Winter Update - String Theory, Berrymandering, & Tariffs

String Theory

We are actively trying to identify an artist for String Theory. We've put together some art boards showing the type of artwork we think would work well for this game. If you know someone who you think could produce this type of artwork please let us know. We were hoping for something like an old newspaper or comic vibe with a particular focus on a nineties sci-fi corporate dystopia vibes (think Severance). 

Over the past several months, we have been working to finalize the rules for String Theory for the 3-6 player game. One of the key concerns we say coming out of Gencon was that there were not enough items on the board for players to collect. We've tried numerous ways of solving this and came up with what we think is the most straight forward solution: Once any player has reached a certain number of points, a wiki-leaks style data-drop spawns a bunch more items on the board. We've been playtesting this in November and December of 2024 and it seemed to work out well. Our goal is to have a 3-D print & play version of the game available for our fans by Origins in June of 2025.

We received a challenge to create a solo and 2-player version of String Theory. We've done some preliminary brainstorming about how that could work out without including any additional components. We will be prototyping this at ProtoCLE at the end of January. This is our 3-day game design event that we help organize in Cleveland, Ohio every year. Playtesters, Board Game Designers, and RPG designers are welcome to join us. See the ProtoCLE website for more details.

Berrymandering

We have been making some giant versions of Berrymandering to share with you at Origins and Gencon. So far we've assembled a giant version of Ohio and Indiana. California is next. Eliot is building these out of wood using the XCarve CNC that he bought before the holidays. We think it's a great showpiece that helps people connect Berrymandering and gerrymandering.

Our artist Kaitey Pastva is hard at work putting the final touches on the Bees vs. Bears version of Berrymandering. We printed a prototype at TheGameCrafter and we're looking at doing some tweaks to the color brightness to make the colors pop more. One of the key things we wanted to explore with this new version is putting a border around the pieces so that new players didn't move the playing pieces too far away and then get confused about how they went back together. We hope that this type of "physical rules enforcement" makes the game simpler to play for all audiences. Additionally, we think the Bees vs. Bears version will appeal to a wider audience than our regular political satirists. We hope to convince Kaitey to also help us put together an updated Strawberries vs. Blueberries version of the game, as our manufacturer has told us that we can get bulk pricing even if we do runs with two different artwork designs.

Tariffs

 We are concerned about producing our games over the next few years. A vast majority of board games are produced overseas and the possibility of tariffs could cause serious problems for us and for our friendly local game store owners, potentially pushing up prices or making it unprofitable to manufacture games. I hope that this is a non-issue in 2025 and 2026, but if it is we may see a severe slowdown of new games coming to the US.