Skip to Content
 

5th Street Challenge - Game Design Contest

The Game Crafter - The Leading Print On Demand Game Publisher

5th Street Games is teaming up with The Game Crafter to create a contest with the ultimate prize: a publishing deal for your game! Welcome to the 5th Street Challenge.

5th Street Games is an indie board game publisher based in Salt Lake City with a steadily growing library of titles (nine and growing!). 5SG is looking for another game, and has once again turned to The Game Crafter.

All 5SG titles are quick-playing, easy-to-learn, and fun for gamers and non-gamers alike. Their games are targeted at families with players ages 8 or older.

Fun for gamers and non-gamers for 5SG means solid filler for gamers that can act as a good gateway game for a non-gamer. Think of a 5SG titles as bait for people new to the board game hobby that gamers will still enjoy playing.

All 5SG titles have a touch of whimsy and cartoonishness to emphasize games are supposed to be fun (Scottish Gentleman werewolves, living crops, things of that nature). The whimsical element can be in the mechanics, art, or (ideally) both.

All 5SG titles have some small element of ‘take that’ to help hook non-gamers that are more familiar with games such as Risk or Uno. The ‘take that’ shouldn’t be overly mean-spirited as to knock a player out of a game, nor should it be the main focus of the game play.

Click here to read the rules for the 5th Street Challenge

Comments

I confess that I don't really

I confess that I don't really understand the logic of these contests; it sounds like the expectation is that the designer will produce a publication-ready game, artwork and all. That's typically the publisher's responsibility, so it seems like the contest is asking the designer to do all of the publisher's work. Also, while it's nice of GameCrafter to broker the contest, it seems like an unnecessary hoop to ask the designer to jump through to have to upload everything to the GameCrafter, and create a shop ad and such; and why is that even necessary or useful? Is 5th Street going to publish the game via the GameCrafter? If so, then in what sense is 5th Street actually "publishing" the winner's game?

You are overthinking this

First off, the contests are opportunities for game designers to challenge themselves by creating new games based on a variety of criteria. Often times, a deadline or special event provides excellent motivation for people to push themselves to reach a goal. (like a 5k run, half marathon, etc...)

When we started the contests back in 2011, the awards were all cash and prizes. However, as the contests continued we realized the winning games started getting picked up by publishers immediately after. So the next logical step was to allow publishers to provide prizes and an opportunity to publish with them. We don't make any money off the publishing deal, but we're happy to create opportunities for aspiring game designers to succeed. For many, this is a dream come true... so we're happy to support it.

Games have to have solid mechanics, clean rules, and be fun to play. Publishers don't expect aspiring game designers to have final art. But, having decent looking artwork definitely helps it get noticed over other games. Most times though the publisher will enhance or replace the artwork before it's actually published. Not always the case, but it's typical.

The contest is held on The Game Crafter website and is tied to our voting system. So naturally you're going to have to use The Game Crafter game editor to build out your game. We make you create a shop ad and page because game designers need to know how to market their games and pitch themselves.

5th Street Games has already successfully signed publishing deals with 4-5 games from The Game Crafter community. They were all successfully funded on Kickstarter and I believe they normally do initial print runs of over 2000 copies. 5th Street Games is not publishing the game via The Game Crafter.

So it's very simple and the system works well. Other high profile game design contests will be using our system later this year and we're excited for the upcoming opportunities for indie game designers!

Regards,

Tavis Parker
The Game Crafter, LLC

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Syndicate content


blog | by Dr. Radut