Next Gen: Me

Grant Rodiek | July 06, 2017
The current me has had a good run.For about seven years I've been exploring card games inspired by Magic: The Gathering and experimenting with many flavors of multi-use cards. Sometimes more overtly (Five Ravens, where cards have two explicit functions), and others more subtlely (Solstice, where you can draft cards to help you or hinder an opponent with blocking plays).
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The Good Score

Grant Rodiek | June 24, 2017
My development focus the last few weeks has been examining and minutely tweaking the score tuning for Five Ravens. When designing, you should always make changes with purpose, and my purpose here is threefold:Reduce the number of ties.
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Post Mortem: Solstice

Grant Rodiek | June 17, 2017
I sent what I intend to be the final update for Solstice, today, and with that, the Kickstarter campaign is more or less finished. There may be a few customer service requests, which I shall address, and I have a handful of copies left I'll sell once those requests die down.
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Hibernation

Grant Rodiek | May 20, 2017
A week or so ago I wrote a highly depressing article about tips for folks who want to be a publisher, largely fueled by anecdotes of my failures. A few months before that, I wrote an analysis of 2016, which gets more into the nuts and bolts of the failure.
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So, you want to be a tabletop publisher?

Grant Rodiek | May 12, 2017
As I watch my little company enter its final death heaves, I want to write some advice for folks who want to pursue this themselves. "But Grant," you ask. "Why should we listen to a failure?" Well, I can save you some time, because I learned many lessons.
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York Development So Far

Grant Rodiek | April 02, 2017
This week, April 7-10 at Game Kastle in Mountain View, CA, I'm attending the annual Protospiel event. It's my favorite event of the year. I will be testing York heavily, because it's the farthest along of my designs and it's the one I want to really dig into.
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My 2017 Thoughts on Kickstarter and the Industry

Grant Rodiek | February 20, 2017
Yesterday, February 19, 2017, a new series of threads regarding Kickstarter and really, the industry as a whole, popped up on Twitter. You have people on all sides of the aisle chiming in with this or that.
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Gamifying a Restaurant

Grant Rodiek | January 29, 2017
As you probably know, I've worked as a Producer (and sometimes designer) for Maxis since 2005. This week I received a fascinating email: a restaurant manager in Chicago asked me about using our game, The Sims 4 Dine Out, to train employees.
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Art Directing Inclusiveness

Grant Rodiek | January 16, 2017
Inclusiveness in media is very important, and as today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States, it seemed like a great time to briefly touch on this. I honestly think most customers are fine with inclusivity, which is a good thing! I also think it's a relatively easy and natural thing to execute as a publisher or art director.
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Hyperbole Games 2017 Road Map

Grant Rodiek | January 14, 2017
Back in November 2016 I wrote my annual report. It may come off as pretty bleak reading, because the summary is effectively I'm not a very good publisher and I failed a lot last year. It's actually fine! But, whereas that article was primarily about what I'm not going to do, this post is about what I am going to do.
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