"Long Time Player, First Time Developer..."

Greetings, everyone!

Recently, while conducting hours and hours of on-line research, I watched one of many "The Dice Tower" productions with Tom Vasel and his friends with whom he's shared many hours of gaming. In the one video, he mentioned BGDF as the place for any serious game designer to spend time, share ideas, and learn from both industry leaders and fellow gamers.

For me, I've been playing board games (and RPGs) for more than 30 years, starting with the classics such as Axis and Allies and Risk to Monopoly, Sorry, and all of the others that lined the toy store walls years ago. During my time stationed overseas (with the Air Force), I honed my war gaming strategy (starting with Chess at age 6) with more than two dozen different war games from Avalon Hill, GMT, and others.

Since my return to the U.S. in 1999, I've played in small gaming groups in the Northern VA area but really fell in love with Arkham Horror (so much that I started a small business crafting component trays and card holders for the game: www.crafthulhu.squarespace.com) and successfully launched two Kickstarter projects (Crafthulhu and Cthulhu's Eldritch Knowledge).

As to gaming, I've been fortunate to have play-tested nearly 40 separate war games for Strategy & Tactics and Modern War magazines, providing rule change recommendations to folks including Ty Bomba, Joseph Miranda, and Eric Harvey. In 2013, I revised a Diplomacy rule-set for Ernie Copley's The War: Europe 1939-1945 scheduled for publication later this year; and have been recently asked to serve as the Lead Developer for a game published by Compass Games.

Having said all of that, I'm excited to be a part of this community as I'm assisting in the Design and Development of a 4X space game which possesses significant depth and breadth without the tedious length of Twilight Imperium; the fiddly cube accounting of Eclipse; or some of the other aspects which may detract from other successful ventures.

We're going to team with artists and proofreaders; play-testers and publishers, and I can't think of a better place than here at BGDF!

Cheers,
Joe