Thar's a Mighty Blow A-Comin'!

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Now that we have copies of Key Largo in stock, I thought I'd show you how to play the game. It's 1899, and ten days till a mighty hurricane roars ashore (we had great weather-predicting machinery in 1899). So, before that hurricane arrives, you want to get as much gold and jewels as you can out of the many pirate shipwrecks sunk deep in the coastal waters. You start with a little wooden boat, $100, and a diver. Your goal is to become the richest salvager on the island in those ten short days.

You have five cards which allow you to go to places around the isle. You play two of them per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. You can:

• Go to the Tavern to hire more divers
• Go to the Equipment Shop to buy those divers hoses, tridents, and weights
• Search a wreck for treasure
• Sell your treasures at the Market
• Take tourists dolphin watching at Dolphin Cove

Those are all good choices, but when you do these actions is critical. Everyone acts at once, and the number of people wanting to do each action can alter the prices for those action. For example, if three people want to hire divers, the divers know they can charge more. So you spend your time trying to guess what everyone else is going to do and surprising them with what you're going to do.

Oh, and watch out for sea monsters! If you don't have a pointy trident to fend off the monsters, your divers might become monster chow.

At the end, as the hurricane is bearing down, you sell off everything you have left, count your cash, and declare a winner as you ride the winds out of Key Largo. And when you come back, that hurricane will have made sure there are plenty more wrecks for you to search...

Mike Selinker
Titanic Games Brand Manager

Paul Randles' Final Game: Key Largo

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

In February 2003, Pirate's Cove designer Paul Randles died of cancer. That story didn't have a happy ending. This one does.

A year earlier, Paul drafted a deep-sea diving board game he called Treasure Hunt. Players would salvage treasure from shipwrecks off the Florida coast. The game had pop-up boats, and little cardboard shipwrecks with treasure disks. Paul wanted a European publisher to publish it, but it wasn't good enough yet. A solid 6 on the scale of 1 to 10, he said. It better at least be a 9 before it hit the street.

Then he got sick. I didn't know how to help. My wife did. Evon suggested I ask Paul for Treasure Hunt. I'd develop the game with him, and then find a publisher to put it out. For the last months of his life, we worked on the game together.

I gave him a 21-Nerf-gun salute at his funeral, and told the legions of game industry folk there that I was shopping Treasure Hunt. It was a pretty good game by this point. Maybe an 8.

At an Ohio convention, I met Bruno Faidutti, the French designer of Citadels. He knew of Paul and wanted to help. Within a month he had restructured the game he was now calling Treasure Island into a great game. A 9 for sure. Gone were the pop-up boats and the cardboard shipwrecks, replaced now by full-size boats and card decks of sunken treasure. Now we could find someone to publish it.

Every publisher wanted to see the game, because Paul had a lot of friends. A major American board game company wanted to convert it to a dungeon-crawl game. I thanked them and declined. (Side story: Based on this, I did design that dungeon game, with my co-designer James Ernest of Cheapass Games. That game, Dungeonville, came out from two more publishers, Z-Man Games and Pegasus Spiele. So Paul's game has a son, and he's bilingual.)

Then Tilsit Editions of France made an offer, which Bruno, Paul's widow Katty, and I accepted. Editor Nicolas Anton proposed adding people you could meet on the island, the last thing the game needed to become a 10 out of 10. Tilsit renamed it Key Largo, gave it a fancy cover and a modular board, and released it in 2005 in German, Italian, and French. Which was great, except I don't speak any of those languages very well.

But I do speak English, and I do know Lisa Stevens, the CEO of Paizo Publishing. Lisa was looking to start a new line of board games, which eventually I helped forge into Titanic Games, the publisher of the color version of Kill Doctor Lucky and Stonehenge: An Anthology Board Game. Titanic needed a third game, so I looked at the name of the company and said, "How about one about sinking ships?"

How about it indeed, she said. And so, in February 2008, five years to the month after Paul's passing, Titanic Games will be releasing the full-color English version of Key Largo, with all-new art and all-new components delivered by graphic designer James Davis. The English edition has a large one-piece board, nice wooden boats, fifteen delightful divers, and beautiful cards with art from Ben Huen and Andrew Hou. Everyone we've shown it to says it's a work of art. I like those people.

The game has undergone a lot of facelifts since Paul's fun little prototype, but there's something unmistakably Paul-ish in the final version. That's why the money in the game bears the inscription "E Paulibus Unum," which I can pretend means "In Paul We Trust."

I can't play Key Largo with Paul, but now I can play it with you.

Mike Selinker
Titanic Games Brand Manager

Key Largo: Sneak Peek

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

We just got the first copy of the all-new English-language version of Key Largo in the office, and it looks gorgeous! We'll have a lot more to say about this fun deep-sea diving game in the coming month, but we wanted to show off some images of the game just as soon as we had them. Given that it's a chilly winter here in Seattle, just looking at it makes me feel like I'm kicking back off the Florida coast, ordering an extra umbrella in my drink, and strapping on a 19th century regulator helmet for some underwater treasure-hunting. Take a look and see if you want to come too.

Mike Selinker
Titanic Games Brand Manager