9 Indie Games I Found at Origins
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Transcript
I just got back from Origins and one of the biggest takeaways that I had is I am so impressed by the stories and passion of the indie publishers in this hobby. The night before last as I sit there trying to go to sleep, I'm just overwhelmed with I don't know, I guess happiness and getting us to see so many of these incredible people that are essentially in charge of the future of this hobby and this overwhelming need to see them succeed. So, with the small platform I have, I went around the halls and tried to get in front of as many as possible and asked them to pitch me their game. So, that's what this is. I'm giving you a sampling of the hall at Origins with some of the coolest indie publishers and awesome people that I can find and my hope is that maybe there's something out there that you might like.
By you watching this video to the very end, you are supporting indie publishing as a whole. If you like this and this video does well, I'm going to do more of these and certainly go around Gen Con and probably do this again. Many of these people you might even see in an interview in the future. So, let me know down below of these games, what are you interested in? Also, what else did I miss? What other indie publishers do I need to go and seek out and talk to? Who do you want to see with longer form conversation? And without further ado, let's let these folks take it away and they're going to pitch you their game.
Uh I'm Jake. I'm from Last Night Games and I'm going to show you about Feather Lane today. This is my favorite game lately. So, in Feather Lane, you're going to be building a city for birds and you're going to be doing that by creating streets by overlapping cards like this and then eventually placing birds on their matching colored houses on those streets. And your city can have up to three streets like this. On your turn, it's very simple. There will be a display here that you'll from. And you'll choose one whole row from the display. So, you'll be taking two cards and a bird. You can go ahead and take those from the display. We'll set the bird aside. And then both of these cards are going to get added to your city somehow. They can overlap by as much as you want. They can go under. They can go either side. They don't even have to go next to each other. But what we're trying to accomplish with these cards is to fulfill these community preferences which are found over here.
Every game the community preferences are going to be different. You can see there's a ton of different cards under here, different options. In this game for instance, as far as the little houses go, we want a yellow and a blue one next to each other. So, we're going to try to overlap cards in a way to accomplish that as many times as we can in our city. But also keeping in mind all these other community preferences. It gets to be very puzzling trying to keep all of these plans together and hold it together till the end. And that's why I like Feather Lane.
Beautiful. And where can folks find this outside of Origins?
That's a great question. It just launched this week. So, it's starting to be in three retail stores. Your local store might have it already, maybe not. Uh you can always find it on our website of course at lastlaggames.com.
Hey, I'm Mo at Asmadi Games. We make games that uh get you to the table. Um we're talking about Dark Heist. Dark Heist is a spooky deck builder game where you recruit monsters and criminals to do haunted heists. You're going to do heists like the vampire hit, like resurrecting your client, going into a party and poisoning a chalice and making a deal with a demon. Um in Dark Heist, you're going to be doing deck building to uh build your gang to do these haunted heists. And whoever has the most notoriety at the end of the game wins. You're going to recruit monsters, criminals, pirates, animals, and uh it all comes in a nice little box with a neat playing mat. You can get these metal coins for a couple extra bucks if you know a guy.
So in this game we are cats who are trying to take over the house while our humans are asleep. So we're going to do missions like take over the water supply, we're going to build pocket dimensions to hide in, and we are going to make ourselves internet famous, like very standard cat stuff. So every turn you get to play an action card where you can run around the house and do cat things like wiggle to increase your catitude or scratch the couch or bat toys around. What you're trying to do is pick up supplies so that you can complete your mission objectives and then use those builds to do certain things. One piece of our mission is always going to be we want the humans to think we're good kitties, so we are going to have to frame this poor dog. Make sure they think it's his fault. We're also going to need to catch some mice because they are trying to collect our supplies first and build their own contraption in the walls so to win the game before we do. So this is a 50 to 80 minute fully cooperative strategy game that you can play from family mode all the way to feral mode.
Beautiful. And tell me a little bit about the different kitties here.
Absolutely. We have six different kitties. All of them have special strengths. So like strong cat can carry more, boss cat can command other folks, tough cat's really good at fighting the dog. So every cat has a special thing that they can do. They also have their own special action card that only they can do. So only tough cat can taunt the dog. Only only Zoomi cat can run really really far, things like that.
Beautiful. Thank you so much.
Thank you. This is coming to Kickstarter at the end of September, September 29th, and it's coming paired with another cat game called Super Chonk.
Beautiful. Let's go check that out.
Yeah. So in Super Chonk we are cats who just want to get super chunky. So every turn we're going to race towards the food bowls and try and get as much kibble into our tummy so that we can be the chalkiest cat at the end of the game. So, you're going to choose which speed you want to run, where one is the fastest and four is the slowest. But, these are also how many bites you can fit in your mouth when you go. So, you can only get one if you go really fast, but if you stroll along, you'll get a whole bunch of bites. So, I'm going to secretly choose which card I want to play and which bowl I want to eat at, and when I'm ready, I'm going to meow. And then I'm going to keep meowing. If someone can't make up their mind, I will just keep meowing at them. When we're ready, we'll meow meow meow, drop on the bowl, figure out who eats first, everything like that, so we can all get our food.
If someone else played the same number at the bowl, we bonked heads. We're not going to get to eat from the bowl. The humans will feel bad and give us a sad treat from the bag. Uh but, we're not going to get to eat from the bowl. So, at the end of the game, you're just going to be adding up how much you ate, except you're going to find that tallest stack that you ate. You ate too much too fast, you're going to throw it up and just add up all the rest of the tokens. This is also coming to Kickstarter at the end of September paired with good kitties. It's going to be from two to five players with a six to seven player expansion available.
Beautiful. Thank you.
Yeah. So, we are pirates competing to serve the very best afternoon tea. An afternoon tea is one tea card paired with three matching dish cards, where you can pair either by the flag color or the flavor profile, or you might be able to do both at the same time to get the big bonus doubloons in the middle. So, sometimes you find the perfect cards, right? Um these are both orange with chocolate, but sometimes you're a little messy and you got to make one. So, I can take cards that I have, smash them together. Now I have a caviar eclair that is now an orange flag dish with a chocolate on it. So, now I have three dishes and I can get those big doubloons from my captain. So, to get my dishes and teas every round, I'm going to deploy my pirate out into the ship to choose my action space.
I can serve the captain to get doubloons, which the pirate with the most treasure is the winner. I can go to the galley to pick up these cards and put them in hand because you have to serve from hand. Or I can go to the smuggler's hold to pick up my tea and my pirate gear cuz I cannot serve tea without a cannon. So, you can get parrots that are going to fly a card directly to the captain for doubloons, monkeys that'll sneak a card from the deck into your hand, and cannons that are going to let you blow up all the face-up cards and demand the chef send you something better. So, it's a one-to-four player game, about 45 minutes, and we're really excited to be debuting it and selling it here for the first time at Origins.
And where can people find it now?
Right now, you can find it at Origins, you can find it at Gen Con. You can also, uh, find it at Barnes & Noble, and you can order it on our website, actually via the All Play website, uh, is where you can find it.
What's up, everyone? I'm Matthew Ryan of MV Board Games, and today I'm going to be showing you Jason and the Argonauts. Jason and the Argonauts is a solo, dice-rolling, dice-manipulation, boss battler, oversimplification, roll dice, hurt the bad guy. Uh, the way that we're going to do that though in Jason and the Argonauts is with our trusty Argonauts here. So, Jason will always be in the fight, and then we will get Argonauts to team up with him, and when we match these icons, it unlocks bonus abilities for us. Um, we will use these bonus abilities to fight our destination challenges. Lemnos, at the top here, requires me to have a combination of dice that is a one and a two, or special owl abilities that some of my Argonauts have, which I'm actually set up quite nicely here with Orpheus, who, if I have a two there, I would get an owl, or two equal dice, I would get an owl.
Uh each destination comes with a lore card. So, as you work your way through the game and you get to new boss fights, you're learning the story of Jason, the Argonauts, and immersing yourself into it. Um as you're getting through the game, these challenges you're facing are going to become more challenging and bigger and harder. Um but, you're also going to be getting uh legacy tokens, which give you bonus abilities. You'll have different Argonaut combinations that become powerful. And even Medea, Jason's wife, will join the battle at some point, and she is a total badass. Uh if you are able to beat the game, you will get to open our sealed envelope and learn the ending of the game. Don't open this unless you beat the game. Uh and that is a quick overview of Jason and the Argonauts.
All right, let's go talk about Headliner, which is our newest game currently on crowdfunding delivering later this year. In Headliner, you're trying to become the first band to go on a nationwide tour. In order to do that, you need to get $100 in cash or eight fame. Every round is going to be built into three phases. You're going to draft, you're going to drive, you're going to jam. When you draft, everyone chooses one musician to draft from one of the five stages. They all put their fingers out, and you add that band member to your band. Let's say I added this one here. You're going to start building out your band in different categories. You've got a wild symbols, you've got these uh other stage symbols. So, you've got different categories such as sound, stage presence, and music genre. As you build out your band, you'll be able to drive your van to different venues, matching the icon requirements there for the venues to your bands you've built out. Once you match the requirements, you play the band, you earn the cash and fame, and you build it on. Then you've got different band members you're going to experience. You've got heartbreakers which will break up your band. You've got also just standard band members, and you have backup dancers which will give you cash bonuses throughout the game.
Headliners got tons of different cool art in it, and we're really excited to be bringing it to retail later this year.
And tell me what what do you got here, the queen and the king?
Yes, this is a cool little promo where we've got the queen of pop and the king of pop, and they also drive a private jet. So, you can pick these up for free when you go and back on the Kickstarter.
Thank you, Chris. Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey, I'm Jonathan terrible games, and this is Token Terrors Battleground season 2, Terror Rising. This is an expand-alone to our flagship title Token Terrors Battleground season 1, which is backwards and forwards compatible, and is going to present an expansion to our ever-growing ecosystem of mini monsters. In this semi-abstract low-lux skirmish game, you're going to draft an army of 10 mini monsters and throw them into your cemetery bag and shake them up. Five are randomly selected to populate the battleground. The other five are going to go into the reserves area of your respective talent cards. And what you're going to do is utilize a universal system that determines how everything moves and fights in conjunction with your asymmetric faction abilities in an effort to completely decimate your opponents before they decimate yours. Um This is a really fun game for people who want to have a robust and tactics and strategy-based miniatures war game experience, but just do it a little faster, a little smaller, and a little for a little less money. One thing that I really love about some of the quality of life changes we've made to this version of Token Terrors is the battle deck. So, what this offers you is in the first iteration, you were able to earn additional action points in the form of what we call surge and it was tracked on a D6. Now that is tracked using these tactile pieces of paper. Uh so every time you earn a surge, you'll get a surge point, but some of them actually feature two values. And in addition to that, we can now splash in these power surge cards. These are faction agnostic abilities that give you a cinematic moment that might help you get an edge in battle or even come back from what's looking like a loss. Uh so they just create more impactful memorable uh battle moments.
Additionally, we have made a mechanical change to our tactics uh cards. So these used to have function around placement of a tile that had to be controlled by a player. Now what they are are um mini uh objectives that you can try to achieve in mid-play and you mark them by placing a reserve unit onto the space of the proven accord. And what that will do is that once both the spaces are filled, you'll remove them and place them back into your reserves and then flip over a team synergistic sub menu of commands that now pertain directly to the two factions that you drafted.
Fluency is a Thanks. Scrabble meets Castadia. So players make words and then you're going to flip over your letter tiles and on the back are marine creatures which you will place onto this bleached coral reef board to restore the bleached coral reef and score points. So. What's very special to me about the art here is that this is all real ceramics made by an artist in the Netherlands and she photographs the ceramics and that is sand dollars, all the marine creatures in the game are made from real ceramics.
Beautiful.
So yeah, anyway, let me get into the game play. This game is launching on Kickstarter in October. Yeah. So we basically play um in a standard mode. We're going to play four rounds of the game and then score at the end of the fourth round. So, and every round has some phases. So, first people get income of two sand dollars. Then we will reveal a challenge. So, ooh, this is a tough one. Global currents. You'll get a bonus four sand dollars if you can make a non-English word. And then all players will draw seven tiles.
I have a hard time with English words. Is that a problem?
You'll do great. So, I I love to make a long pretty words and I usually don't win because the majority of scoring comes from clever tile placement on this board.
Okay, well then that's that's that's a little bit better.
Yeah, you'll be great. So then um players will get these cute tiles and sorry, these are my prototype tiles.
No worries.
But um on one side you'll see the marine creature or coral and on the other will be the letter. So, then we'll all be spelling words at the same time. For the sake of time here, let's say I make the word dote. D O T E. Sadly not a a non-English word, but that's okay. You got the point. So, we all make words, then we reveal, we um tell each other the word that we made and then we'll flip over our tiles here. And then we're going to go around and place two tiles at a time onto this board. So, maybe I'll put my coral here and my crawler here.
So, we go around and more and more players will, you know, be placing their marine creatures. At the end of four rounds of doing this, making words, placing our tiles is when we're going to score. So, for the standard mode of the game, your coral will score two points if they're not adjacent to any of the bleached coral reefs, which is this white area here. Your We're going to score each school of three fish tiles separately. The player with the most fish tiles in that school will get five points, and anyone with second most will get two points. Your crawlers want to be get three points each if next to a coral and a fish. So, this is a very happy crawler that we have right here.
And then your giants want to be next to the largest school of fish on the board. And what's kind of fun is, you know, as people are placing their giants and coral and crawlers, schools will get closed off. And so, players will start to kind of compete and work together to make bigger schools elsewhere, etc. And then we've got an advanced side of the scoreboard, which also introduces instant scoring. So, you know, when placed, this crawler would score two points when placed next to a fish on the board. And then at the end of round three and five, you'll score again for each crawler if next to the next to a coral and a fish. So, yeah, it's like people are like, "Wow, I didn't think this would work, but it's pretty cool." And they're like,
I would have never thought that this like combination of word creation and tile placement would come together.
Yeah.
I love seeing new stuff like this.
Thank you. Yeah, it's it's been really fun.
And that's it. If you made it to the end, thank you. Supporting independent publishers is a huge deal, and I realize that more than ever after visiting Origins for the first time. Another way you can support independents is going to my community, crdbrd.app, that is cardboard. I'm trying to create the greatest board game community to have ever existed, and if you're cool, I need you over there. And thank you. Have a great day.