News

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.

Cherry Blossom Season

Hi Cherry Picked Fans,

It's beautiful up here in Cascadia. The cherry trees are in bloom, tulips line the sidewalks, and it's finally warm enough to not constantly run space heaters. We just wrapped up our Emerald City Comicon experience and are looking forward to the next con.

CPG will be at Evergreen Tabletop Expo from May 27th to 29th. We are sharing a booth with other local game designers (including our friends at Warding Circle) all weekend. Our plan is to run short Catalyst demos at the booth, launch into full sessions throughout the con, and Drink! in the bar afterwards. We might have a prototype for our next secret project too.

We will be swinging through Moscow, Idaho this weekend. Stop by Safari Pearl Saturday from 2-6 to play Catalyst with us or Friday night for some Drinks. We are trying to expand our reach outside of Washington, so if your city is still infested with demons, let us know what game stores could host the human resistance. A summer demo-tour would be awesome.

Huge thanks to HyperRPG for having a us on Grab Bag last Thursday to flex our design muscles. If you haven't already, go check out their Twitch stream for a variety of gaming shows.

Alright, time to get back to work. You all expect great things of Drink! and our release date is fast approaching. Cheers!

Indie Game Alliance

Big news from behind the protection spells and drunken haze. We joined the Indie Game Alliance! This organization gives us more community and support than we could have on our own. We're excited to join their ranks and collaborate with other small studios across the globe.

IGA offers us many tools to get more games into the world. They do retail distribution, online promotion, and offer discounts on services ranging from manufacturing to legal advice. Their freelancer and publisher network lets game developers of different disciplines contract work or help publish ideas from tiny studios. Finally, IGA has a lot of convention and store connections, letting us have a presence beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Best of all, gaming fans can join for free. IGA's Minion program gives games, both prototype and retail versions, to volunteers in exchange for demoing the games at stores or conventions. These volunteers also earn points to get free games and have opportunities to attend gaming conventions for free as IGA officials. 

If you want to help out CPG, join IGA and offer to playtest and demo games. They'll hook you up. We'll hook you up too. Everyone will give you stuff if you go to a store or con and play Catalyst or Drink! Hooray!