Keith Burgun Games

Dragon Bridge TTS Tournament!
about 5 years ago – Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 05:20:54 PM

Hey everyone! Just a quick update to let you know that you can participate in a Dragon Bridge tournament starting on the 24th. It's all on Tabletop Simulator, which trust me, isn't as much of a pain as it sounds to use. (If you don't have TTS and would like to participate, let me know -- I may be willing to buy TTS for you so that you can participate!) Signups are available here. It's important that this game gets as much playtesting as possible before it goes to printing, which I'm hoping to do around the end of the year or early next year at the latest. So please come on by (there are prizes!)

Again, the link is here: https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/iK8LRUItUD 

And you can join our discord too where we arrange friendly games, talk about game balance, design, and tons of other stuff. Hope to see you there! https://discord.gg/MFMBhVB

New characters, balance, printing and a question for you!
about 5 years ago – Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 02:30:34 AM

Hi everyone! We have a bunch of news. Over the past few weeks I've been balancing and playtesting the FIVE NEW CHARACTERS that we made as a result of the stretch goal. Here they are in (almost finished) form!

This image was taken in Tabletop Simulator, where we've been doing most of our testing. So far, Andromeda, Gelf, and Trevor are pretty awesome. Peebnup needs a little more work and December might have to hit the drawing board again before printing (she's a pretty ambitious concept).

But playtesting has been going really well and we keep tuning the game to make it more balanced and interesting. If you'd like to get involved, please come by the Discord anytime (find the link at www.keithburgun.net).

IN OTHER NEWS~

I've been talking to my printing people, and I wanted to get your feelings on this before I finalize anything so please comment with your thoughts below, but: for a game with this few copies to print, it may not make sense to create 3 separate versions of the game. It's actually a lot more work for me to have to make 3 different manuals and make sure they're all consistent and well laid out and everything, as well as 3 different boxes, etc. What we could do is give EVERYONE a copy of the Deluxe edition, and give those who ordered at the Deluxe level some extra goodies (extra travel copies, other Keith Burgun games, other promotional materials etc) to make it up to them (note that they're not really losing anything, they're getting what they signed up for, it's just kind of a crappy feeling to have the lower tiers also get what you get).

Please also note that the deluxe edition contains a tuck-box copy of the base game, so everyone is still getting the super-easy-travel version of the game as well as this bigger box with all kinds of great fancy stuff in it (I'm most excited for some thick ceramic Green Gem tiles).

If I did do this, I would be eating the additional costs of shipping and all that, which is something I'm still working out the details for. It's a small enough Kickstarter campaign though where I don't think I would lose that much money by doing it. And I like the idea of having one REALLY SOLID awesome product out there that I can refer everyone to.

Of course, this is all still tenuous -- if I get a bunch of people in the comments here being like WHAT THIS IS THE WORST IDEA OF ALL TIME then I probably won't do it. So let me know what you think!

Dragon Bridge with the expansion plus the 5 new characters is really a big, deep, interesting game, one that you can have tournaments around and stuff like that.

Let me know, and thank you again SO MUCH for being a backer! <3

-Keith

We did it! (Also sorry for the radio silence!)
about 5 years ago – Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 05:09:39 PM

WE DID IT!

Wow! I'm so happy we made it! Thank you so much everyone for your support, your feedback, and more. We'll have more news coming soon. Sorry about the bit of radio silence over the last few days: I've been at #indiecade in Santa Monica, CA. It's been really fun, I've seen great talks, met cool people, playtested a ton of cool games and, most important, I got to show off Dragon Bridge there (the latest, hot off the presses version) and get more IRL feedback, which was so cool. Anyway between travel and everything (I live in NY) it was just crazy and I forgot to post my 2nd to last day of the Kickstarter post, which I've included below.

We are going to have copies available beyond the Kickstarter, so definitely stay tuned for that. We also hit the 4k threshold so there's gonna be new characters. From here, it's basically POLISH POLISH POLISH and a bit of balance and then we go to print. My guess is, not having done this before mind you, that we can print WELL in advance of our stated printing date, but we'll see how it goes! Much love and thank you everyone!

Here's a draft of the update that was SUPPOSED to go out the 2nd to last day of the Kickstarter XD:

---

Yesterday we hit an amazing milestone stretch-goal of $4,000, which I was really hoping to hit because it means we're now going to have FOUR MORE CHARACTERS in the expansion. Actually, I'm toying with the idea of adding 1-4 of those to the base game instead of the expansion; there's some logistical stuff I have to figure out but I'd love it if ALL my backers could benefit from this.

I've also done a lot of testing recently and come up with EVEN MORE readability upgrades since I wrote this article the other day - the latest is visible on this Fireball card (some of the upgrades, anyway):

As you can see we now have Gem Deplete and Gem Ready icons which will massively help cut down on the amount of text required. Further, the BUMP icon looks a bit less like a duck!

We've done tons of improvements. Now I'm off to Indiecade where I'll hopefully get to sit down with some awesome game designers and play their games, and maybe get them to try out the latest Dragon Bridge.

Thanks everyone for supporting this weird, strange, cute but DEEP card game! I'm feeling so good about it, and will be posting soon about the new characters!

For now: anything you can do to help get the word out would be amazing - posting on social media, reddit, discord, or even just telling a friend helps.

Much love, and you'll hear from me again tomorrow!

-Keith

One week left: playtesting, graphic design updates, more
about 5 years ago – Thu, Oct 03, 2019 at 11:00:15 AM

So much has been going on and I just wanted to give everyone an update on where we're at!

- The Kickstarter is going great! According to Kicktraq, we're currently headed for somewhere between 3.5 and 4k for the total, which means we might get another stretch goal unlocked (four more characters!!)! I really hope we do because I have a couple of awesome characters planned out and I think they'd make super awesome additions to the game. Of course, we can use your help here, by posting on boardgamegeek, on reddit, or on any Discords that you frequent!

- I have been going through a huge graphic design overhaul, I'm about halfway through it, but basically I really wanted to improve the way we communicate actions, resources for the actions (like, how far you bump), and the quantity of those resources. Before, there was a thing where would say BUMP 3 (as the action) and then we'd also say add BUMP 2 from an item or character power, which was a bit confusing, because is that another bump ACTION or is that more resources for my original bump action? All of this needs to be ironed out and we're in the process of it. Ultimately I really want the game to "go down smooth", so I'll be working on this over the next couple weeks as we wrap up the Kickstarter.

- We've also been playtesting more and more and improving the hell out of the game! Every week the game becomes better and better, particularly in terms of character powers and item powers (which are really important, it turns out). I'm really enjoying this part of the process.

- I will also be at Indiecade next week if anyone's around and wants to say hi! I'll have some copies of Dragon Bridge with me.

Anyway, back to the graphic design and playtesting mines. See you soon!

120% Funded! Stretch Goal UNLOCKED!
about 5 years ago – Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 10:32:17 PM

WOO we hit 120%! This means we've unlocked the Solo Variant! I personally don't play a lot of physical games solo (except when they're digital, in which case I play them more than ANYTHING ELSE), but as you might know I'm a very big fan of one-player games, so I was really excited to try to make this solo variant be a bit more robust. Check out this post to see how it all works!

Thank you SO MUCH everyone for backing and spreading the word about this game! It's getting better and better every day - we had an incredible playtest session yesterday on Twitch/TTS which I'll post soon (you can see it in past videos at twitch.tv/keithburgun if you want!)

Much love, see you soon!

PS! Oops, in the last episode I posted a link to the comic and it was wrong! Here's the real link: http://keithburgun.net/new-comic-robot-boy-and-may-danaris/ 

Enjoy!