new projects

Ganbei!

With a clearing of our plates and a draining of our glasses, we sent Drink! to the manufacturers. We should receive a proof copy in a couple of weeks in all its drunken glory. Thank you to everyone who backed the Kickstarter, preordered Drink!, played the game at cons, playtested with us at house parties, or helped spread the word. The excitement surrounding the development and concept has been amazing; we’re hyped to see where the full game goes.

With the hard part of Drink! over (*fingers crossed*), we’re focusing on the next steps. The game’s art is being repurposed to cover bar guides, underwear, glassware, and coasters for our Kickstarter rewards.  Watch Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for those designs and items rolling in. We’re also ordering boxes to ship Drink!, which is… way less exciting.

We’ll be at Evergreen Tabletop Expo at the end of the month. Our booth will be the Washington Game Co-op. Cherry Picked Games is joining with Warding Circle, Do Better Games, and Hutt Family Games to share a diverse selection of local games. Explore ancient folklore in Mysteries of the Yokai, make Danielle Steele lines funny in Bring Your Own Book, and outsmart your opponent by channeling your inner-GPS in Triangul8. We’ll be holding down our usual modern-urban-fantasy-apocalypse with Catalyst and drinking heavily (and playing Drink!). We’ll also be playtesting Conspire.

What’s Conspire you ask? What a great unsolicited question. Conspire is concept we’re testing out for the next Cherry Picked game. It’s a hidden-role role-playing game. You’ll work together to set the scene and create roles to play, then secretly assign goals and distribute these roles to players.  Lie, bluff, and manipulate each other to get your way. Once the dust settles, tweak the characters to keep things mysterious. You’ll end up with a unique hidden-role game based on your group’s experiences.

Speaking of unique experience, we got a great review from Cloak and Meeple for Catalyst. The intro is superb; totally on par with our LARPing skills. There’s also a playthrough if you don’t mind the audio hiccups on our end. For a more audible Catalyst experience, come down to Card Kingdom any Thursday for our drop-in sessions.

Thanks again everyone! See you around the tabletop.

Back from the Tour

The CPG crew just wrapped up a couple crazy weeks of demoing Catalyst. Game stores across Washington and Oregon housed the "Cascadia militia" for an evening and let us sell our role-playing game. The public response was wonderful. Thanks to everyone who listened to our pitches and rolled some dice. We're always psyched to see people genuinely happy while playing Catalyst.

We'll probably do another tour soon and hit the places we missed last time (Bellingham, Olympia, Redmond, Vancouver). We've still got a second demo at Meeples Games on the 22nd. If you missed the first round, swing by. And if we missed your favorite game store, let us know. We'll go anywhere we can get an audience.

In the meantime, we're wrapping up the Catalyst stuff from the KS campaign, We just published "Fourth World", a backer-sponsored campaign set in Northern Arizona. Flagstaff is an amazing town and lends itself to an RPG shockingly well. Between the glorious terrain, railroads, Anasazi ruins, and Skydome (the best dueling arena), "Fourth World" takes full advantage of the high desert haven. Two more campaigns are being worked on now. Our conspiracy-influenced "Shadow Parliament" is going through playtesting and will likely be done within the month.

The player app is nearly ready for completion. I realize it's been on the precipice of completion for a while. Basically, when we didn't make our KS stretch goal to hire a developer, we made the decision to continue to make a complete app. This meant we have a part-time developer making a fleshed out, extremely robust and helpful app, instead of a bare-bones version.

Our next game, Drink!, should be ready for crowdfunding support by the end of summer. If you enjoy tasty beverages and want to help us playtest, contact CPG through Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments.

That's it, aside from a secret announcement pending some legal stuff. Thanks for the love Cascadia and beyond. 

--Alex