Boxed Culture: DCC 2015 and Mr. B Games 1


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One of my favorite parts about going to conventions is the exhibition halls. They allow for most individuals, companies or organizations to set up a booth. This is great with small companies because you get to interacted with their whole staff. The more cons I attend the more I am learning that Colorado has some pretty fantastic gaming companies;

At Denver ComicCon 2015  I had the distinct pleasure to talk to the people from Mr. B Games, They are doing some great stuff, mainly they have ran many extremely successful Kickstarters such as Alien Uprising and most recently Posthuman. I would like to take the Game Corner this week to focus on Mr. B Games and what I learned from talking to their president Sean Brown. We talked about how the game Spurs came to be, how he views Kickstarter and what the process for one of the talked about (and internally successful) games so far this year Posthuman.

Spurs:

 

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Spurs has to be one of the coolest western board games. I love the wild west setting and pretty much always will purchase something related. In this case I not only got my wild west fix, but I also got a great game attached to it. As I was purchasing Spurs they said they were in talks with an undisclosed network about doing a Spurs TV show. “Yes please!” was my immediate response.

Sean mentioned that one of the reasons that they decided to make Spurs was because the wild west market was very sparse. Carson City and Doomtown being the two (good) games in the setting. Spurs was a game that was created by a love for the wild west and answering the demands of people in the board gaming community. I think they did a great job and cannot wait to get this game to the table!

Kickstarter:

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Before going into Posthuman I want to mention that we talked about Kickstarter.  Many individuals in the board gaming community are split on the subject. Some claim it is no more than a dumping ground for untested and unpublishable junk and others really like the way that Kickstarter has facilitated some of the coolest games we have seen in the last few years.

Mr. Brown seemed to really like the idea of Kickstarter and considering it has worked extremely well for them I can imagine why. The idea that not only can you gauge how big your print run needs to be but also give people a very efficient maneuver for pre-ordering a game are both equally attractive. Mr. B Games also really likes utilizing stretch goals and we all love them for it. 🙂

Posthuman:

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As I have mentioned a few times now Posthuman blew up fast when it showed up on Kickstarter. With over 300k raised for the campaign and 28 stretch goals, I just had to ask Sean about how this game came to be.

He told me a story about how at the first moment he played Mighty Box‘s game he loved it and wanted to publish it. He had asked them to set goals up to $100k just in case the campaign got there. To their surprise it hit that goal with in 5 days of launch. They found themselves in need of more stretch goals. This was both a gift and a curse. Mr. B Games loves offering additional stuff for stretch goals because they really like us, the gamers; however, with the speed at which the campaign was growing they needed new stretch goals, and fast. Sean mentioned one of the hardest parts is that they want to offer all this extra stuff, but need to make sure it is balanced. Good mechanics being more important than extra stuff is an idea I agree with.

Denver ComicCon 2015 was a great first media experience. Meeting the people from Mr.B Games was fantastic and I truly enjoy chatting it up with people in the industry. I will have one more article to write about DCC 2015 coming up next week. Stay tuned and see ya next time!


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